Trump's America Page 2
We believe citizens from any background can work hard, pursue their dreams, and achieve success and prosperity for themselves and their families.
Furthermore, in Trump’s America we uphold—with conviction—the understanding that individuals can speak, worship, and live as they please and, so long as those actions do not infringe upon the fundamental rights of others, do so without threat of consequences from the government.
These are all bedrock beliefs that traditionally make America exceptional.
On an everyday level, Trump’s America stands for the flag and the national anthem. We like patriotic movies. We believe our young men and women in uniform—both police and military—are heroic for risking their lives to protect us. We believe in the value of a hard day’s work and abhor political correctness as a threat to freedom of faith and speech.
Furthermore, in contrast to the elite “citizen of the world” attitude, the people of Trump’s America intuit that if America is strong, then our families will have better futures.
This is the feeling that President Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan so perfectly captures. Trump’s America is deeply unhappy with the direction the governing and cultural elite have taken America over the past several decades. We want change and we hope for a better future. We want a fighting administration, and we expect the Left to smear it and attack it. Each smear, each allegation, each biased news story is more proof that President Trump stands for real change.
We are Trump’s America because President Trump has unified us by acting as a reversion—a course correction—toward the traditional belief that America is an exceptional country that should act in accordance with historic American principles.
The belief of Trump’s America in American exceptionalism is at the heart of the political-cultural civil war because it defines virtually every Trump administration policy and it is driving our country’s great comeback.
THE TRUMP PATH TO EXCEPTIONALISM
In his own life, President Trump has witnessed American exceptionalism at work. At a relatively young age, he achieved economic success and gained national recognition. He has wonderful children and grandchildren. He owns his own golf courses, so he can play when he likes. And he won a remarkable race for the presidency.
For Trump, America is an exceptional country.
His natural bias is to think highly of the Founding Fathers and the other leaders who gave us this remarkable system of freedom and to praise their achievements.
This pro-Americanism, which upholds the Constitution, follows the vision of our Founders, sees the flag as the symbol of a free nation, and agrees with President Abraham Lincoln that America is “the last best hope of mankind,” is horrifying to many people in the anti-Trump coalition.
Trump’s greatest strength has been his ability to understand that clearly confronting an unacceptable reality and articulating its failure with passion and conviction can change history. This single insight has guided his campaigning and his governing.
As a businessman, Trump amassed billions by seeing opportunities others missed. He also built large projects by persisting through obstacles and selling people on a vision of success they had not imagined. As president, he has brought the same kind of brute force clarity to politics and government.
When Trump has strategic insight about fixing broken government systems, he is not intimidated by initial rejection, failure, or opposition. He simply redoubles his efforts and looks for new avenues of communication or paths to success. This pattern of stubbornly sticking to an idea and finding new ways to market it is precisely what he did through a half century of success in business.
This ability to address longtime problems without the inhibitions, or the self-censorship to which other so-called sophisticated people feel required to submit, has already made his presidency historic.
Tax reform had not been passed in 30 years because it is difficult and requires a lot of work. Similarly, politicians have campaigned on immigration reform and border security for decades and then comfortably placed these issues on the backburner for “more pressing” issues once elected. Past presidents have done the same about shrinking government and cutting regulations. President Trump is not letting up on any of these challenges.
Consistently, President Trump has approached situations with common sense, ignored the elites—including some on his own staff and government—and followed his instincts. This approach, combined with his knack for using vivid, direct language, has infuriated the anti-Trump coalition over and over.
It is this pattern of looking at reality and applying common sense which has made Trump and his presidency so threatening to his opponents. The values of Trump’s America are antithetical to the values of the anti-Trump coalition.
Trump believes patriotism and sovereignty are vital to our survival as a nation. He believes Americans should be proud of our flag, national anthem, history, culture, and military.
Many in the anti-Trump coalition say patriotism and sovereignty are words for belligerence and warmongering. They regard our national traditions as backward, bigoted, and ignorant.
Ultimately Trump’s America and the post-American society that the anti-Trump coalition represents are incapable of coexisting. One will simply defeat the other. There is no room for compromise. Trump has understood this perfectly since day one.
The outcome of the struggle will determine America’s future for a generation or more.
LEARNING FROM THE PAST
If Trump’s America is to win, we must understand how a radical, fringe ideology became the dominant outlook of the political and economic establishment—and why the presidency of Donald Trump represents a turning point in the fight against it.
The brand of radicalism that fuels the left-wing branch of the anti-Trump coalition has been growing for half a century. Its advocates knew they could never impose their values on America under our traditional system, so they started to undermine it.
At first, their efforts were subtle.
It started in the 1960s, when liberal academics began to critique traditional American ideals. Within a few years, this insidious academic approach was replaced by more open, radical repudiations of traditional America.
At the time, the Left was a radical offshoot of American politics—a minority fringe group that was sympathetic to Euro-Asian communist and socialist movements. The effort to infiltrate academia was effectively the start of the Left’s training and recruitment strategy. After more than 40 years, that strategy has been a clear success.
Countless cohorts of young American college students attended courses in which professors promoted secularism, liberal social mores, and a twisted version of history, which casts traditional America as the villain in nearly every era of its existence.
Many of those students then went on to earn postgraduate degrees and ultimately make careers in academia, wherein they continue propagandizing left-wing ideals to their pupils while demonizing traditional American viewpoints. As traditional American values became identified with racism and sexism in the universities, people with traditional American values were pushed out of academia. This cycle produced an increasingly radical and shrill feedback loop that made our schools rapidly more left-leaning.
Meanwhile, those of us who believe in traditional America continued to send our children to these schools and supported these institutions with monetary gifts. I frequently tell conservative groups that we are crazy for paying liberal colleges who train our children and grandchildren to despise us.
It was from this foundation in academia that the left-wing branch of today’s anti-Trump coalition grew.
As other newly indoctrinated students moved on to legal, political, media, and economic professions, the beliefs of the Left became the norm in elite circles.
As the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia brilliantly wrote in a series of opinions, the courts moved from interpreting the Constitution to inventing a new American Constitution bas
ed on radical values, which increasingly repudiate the thinking and writing of the Founding Fathers.
Parallel to the transformation of our courts, American bureaucracies grew in size and power. They were increasingly led by liberals looking to impose the “correct” policies on a nation of voters they consider too ignorant to adopt sound policies voluntarily.
After all, as Hillary Clinton warned in 2016, millions of Americans who were “deplorables” could not be expected to make wise decisions. The social elites believe they preside over a country of inadequately educated, culturally reactionary, and hopelessly selfish people. The elites aim to sacrifice the misguided populace’s values, interests, prosperity, and futures to create a supposedly better country. To many in the socially elite echelons of the anti-Trump coalition, traditional America is racist, misogynistic, homophobic, oppressive, anti-female, militaristic, and violent.
Those in the orderly institutionalist wing of the anti-Trump coalition took a multifaceted approach working around the will of these “deplorable” voters without verbalizing it.
Increasingly, America became submerged in international agreements, which force our country to answer to foreign bureaucracies. Some in this group recruited powerful corporate leaders and popular celebrities to help coerce the ostensibly backward and inadequate general population into “doing the right thing.” As a result, an elite cultural environment was cultivated in which thinking the wrong thoughts could lead to public condemnation, ostracism, isolation, and even firing.
The news media joined the entertainment industry (which it now emulates) to become the enthusiastic cheerleaders for this new, improved America—and the voracious critics of our traditional model.
However, the deep flaws in their post-American nightmare have started to show.
Under the leadership of the orderly institutionalists, 6,948 young Americans have been killed and more than 52,000 wounded in our wars in the Middle East. These conflicts have cost $7.6 trillion. Under President Obama, success was seemingly impossible, and we were faced with either defeat or war without end.
We have seen poor children suffer because expensive, unionized inner city schools have collapsed under their own dysfunction. We have seen the rise of zones of intense violence in big cities such as Baltimore, Chicago, and St. Louis. We watched a decaying economy cause millions of Americans to be forced out of the middle class. The anti-Trump coalition’s contempt for small-town America has led to real bitterness. Millions of Americans who once had good jobs in manufacturing feel they have been abandoned by the national leadership.
These hardworking Americans watched their jobs disappear as our nation’s leaders entered trade deals that favored other countries over America. Meanwhile, these Americans were repeatedly told by Obama that the economy was steadily improving.
In fact, the Obama years’ failure to grow economically deepened the anger felt by people who might have tolerated an overbearing government if it delivered. However, being lectured by leaders who were clearly failing was simply unacceptable and increasingly enraging.
The breaking point may have been the explosion of illegal immigration, which led millions of Americans to believe that their government had abandoned their economic and cultural interests in favor of foreigners who broke the law.
Over time, this rise of social, political, and economic ideologies, which rejected the notion of American exceptionalism and were counter to historic American principles, led to a series of political movements aimed at returning our country to its founding principles.
In fact, you can track the rise of Trump’s America through Goldwater, Reagan, the Contract with America, and the Tea Party. Trump’s America is the response to the rising left-wing forces that want to replace America with something else.
IN A FIGHT OVER IDENTITY, ONLY ONE SIDE CAN WIN
The essence of this cultural-political civil war is a fight over America’s identity.
Normal political conflict within the same American identity tends to lead to compromise and finding common ground. If opposing political parties are operating within a broad consensus on what America stands for, there is room for negotiated settlements.
Today, however, there is no broad agreement, no common ground, and no consensus about who we are. This makes compromise nearly impossible.
We have experienced similar periods of identity conflicts in the past.
During the American Revolution, the Founding Fathers were going to win or be hung as traitors to the British Crown.
President Lincoln got slightly less than 40 percent of the vote in a country so bitterly divided it drifted into a civil war. Southerners believed they were fighting for the survival of their civilization, and Northerners believed they were fighting for the survival of the Constitution and the Union. These two sides were mutually exclusive. Those, like General George B. McClellan, who kept looking for peace through compromise, misunderstood the nature of the struggle.
Both Winston Churchill’s and Ronald Reagan’s great insights into the nature of Nazi and Soviet ideology, respectively, allowed them to see clearly what the foreign policy elite of their times could not: There could be no compromise. Evil had to be defeated.
These types of conflicts do not necessarily involve bloodshed, but they do provoke intense feelings that lead to bitterly fought elections.
The election of 1800 was a fierce fight over the relationship our budding nation would have with Great Britain and our commitment to Republican principles. This was most vividly seen in the controversy over the Alien and Sedition Acts. These were four laws that were broadly aimed at making it more difficult for immigrants to become naturalized in early America and to make it illegal to lie while criticizing the government. The laws were supported by the Federalist Party, which had been fighting an undeclared war with France under President John Adams. Jefferson and his fellow Democratic-Republicans saw the acts as a means for the Federalists to suppress free speech and centralize power. Ultimately, this fight became so intense it led to Jefferson completely wiping out the Federalist Party.
The election of 1896 was a deep identity struggle between the urban industrialism of President William McKinley and the rural populism of William Jennings Bryan. Bryan was a charismatic, ideological rural populist and had essentially waged a war on the urban industry. McKinley, on the other hand, realized that industry and prosperity was vital to the survival of our nation. The fight was so intense that the GOP remains to this day the party of business and jobs while the populist rhetoric of Elizabeth Warren can be traced directly to the Bryan campaign.
Today, President Trump’s election and presidency represent the emergence of a political-cultural identity fight, which will define American politics for the foreseeable future.
As in identity fights of the past, there can be no compromise in the battle between Trump’s America and the anti-Trump coalition. One side will win, and one side will lose.
CHAPTER TWO
THE COMEBACK OF “ONE NATION”
A key component of America’s great comeback under President Donald Trump is his efforts to reunify the country around a common set of values—to make us “one nation” again. The issue where this can most clearly be seen is immigration.
This statement may come as a surprise because it is the opposite of the media’s narrative, which insists that what President Trump is trying to do in immigration is divisive.
This disconnect is because the elite media is part of the anti-Trump coalition, and Donald Trump is rolling back the disastrous immigration regime its members have imposed on the country for the past 40 years. That’s why every new proposal or statement from President Trump about our immigration system is greeted with howls of outrage from the anti-Trump coalition.
A perfect example of this phenomenon was in August 2017, when the president announced his support for the Reforming American Immigration for a Strong Economy (RAISE) Act, which would reduce the level of legal immigration from the historic highs of the las
t 40 years and institute a merit-based system for accepting immigrants.
During a press briefing with White House Senior Policy Advisor Stephen Miller to discuss the bill, CNN’s Jim Acosta asserted that Trump’s support for the bill was “not in keeping with American tradition when it comes to immigration.”
Acosta argued that prioritizing English-speaking immigrants, and those with skills useful for the U.S. economy was an attempt to “change what it means to be an immigrant coming into this country.” He also asserted that prioritizing English-speaking immigrants would mean all immigrants would come from Britain and Australia—not so subtlety accusing President Trump of racism.
Miller quickly pointed out Acosta’s complete ignorance of both civics and history, noting that current naturalization law requires new citizens to be proficient in English. He also expressed astonishment that Acosta thought only people from Britain and Australia spoke English. Indeed, an estimated 1.5 billion people speak English throughout the world. It is the official language of more than 60 countries. In fact, recent estimates suggest that India, with its more than 1 billion people, has more English speakers than any country in the world, including the United States.1
Miller also correctly pointed out that immigration to the United States has historically ebbed and flowed. Large periods of high immigration have been followed by significant slowdowns—either to give the new immigrants a chance to assimilate, or in response to changing economic conditions.
So, contrary to the arguments of Acosta and the anti-Trump coalition, there is no requirement of the American creed that says immigration rates must remain high or that we must not prioritize those immigrants who have the skills needed to succeed.