The Cost, page 2
In that mission he has largely succeeded, although it hasn’t always been pretty. Most politicians go to great lengths to conceal character flaws. Donald Trump wears them on his sleeve. Most presidents try to appear dignified and restrained in response to criticism. When a former cabinet secretary questioned the president’s competence, Trump called him “dumb as a rock.”
Speaking of former administration officials, Trump is setting records for acrimonious partings with senior staff. And America’s forty-fifth president is often no more diplomatic in the way he conducts foreign relations. He called the leader of one of America’s closest allies “very dishonest and weak”15—but also managed to strike a new trade deal with him.
Trump’s impolite and unconventional style partly explains how he could manage to get impeached without being accused of any crime in either of the two impeachment articles passed in the U.S. House. And even people who find the Biden family’s mining of overseas wealth appalling may not like the president’s handling of relations with Ukraine.
But Trump’s odd manners and methods also obscure the substance of a highly consequential presidency with significant achievements. Much of the press corps may now be dedicated to cataloging the inaccuracies in the president’s rhetoric. Yet it’s hard to name an elected official who has more faithfully pursued his campaign agenda—or has disclosed more of his thoughts and opinions. And his well-documented faults appear smaller the more we learn about the surveillance abuses conducted by his detractors within the federal government beginning in 2016. If such abuses of power can target even a successful presidential campaign and White House through wiretaps, informants, and a media leak strategy, then there is little hope of fairness for the rest of us.
Three years into his term, Donald Trump is neither the dignified statesman that some Americans hoped he might become nor the abusive authoritarian that media critics claimed he would be. But Trump can—and often does—boast of impressive results when it comes to the central promise of his 2016 campaign: restoring economic opportunity for the average worker. As we’ll describe, in the years before Covid the U.S. job market set a series of records.
Trump has accused many members of the media—including Maria and the Journal editorial page where James serves as assistant editor—of spreading “fake news.” Yet media organizations are thriving in the Trump era. The question is no longer whether they will remain free to criticize him but how they will continue to generate such robust ratings and revenues after he leaves the Oval Office.
Now it’s time for Americans to review the record and decide how long he should stay there.
1 Morality and Prosperity
Judging the presidency of Donald Trump naturally involves a question of style versus substance. It’s not surprising that the boorish billionaire who crashed the Republican presidential debate party in 2015 is still tweeting disrespectful comments about his political adversaries. Most people don’t change all that much after the age of seventy. But what is remarkable is that the political novice is now concluding one of the most consequential first terms in recent history.
After Trump’s stunning victory in 2016, one might have expected the former star of reality television to preside over an entertaining but ineffectual administration. One might even have had fun imagining Trump’s celebrity pals lining up for nominations to the federal bench. But who would have guessed that, four years later, legal analysts of both parties would be acknowledging the exceptional quality and quantity of Trump judicial appointments?
The cost of supporting Donald Trump is enduring awkward moments when he says things that presidents shouldn’t say. The benefit is that he champions American liberty and prosperity, and a free and prosperous America is a benefit to people all over the world.
In 2016, U.S. voters decided to take a chance on Trump because they figured that, for all his rough edges, he seemed willing and able to confront the bullying Washington bureaucracy—and bully it right back. In Trump’s favored metaphor, Americans decided he was the guy to wade into a Beltway swamp that needed draining. The voters had no idea how right they were. As we’ll discuss in chapter two, the culture of Washington turned out to be much more corrupt and rotten than almost anyone could have imagined.
Since moving into the White House, Trump hasn’t become highly popular. He never was. But he has surpassed any reasonable expectation for his performance in office. In important ways Trump has reduced the federal footprint on the daily lives of U.S. citizens. Meanwhile, his adversaries are promising that when he departs the White House that footprint is going to get much larger.
In 2016, many of Trump’s adversaries in politics and the press were saying that his various ill-advised comments portended a dark night of authoritarianism in America. They were wrong. Trump’s regulatory and tax reforms and his appointment of judges committed to the rule of law have resulted in a federal government that exercises less power than the day he was inaugurated. And, unlike an actual authoritarian, he accepts the decisions of judges even when they rule against him, just as he accepted the decision of voters to hand the U.S. House of Representatives to Democrats in 2018.
A few journalists, like Doyle McManus of the Los Angeles Times, have been honest enough to acknowledge that the 2016 hyperventilating over a potential dictatorship was overdone. “Not long ago, the ‘Never Trump’ half of the nation was gripped by fear of an authoritarian takeover,” wrote McManus in 2019. “But the specter of an autocratic president running roughshod over democratic institutions has ebbed,” he admitted, as the courts and Congress maintained the usual restraints on the White House.1 But many of Trump’s critics have simply moved on to claiming that he violates vaguely defined constitutional “norms.” Such claims often come from people who favor violations of actual constitutional rights and spend much of their time pressuring judges to ignore the plain language of the first two amendments.
Trump doesn’t trample our rights and he doesn’t start wars. He says things that offend people.
Another thing that Trump sometimes says is that Americans “have no choice”2 but to vote for him given his economic policies. We always have choices, but he has a point for voters who prize limited government. As we write this in the summer of 2020, with virus lockdowns ravaging the economy and triggering the highest unemployment rates in more than seventy years, Trump’s presidential election opponent Joe Biden is stubbornly maintaining that what the U.S. economy needs is a $4 trillion tax increase. Biden has also proposed a much larger increase in federal spending, plus a wave of new federal regulation. This fall voters have a clear choice between a candidate who favors economic growth and one who has other priorities.
The massive exception to Trump’s limited government agenda is, of course, the rise in federal debt during his presidency; sadly this is the one area in which he has proven to be an utterly conventional politician. But if voters choose to reject him on this basis, they will elect a candidate promising to spend and borrow much more.
The Republican president Trump is the imperfect champion for foundational liberties at a time in our history when socialism is increasingly embraced by Democratic candidates. In this context, it’s possible that Trump’s controversial tweets will end up as forgotten footnotes.
One can argue with the slogan “Make America Great Again,” on the grounds that America never stopped being great. And the United States is not just one of the great countries of the world. It’s the greatest. No other country has done nearly as much as the United States to liberate and enrich people all over the world. Trump the salesman actually understated the case.
Still, the important thing about Trump is that he believes in American greatness, wants America to be the most prosperous country in the world, and prioritizes a thriving America above all other considerations. In another time and place, it might be obvious that a president puts the interests of his country first. But Trump came along at a time in America when too many politicians seemed to view America as one of the world’s challenges, rather than its greatest asset. Trump’s predecessor President Barack Obama began his tenure by making a series of memorable speeches overseas in which he described American flaws. In France of all places, he castigated America for “arrogance.”3 Critics dubbed it Obama’s “apology tour.”4 By Obama’s last year in office it had become standard operating procedure, even when visiting Marxist dictatorships, to recall alleged U.S. misdeeds against the host nation. During a visit to Cuba he noted that the United States had once sought to “exert control” over the country and no doubt many suffering Cubans were wishing that we had.5 Trump doesn’t apologize for America. When it comes to foreign relations, he thinks that in many ways we’ve been too nice. He presented himself to voters in 2016 as an experienced negotiator who could cut better deals on America’s behalf.
Trump correctly casts the United States as a model for the world. And regardless of the number of odd messages he may post on Twitter, he’s done as much as any recent president to maintain the constitutional governance that made us great and allows us to exercise the global leadership the world needs. In a September 2019 speech to the United Nations General Assembly, President Trump said, “I have the immense privilege of addressing you today as the elected leader of a nation that prizes liberty, independence, and self-government above all.… Americans know that in a world where others seek conquest and domination, our nation must be strong in wealth, in might, and in spirit. That is why the United States vigorously defends the traditions and customs that have made us who we are.”6
Trump then encouraged the leaders of other nations to honor their own cultures as the foundation of a patriotism that inspires people to defend their independence. But he might just as well have been talking to Americans who have lately witnessed a flood of media stories about attempts to destroy U.S. monuments, even ones dedicated to great abolitionists. Trump stands squarely against efforts to trash our history and understands that while America has often fallen short of its founding ideals, the answer is not to reject such ideals but to extend them to people everywhere. He said at the U.N.:
The core rights and values America defends today were inscribed in America’s founding documents. Our nation’s Founders understood that there will always be those who believe they are entitled to wield power and control over others. Tyranny advances under many names and many theories, but it always comes down to the desire for domination. It protects not the interests of many, but the privilege of few.
Our Founders gave us a system designed to restrain this dangerous impulse. They chose to entrust American power to those most invested in the fate of our nation: a proud and fiercely independent people.
The true good of a nation can only be pursued by those who love it: by citizens who are rooted in its history, who are nourished by its culture, committed to its values, attached to its people, and who know that its future is theirs to build or theirs to lose. Patriots see a nation and its destiny in ways no one else can.7
Of course such soaring rhetoric is often followed by undignified Twitter commentary. For years this has led many observers to cast Donald Trump as the guilty pleasure of American politics. It’s been a recurring theme in media circles ever since he began running for president. The argument is often framed as selfish voters accepting an unpresidential occupant of the White House in exchange for economic benefits. As Trump seeks reelection, it’s a good time to revisit this popular media morality tale.
Guilty or not, many voters have certainly experienced pleasure watching Trump torment the Washington establishment. In 2015, Christopher Orr argued in the Atlantic that the Republican primary race was the political equivalent of the movie Caddyshack, with Trump playing Rodney Dangerfield’s character Al Czervik and Jeb Bush taking over the role of Judge Elihu Smails from Ted Knight.
“Pretty much everyone in America would like to have more money, obviously,” wrote Orr. “What they don’t want is to think that wealth would fundamentally change who they are. This is a basic democratic credo. Most Americans don’t want to be rich so that they can develop a taste for fancy French cuisine to be enjoyed over polite repartee with their fellow snobs at the country club. They want to be rich so they can do whatever they want and never have to take crap from anyone.”
Orr added that Trump was “an aggressive anti-snob who says whatever the hell he pleases and misses no opportunity to stick it to the establishment. The GOP is Bushwood Country Club (Bushwood!) and Trump the obnoxious interloper who, owing to his wealth, can’t be tastefully ignored.”8
In 2016, Josh Barro of Business Insider called Trump “the guilty-pleasure candidate” and wrote about the future president’s brand identity: “Trump Steaks. Trump Vodka. Trump Wine. These are not luxury items so much as they are indulgence items. His is a brand that says, screw your cardiologist, have a steak. You earned it.”
Barro went on to observe: “There is a lot of money to be made selling virtue-signaling goods and services to affluent people, but Donald Trump is not Martha Stewart, and he is not Gwyneth Paltrow. The appeal of Trump is not just that he’s rich, but that because he’s rich he gets to do whatever he wants—and he does not want to drink kale juice.”9
In a similar vein, comedian Seth Meyers noted a suspicion among some political analysts that candidate Trump was more popular than reported because voters were reluctant to admit to pollsters that they backed his controversial ideas. Said Meyers: “Guys, that’s a red flag. Your president shouldn’t be a guilty pleasure.” Meyers then pretended to be a voter struggling to make the decision and said, “Uhhh—I know I should be getting a salad, but I’m just going to vote Trump. I am so bad right now!”10
Whether Trump’s unique style of commentary elicits laughter or outrage—or perhaps a little of both—there is now a presidential record to consider. In this era the stakes are high for America and the world, and who would say that a tasteless tweet should overrule a presidency that supports liberty and the rule of law?
Trump’s media detractors have known all along that they weren’t going to get anywhere blasting the president’s Caddyshack style if the substance of his agenda was yielding positive results for most voters. So reporters at major media outlets spent a few years promoting without evidence a theory that Trump had betrayed his country. Unhinged opinion writers like Paul Krugman at the New York Times suggested that tens of millions of American voters were willing to accept a Russian conspiracy to rig U.S. elections as long as they could gain partisan advantage or tax cuts.11
If the claims of collusion with Russia had been true, they surely would have proven that voters made a devil’s bargain in backing Trump. But the point was always to try to shame his supporters, not to conduct a thorough examination of the available evidence. In March 2018 the House Intelligence Committee released a report on Russian efforts to interfere in American elections, and like every other government report on the subject it found no evidence of Trump’s involvement in such efforts. Three days later, Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) told Maria, “What strikes me most is that we had seventy recommendations and findings, yet I think you might be the first person to actually cover” them.12
* * *
The collapse of the collusion case makes it hard to claim that Trump voters should feel guilty about anything. On the other side of the ledger, the tragic events of 2020 have only served to underline the moral imperative of electing a U.S. president who prioritizes American prosperity and liberty.
During the first three years of the Trump presidency, while American workers were often enjoying record-setting levels of job openings, perhaps it was easy for media pundits to take such conditions for granted. Wage gains were dismissed as insufficient compensation for Trump’s flaws. Such pundits will now have a hard time persuading the former owners and employees of shuttered businesses that, hey, it’s only money.
In the spring of 2020, state and local governments responded to the coronavirus by ordering the shutdown of much of American society. Mandated closures of businesses and other organizations inflicted a financial toll that would have been almost unimaginable just a few weeks earlier. Exactly how many trillions of dollars this will cost Americans is still to be determined.
Long lines suddenly appeared at food banks nationwide, even in some of the country’s most affluent communities. Aerial views of thousands of cars whose drivers were waiting for emergency food assistance circulated on the internet. Many people had never relied on charity before and were shocked to find themselves needing help. In San Antonio, National Public Radio interviewed a forty-two-year-old bank employee named Erica whose ex-husband had lost his job and could no longer make child support payments.
“I never, ever could have even imagined anything like this,” Erica told the public broadcaster. “I was almost ashamed, to be honest, to even pick up food from the food bank because somebody might look at my used Cadillac and be like, ‘What is she doing in the food bank line?’ But I had to get past those feelings of shame. There’s no shame in feeding my children.”13
In April alone the shutdowns destroyed more than 20 million jobs as the national unemployment rate surged to nearly 15 percent. Unemployment was even worse than it initially appeared because the rate didn’t account for the millions of people who had recently been on a payroll and had not even started looking for another job during the lockdown.
But the unemployment rate was still historically awful. “The U.S. jobless rate eclipsed the previous record rate of 10.8% for data tracing back to 1948,” reported Sarah Chaney and Eric Morath in the Wall Street Journal. Economists estimate that the unemployment rate during the Great Depression was much worse—close to 25 percent. Still, by one measure the U.S. economy really did fall all the way back down to 1930s-style disaster territory: “The job losses due to business closures triggered by the pandemic produced by far the steepest monthly decline on records back to 1939.”14
