Trump's biggest threat is Trump

Abnormal Dems, Cocaine Mitch, Ukraine, New York Dolls

Donald Trump’s promise of a “common sense revolution” has a number of parallels to Warren Harding’s “Return a Normalcy.” Harding, one of the nation’s greatest presidents (despite what you’ve heard), was the answer to the incompetence, arrogance, zealotry and chaos of the Woodrow Wilson years. Harding, famously imperfect, embodied the American spirit in both his career and political life. He succeeded a puritanical Wilson, whose administration that had bumbled its way into a disastrous conflict, into a recession, and was constantly at odds with traditional American ideals. Wilson, of course, also lost his mental capacity after a stroke, creating questions about who was running the country, as well.

Which makes his obsession with statist economics confounding. Trump spoke to the normie. Creating needless economic chaos is not the way to keep them. As I write this week in the Examiner:

President Donald Trump’s fixation with tariffs is reminiscent of the Democrats’ self-destructive crusade to pass the Inflation Reduction Act under former President Joe Biden. The Left treated the partisan spending bill as a moral imperative, even though honest economists across the spectrum warned that dumping hundreds of billions of dollars into a hot economy would come with a heavy cost. And more than any other policy or position, one suspects, it was inflation and the resulting economic uncertainty that hurt Democrats most over the past four years.

It is not an exaggeration to say virtually no economist in the country believes tariffs are good for Americans.

More than even immigration, though, economic disorder turns voters against politicians. And we are starting to see it. Mocking Canada is always a blast until it starts tanking peoples’ 401(k)s. Rather than sitting down and forging new trade agreements with our neighbors and striking “fair” deals, the president has relied on his business-era strategy of throwing bombs and creating chaos.

That said, Trump has always benefitted from the insanity of his enemies.

The president’s address to a Joint Session of Congress this week offers a near-perfect glimpse into the dynamics that helped Trump take power. You didn’t have to agree with everything he said to acknowledge that his tone was patriotic and uplifting. It was a speech that normies could embrace. The Left’s demeanor, conversely, was sour and weird. Democrats have become one of the most feckless political parties in modern history. They simply can’t be normal.

Mollie and I spoke about this, and a number of other issues, on this week’s You’re Wrong.

Congressional Democrats couldn’t even stand to honor the memory of Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student who was bludgeoned to death by an illegal alien from Venezuela. You don’t need to be a pollster to understand that most Americans find the idea of spending $22 billion on free housing for illegal immigrants unacceptable.

But Democrats continue to act as if borders are merely suggestions. The fact that illegal crossings instantaneously plunged as soon as the Trump administration took power only signals to voters that Democrats are either preternaturally incompetent or deliberately sowing lawlessness. Every argument they make now leads us to believe the latter.

Democrats couldn’t muster the ability to join applause when the president made DJ Daniel, a 13-year-old with cancer, an honorary Secret Service agent. Worse, lefty pundits are so obsessed with partisanship that they thought it would be a good idea to blame the child’s cancer on the Trump administration’s negligible EPA cuts, which have barely been instituted. A normie, I suspect, doesn’t process the plight of a child with a deadly ailment in quite this way.

As Trump walked toward the stage on Tuesday, Melanie Stansbury (D-NM) held up a sign aimed at the Republican that read, “This is not normal.” All evidence says the congresswoman has it backward.

Before the speech, Axios reported that Democrats were going to walk out of the address in protest of the most offensive passages. What offense would spark this courageous walkout? “Criticism of transgender kids was brought up as a line in the sand that could trigger members to storm out, according to a House Democrat,” the outlets reported.

First off, no one is criticizing transgender children. They’re criticizing adults who irreparably mutilate confused children or demand genetic males be able to compete with girls in sports. Most polls show a significant majority of the public — even Democrats — don’t want gender anarchy in schools. The fact that this issue is the one Democrats are willing to take their stand on is mind-boggling.

And that is not the only issue where Democratic Party behavior defies common sense. Trump keeps daring Democrats to defend unhinged USAID spending on quackery around the globe. The hundreds of millions spent on DEI scholarships in Burma, LGBTQ+ programs in Lesotho, or Afro-Colombian empowerment in Central America represents a kind of administrative state free-for-all. The president knows voters who see high grocery prices and insane college tuition don’t care about Lesotho.

Cocaine Mitch, first-ballot Hall of Famer

Last week, I wrote positively about the legacy of the retiring Mitch McConnell in the Examiner, and used a truncated version as my syndicated column. It did not go over well. When I checked the comments at New York Post — something I rarely do — not a single one was positive. As it goes, they’re all wrong.

There are, of course, numerous legitimate criticisms of McConnell’s tenure. He ruled the conference with an iron hand, alienating many. He often undermined dynamic upstart candidates, not only MAGA but also Tea Party, funding establishment politicians who would consolidate his rule. He abetted Democrats in their conspiratorial Russiagate fantasies. Under McConnell, there were decades of spiraling debt spending without any genuine effort to curb spending, reform entitlements, or rein in the administrative state. On this front, McConnell is far from alone.

The real problem is that McConnell failed to show the proper deference to Donald Trump. And sometimes, such as the time the president pressured McConnell to get rid of the legislative filibuster, that was a good thing. But more pertinently, McConnell sits at the center of the founding myth of Trumpism, which states that before 2015, the GOP had conserved nothing, accomplished nothing, and stopped nothing. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard someone say, “Republicans gave Obama everything he wanted.”

The opposite is true.

After winning wave elections in 2006 and 2008, Democrats controlled both legislative branches and the White House. Republicans hadn’t looked as feckless and leaderless since the “Old Right” was ineptly sitting in Congress watching one massive expansion of the state after the next. The coming Obama transformation of America was fait accompli according to the pundit class. To say differently was unpatriotic.

McConnell became the leader of the Right, holding together a fractious GOP conference that ran from squishy centrist to hard-liner, denying Obama his revolution. As McConnell noted at the time, “When you hang the ‘bipartisan’ tag on something, the perception is that differences have been worked out, and there’s a broad agreement that that’s the way forward.”

The rest here.

Our insufferably stupid Ukraine debate

The domestic debate over Ukrainian aid has devolved into one of most unhinged in our discourse, which is saying something. The “realist” case is riddled with specious and ahistorical claims, meaningless ad hominem attacks — “neocon!” and “globalist!” The idealist case claims that Ukraine is the bulwark of “democracy” and out own freedom hinges on whether the country loses its Russian-majority Eastern regions. I don’t buy that either.

From my piece in the Examiner.

“Ignore all the blue and gold virtue signaling,” Fox News host Laura Ingraham tweeted about pro-Ukrainian protestors. “The most telling question is: How many of them are willing to send their own sons and daughters to fight?” None, I assume. Because the question tells us nothing.

For one thing, neither the children of protesters nor any other American children have been asked to fight for Ukraine. Not one person of political consequence has argued that we should deploy American troops to Ukraine. The unconvincing argument made by Zelensky’s defenders is that if we don’t stop Russian President Vladimir Putin today, one day, U.S. troops will have to do it.

To say otherwise is fearmongering. We’ve been involved in proxy wars all over the world without ever sending troops. Not one American has ever died defending Israel in its wars against Soviet-armed Arabs or the Islamists.

Second, even if we did want to send soldiers to Eastern Europe, civilians, not soldiers or generals, would make that decision. You can be a genteel Quacker and your position on prosecuting war is just as valid as that of a Marine. Indeed, this is one of the central planks of a free nation. And everyone who volunteers to join the military, one hopes, understands this.

The chickenhawk smear, which conveniently only works for isolationists, including ones who’ve never served, is just meant to chill speech.

Moreover, the idea that one can only express support in a conflict if they’re willing to die is ludicrous. If you support the plight of African Christians being slaughtered by Islamists or Taiwan over the CCP, you don’t need to promise to send your firstborn to die in Congo or the South China Sea.

Personality Crisis

A recently caught Hungarian filmmaker Adam Breier’s fantastic movie, “All About the Levkoviches,” which tells the story of a secular atheist Jewish widower who mends relationship with his Orthodox son and grandson. Well worth watching if foreign films are your thing.

Also, RIP, David Johansen — and the days when gender-bending was transgressive campy fun rather than destructive quack pseudoscience.