Just as the "science" of man-made climate change is apparently settled, so (if the English speaking media is to be believed) is the consensus the 47th President of the USA is shaping up to be the worst in the history of the Republic. It does not seem to occur to the op-ed writers that Donald J Trump is not presently even the worst or the most dangerous president of the 21st century. That accolade surely belongs to G W Bush Jnr, who started two wars and lost both; presided over the shambles of the Federal response to Hurricane Katrina and oversaw an explosion in financial risk taking on Wall Street such as nearly capsized the global economy. So no, by virtually no measure by which effective presidents are assessed is Trump objectively the worst president to have occupied the Oval Office. But some people, whom you would have thought would have the ability to discriminate and judge fairly, will simply not be argued with. They seem determined to be absolutely A-PPALLED and will not tolerate any attempt at enlightenment. Like his permanent tan, the mere mention of Donald Trump acts like Agent Orange on the conversations of polite society where important people of liberal persuasion measure their words oh-so-carefully.
One of the biggest difficulties of defending the 45th and 47th President is that his whole schtick seems purposely designed to enrage his detractors. He is Dennis the Menace with absolutely no redeeming features beyond the odd act of capricious personal generosity. Even these bear the unmistakable glow of his vanity rather than any innate kindness. He is, indubitably, a convicted felon, a liar and a misogynist. But it is equally impossible to see him ordering the dropping of an atomic bomb, an act about which Harry Truman appeared to have no qualms whatsoever. Indeed, in his first term he was reticent about the spilling of any American blood and had the habit of firing those like John Bolton who argued too urgently in its favour. It is also fair to say that until unzipped by Covid, Trump Mark I presided over not only one of the purplier patches of US stock market performance but also one of the biggest rises in the living standards of the lowest income quartile since the Second World War. He also began a necessary re-setting of the terms of trade with China, which had had such a corrosive influence on the creation and maintenance of jobs in the USA.
The US electorate has had a good look at Trump and plenty of opportunity to judge the risks it is prepared to take with a character such as his as Supreme Commander. To the utter astonishment of the commentariat however, who thought the 2021 "insurrection" would be the final piece of Jenga to bury him, he staged one of the most astonishing political comebacks in modern political history. Or, if you prefer a sporting analogy, it was George Foreman recovering the world heavyweight boxing title aged 45 and after a long absence from the ring. It was a clear knock-out too: the Democrats lost the 2024 popular vote decisively.
While a few far-sighted Democrats have reluctantly concluded their long held political pitch is yielding incrementally lower electoral returns, particularly among blue collar and Latino Americans, the media has doubled down on the Trump bashing. All the claimed elements of the President's sinister and volatile thought processes are there: the interview-without-coffee for President Zelensky; the tete-a-tete's with the monster Putin; the threat to turn Gaza into a theme park; the weird determination to annexe Canada and seize Greenland. Of course Trump has facilitated this latest pile-on too, as he appears to have no intellectual hinterland beyond a curiosity about what happened to Biggy and Tupac and whether or not the Moon-Landing was faked. In short, since the Donald shows neither depth nor consistency nor even a basic grasp of public good manners, he presents an open goal to his detractors and writes their leaders for them. Which of course tickles his narcissism and is otherwise water off a duck's back.
In public administration as in foreign policy, the Donald has hit the ground running and has cleverly appointed Elon Musk as his Thomas Cromwell to oversee America's very own reformation. His is more than just a war on "woke" but also a wholesale re-imagination of the purpose of the egregious Federal state. This too has caused apoplexy and there are even some commentators who have publicly returned their lease-hire Tesla's while seriously asking us to believe this is a considered political statement. They are on safer ground when they point to the recent wobbles on the US stock market. But this may be no more than the long overdue release of air from an inflated technology bubble where participants are beginning to question whether the whole AI paradigm is everything it is cracked up to be and whether it is China rather than Silicon Valley which is now ahead of the curve.
For a glimpse of the philosophical underpinning of the Trump project however, one needs to look to the office of the Vice President, a position once memorably described as worth no more "than a warm bucket of spit". JD Vance, who once publicly described Trump as a re-incarnated fascist, is now condemned as a turn coat and a lickspittle who has sold out. Of course this odium assumes the vice president is a closet liberal, which he is most decidedly not. But the brick bats hurled at Vance have a noticeable amount of personalised venom attached, a good sign the liberal commentariat takes him very seriously indeed.
In his acclaimed best-seller Hillbilly Elegy (2016), Vance showed that he had walked the walk as well as talked the talk. Deserted by multiple fathers, tethered to a drug addicted mother and raised by foul-mouthed, fist balling and gun toting grandparents in one of America's poorest post codes, Vance defied probability, completed his secondary education, went on to be a marine and graduated from Yale Law School. The rest, as they say, is history. His book is a compelling memoir of the sustaining and redemptive power of the family unit in a wasteland of social deprivation and low achievement. While it is powerfully insightful about what happens when fleetfooted capital ups and leaves more rooted communities which are then abandoned, Hillbilly Elegy is no polemic against the dark side of the American Dream. Rather, it contains a critique about how welfarism degrades and removes the agency of its recipients to improve their lives, no matter how well intentioned. The key, as Grandma Vance so pithily put it, is "Never (to) be like these fucking losers who think the deck is stacked against them" and this can best be achieved by sticking with school and being supported by a secure domestic base, whether it be led by a cussed grandmother, protective sibling or sympathetic uncle. Indeed Vance makes one of the best conservative cases in favour of comprehensive, publicly funded education that you are likely to read.
Naturally, the vice president has retained many of the elements of his personality which were shaped by the hillbilly milieu of both Appalachian Kentucky and rust-belt Ohio. Despite his obvious and sprightly intellect, Vance was brought up in a community where disagreements were often settled by a smack in the mouth and which fostered vendettas. This side of his character was most clearly on display during the very public dressing down of Vladimir Zelensky, an incident to which the commentariat reacted with almost theatrical horror. But Vance has a very acute understanding of his boss, who has been seriously peeved with the diminutive Ukrainian president ever since his arms-length role in the Democrat's first attempt to impeach Trump in 2019.
Much more significant was his speech to the European security apparat recently gathered in Munich. In keeping with the themes of resilience which pepper Hillbilly Elegy, the vice president lambasted his audience for their incessant free-loading off the security provided by the USA while losing sight of the very freedoms they are supposed to be defending. Far from a new departure, Vance was merely putting into words a frustration shared by many of Trump's presidential predecessors. The USA is heartily sick of underwriting European defence needs while its recipients carp about the manner of its provision.
If the Donald has ever dwelt upon a book of American history, which must be a bit doubtful, he will perhaps have found a dim echo of his current world-view in the more muscular agendas of his predecessors in the early nineteenth century. Both Monroe in his robust defence of US territorial interests against Europe and Jackson in his championing of the American common man against the elites, spoke of an America to be put first. Today, the critique of Trump's agenda by the liberal brahmins of the East and West coasts is it amounts to form of authoritarianism. But the commentariat conveniently forgets that Roosevelt enjoyed almost dictatorial powers in the forging of his New Deal. They also forget that in his first term, Trump was far too incompetent and distracted to deal with the real centres of power in the judiciary, the academy and among the corporate elites which were determined to frustrate him.
It will be very much up to the likes of JD if he succeeds this time around.
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