Lessons From Trump’s First Term Animate His Push To Confront the Washington Establishment’s Depths of Perfidy

After less than four months in his second term, President Trump is no less controversial yet steadily more accomplished. Illegal immigration, which reached the proportions of the barbarian invasions of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth and sixth centuries A.D., has effectively been ended. Almost forgotten now are the shameful compromises of Senator McConnell and others claiming that an excellent goal would be keeping illegal immigration to two million people a year. Even fewer now remember the endless years of hypocritical claptrap from Senator McCain and others about “comprehensive immigration reform,” a euphemism for doing nothing or making conditions worse. The Democratic desire for more votes to be regimented and delivered, despite the lack of citizenship of this new election-clinching constituency, united with the avarice of Republican employers to exploit cheap labor, and to hell with the national interest. The press allowed President Biden and some of his predecessors to claim legislation was necessary to enable them to honor their presidential oath in defending America’s borders.It isn’t clear how great the savings accomplished by the DOGE may be, and with Elon Musk one must always be ready for hyperbole. Doubtless some people are being disemployed unwisely, and such incidents will receive maximum publicity. Yet this is an effort worth making that will produce material results as well as shaking the complacency of the gigantic Democratic pustule of government in and around the District of Columbia.Tesla’s Elon Musk holds a chainsaw at the Conservative Political Action Conference on February 20, 2025, at Oxon Hill, Maryland. Andrew Harnik/Getty ImagesMr. Trump’s opponents tried to turn a thoroughly undesirable person who had entered the country illegally into a civil rights hero while only defending “due process.” This is a bit rich coming from all those who sanctimoniously cheered on the politicization of the intelligence agencies and the FBI, to present Democratic campaign smears in 2016 as the work of legitimate intelligence gatherers so clearly truthful it could be published without any verification, and who supported spurious impeachments and indictments of Mr. Trump, attempts to keep him off the ballot, and who may have been at least indirectly complicit in lapses of security so serious that they almost cost the former president and leader of the opposition his life.The Democratic Party has allowed itself to become entangled with visa-holding students supporting antisemitism and sanctifying terrorists. All the while, Mr. Trump is accused of being a rudderless force for chaos with Hitlerian ambitions. No effort whatever was made by the previous administration to bring the Ukraine war to an end. It was assumed that Russia would win easily, and the Biden administration completely misread the correlation of forces. For two years, Mr. Biden and NATO gave Ukraine enough material support to survive, but not to win, and there was never any exit strategy, much less one with a satisfactory strategic outcome. Mr. Trump will eventually get a cease-fire because he alone has the ability to create conditions in which both sides need an agreement. His opponents accuse him of being motivated entirely by a desire for a Nobel Peace Prize. Anti-Israel activist Mahmoud Khalil outside the Columbia University campus, April 30, 2024. AP/Mary Altaffer, fileHe is the only president who has taken serious counter-measures against the Communist Chinese campaign of unfair trading, industrial espionage, currency manipulation, and intimidation of smaller trading partners, all while being overtly contemptuous of America. There has been the customary press effort to present the recent de-escalation of tariffs between America and China as a climb-down by Mr. Trump, but it is obvious the world is far more concerned with access to the American market than it is with placating the Chinese. So far, Mr. Trump’s tariff plans appear successful and the 130 countries seeking negotiations are looking to limit their own concessions, not aggravate American complaints. Mr. Trump also has the distinction of being the first president since Bill Clinton to pay any attention to the federal budget deficit and to the trade deficit, though it has been a concern since the Carter years.Ultimately more important than individual policy areas is that the Trump administration is now armed with the knowledge it did not possess in its first term of the depths of perfidy and tenacity of the corrupt Washington establishment, which sustains itself not by popular support but by the self-interest of the elites and the occupation of the commanding heights of unelected, bureaucratic, and regulatory government. Now that the prosecution service has been torn from their hands, they have engaged in industrial-league judge shopping, and redefined democracy as the ability of a thousand district judges individually to stop anything the president of the United States wishes to do. The challenge to the Academy to maintain reasonable toleration of a variety of opinion and to avoid the degradation of higher learning into a battering ram for the destruction of American society and civilized traditions is denounced as fascist authoritarianism, when as the public sees, that is in fact what it is opposing. A protester waves a Palestinian flag above the occupied Hamilton Hall, renamed Hind’s Hall, on the Columbia campus, April 30, 2024, at New York. Pool/Mary Altaffer via APAbout 80 percent of the national political press and the visible academic elite are leftist and they had succeeded in foisting upon a hostile nation anti-American education, systematically dishonest media, biological men destroying womens’ sports, a permanent welcome-mat for the destitute and criminals of the world, hemorrhaging debt, a politicized and corrupt legal system, and diminishing armed forces harassed by racial and gender nonsense. Mr. Trump’s assault on the unrepresentative biases of the academic, journalistic, entertainment, and financial elites is generally popular, and because he is much more knowledgeable of the methods of his enemies than he was eight years ago, and has so convincingly debunked the defamations of those who represented him as a meteoric freak and mountebank, the forces of national defeatism are finally in a state of cold and almost inarticulate terror.If there is a potential Achilles’ heel on what should now become one of the most important presidencies in American history, it is the president and his family’s fondness for commercial hucksterism. To some extent, this is a question of taste, but some of the Trumps’ recent commercial initiatives, particularly with countries he is in intimate official negotiation with, do not appear to be entirely above suspicion. Mr. Trump is very close to a series of colossal triumphs that will make him a world-historic figure. He should be careful not to give any hostages to his enemies as a result of commercial habits that could be inappropriate to a holder of his great office.

Lessons From Trump’s First Term Animate His Push To Confront the Washington Establishment’s Depths of Perfidy

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