The Cocktail Party Contrarian: America First’s Week of America Last

America First voters have been having a bad week. First, front page photos captured Syria’s president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, being welcomed at the Oval Office on Monday, the same day as the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States Marine Corps.Mr. Al-Sharaa, a wanted al Qaeda terrorist with, until 5-minutes ago, an American bounty on his head, was described by the president as a “strong leader” with a “rough past.” His past includes joining an al Qaeda cell in Iraq to fight against America in 2003, directly engaging with United States Marines in places like Anbar province and Fallujah. After al-Sharaa’s capture and multi-year detention, he returned to Syria to lead the al Qaeda chapter there.Syria’s new president has clearly been ”al Qaeda First” for his entire adult life and is now being pitched to the “America First” crowd as someone whose anti-American past shouldn’t matter. The argument is that he is an important partner in the fight against ISIS and a strategic asset in the American plan to sever Syria’s ties to Russia and Iran.It’s a tough sell. Mr. Al-Sharaa and his Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham buddies aren’t even the ones who did the heavy lifting to dismantle the ISIS caliphate in Syria. That distinction goes to the Kurds who didn’t get a photo op with Congressman Brian Mast at the White House.What HTS has done well is kill Christians and Druze in Syria, destroying churches and religious heritage sites along the way as it swept to power. America First Americans, often Christians themselves, aren’t as ready as President Trump was to slap Mr. al-Sharaa on the back and spritz him with Victory 45-47 cologne.Then came word this week that the government shutdown was finally coming to an end. Democrats, like the talk show host John Stewart and Senator Bernie Sanders, fumed that the Left got nothing from the standoff. Ironically, many on the America First right felt the same way, but for different reasons.In the early days of the shutdown, President Trump and the OMB director, Russ Vought, talked about using the opportunity to shrink government bureaucracy and even to shutter whole department divisions, delivering on the MAGA promise of eliminating government waste, fraud and abuse and diminishing the Deep State.The Trump administration produced only a few thousand pink slips and furloughs, which were legally contested by Democrats and are now likely to be reversed under the terms of the Senate bill to end the shutdown. Further firings are prohibited until January 30, 2026. This isn’t for what MAGA voted.Then on Tuesday. Mr. Trump offended America First voters further by defending the H1B visa program. He did that on the Laura Ingraham Show. Dismissing complaints that the program has been abused to undercut American white-collar jobs, the president clumsily said H1B’s are necessary because American workers lack the talent to perform certain high-skilled jobs like building missiles and batteries.To the America First ear that sounds a lot like America Last. It sounds like our top universities have been producing a workforce full of useless pronoun experts, causing our country to import much needed and much cheaper tech experts, and our America First president is accepting that America Last reality rather than fixing it.No one believes that Mr. Trump truly feels this way, but this was a Kamala-level verbal flub for which the MAGA base won’t easily forgive him.Neither will he be able to continue to avoid full support for the release of all the “Epstein Files.” Accountability for elites was part of the MAGA promise. The issue resurfaced this week, and any advice the president is getting to continue to dismiss it should be ignored.The president undoubtedly still wears the MAGA/America First crown, but as much as America Firsters love him for what he started, they aren’t radical, blind devotees, the media’s caricature of them notwithstanding.As the elections earlier this month have demonstrated, if the MAGA base doesn’t see the cost of living go down, jobs returning to America, and domestic concerns prioritized over foreign interests, they won’t even show up to vote against a socialist running for mayor in New York City, no matter how many times Mr. Trump calls him a communist.The worry is that if we keep having weeks like this, MAGA voters won’t show up in the midterms either. America Firsters already voted for the policies they want. If they don’t get them with Mr. Trump in the White House and Republicans in control of Congress and the Supreme Court, it will be hard to convince them that voting matters at all.

The Cocktail Party Contrarian: America First’s Week of America Last

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