Trump Emerges From Dallas With a Chance To Surprise the Pundits Yet Again

The midterm convention of the Republicans at Dallas last week demonstrated again what an overpowering presence President Trump is in contemporary American political life. Apparently unencumbered by his 80 years, he rolled two speeches together for a total of over 90 minutes. One was a disciplined and relevant script reciting key achievements and goals and holding the opposition up to civilized unflattering comparison.The other was discursive and rich in his often humorous stream of consciousness disparaging opponents and ranging far afield. The outline emerged of the Republican strategy to defeat the long-standing tradition of reversals for parties in office in midterm elections and particularly in second terms. The Democrats are now roughly half the party of failed Bidenites who gave American 9 percent inflation, between 10 million and 15 million illegal migrants, indifferent economic growth, the Afghanistan disaster, back-breaking regulation, much of it in the name of spurious responses to climate change, and complete ineffectuality as Russia invaded Ukraine, Hamas invaded Israel, and Communist China deployed resources in Latin America.This half of the Democrats are also the bedraggled and discredited party of the Schumers and the worm-eaten legacy of the Clintons and Obamas and Nancy Pelosi. The other half are the Islamo-Marxists whose ideas could easily be used by the Republicans to frighten children into eating their breakfast cereal.Mr. Trump came out slugging and was anything but on the defensive. He essentially sketched out three simple metrics for Americans trying to decide how to vote. In addition to his incineration of the Democratic pantomime horse of the Clinton-Obama-Bidens and the Marxist champions of the Prophet, he told the people what he alone could prevent and what he alone could provide. A vote for the Democrats was effectively deemed to be a vote to permit Iran to become a nuclear military power and Mr. Trump presented temporarily higher gas prices as a small price to pay for avoiding that fate.For once his approach is not evident hyperbole, and the argument is a persuasive one. The official line of the Democrats is that they should return to negotiations with Iran. Every American with an IQ above double figures knows that this would lead in double-quick time to Iran menacing all of Europe and the Middle East with nuclear weapons.The Democrats have offered no alternative to the conspicuous falsehood that President Obama’s agreement with Iran would have led to anything other than a nuclear -armed Iran well before now. They are blaming moderate inflation on Mr. Trump with a venom that ill-behooves those who sat like suet puddings while President Biden quadrupled the inflation rate that he inherited from Mr. Trump. Mr. Trump’s clinching argument was the promise to give every American adult citizen a grant of $5,000, provided the Republicans retained control of both houses of the Congress and provided the money received was spent or invested in the United States. His recitation of the $20 trillion being invested by foreigners in the United States, and the greatest revival of American manufacturing since Roosevelt’s New Deal and an astonishing economic growth rate of approximately five percent indicate that such a dividend might be less catastrophically unaffordable than it seems.Commentators were quick to note that the cost to the treasury would be approximately $1.35 trillion but about third of that would come off as income tax at source, and as all the rest would be either invested or deposited or used for acquisitions in the United States, at least another 25 percent would come into the Treasury as income tax or sales tax, and a substantial part of the balance would return to the treasury from the routine expansion of the economy. America’s experience of tax reductions under Presidents Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and Reagan all demonstrated that they increase government revenue after two or three years.The amount of the dividend is undoubtedly excessive but if it were reduced to $2,000 that would be about $530 billion, of which normal taxes would quickly retrieve 60 percent. Economic growth would justify the rest and the quantum to each individual would alleviate concerns about gas prices. Since the dividend is conditional on retention of both houses of Congress by the Republicans, all the smirks and shrugs of even commentators relatively well disposed to Mr. Trump over the weekend missed the point.It could be a successful political tactic whether any part of the dividend is ever issued or not. In presenting a dividend in this way, the president is not only making the ultimate foray into vote buying, he is making the points that failing to retain Republican control of the Congress will slap a generous gift horse in the month at the same time that it puts nuclear weapons into the arms of the enemies of the West.Mr. Trump has gone to war against what he considers the unjustified and alterable tradition of defeating political parties in midterm elections. He is doing so with the greatest economic record of any president since Reagan in 1984, if not Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936. Those were presidential election years, but this president’s ability to demonstrate that the tradition of midterm election setbacks for the White House is just yet another tradition by which he is not bound, should not be underestimated. Both sides agree that Mr. Trump is the issue; the divided and scarcely presentable Democrats should not assume that they have the better of that argument either. At this convention, Mr. Trump seemed to alleviate that sensation of people tiring of him, as they generally do with presidents after six years. He has many times before blown away the punditocracy and the serried ranks of his enemies before. He might be able to do it again: he did not look like a cornered man at Dallas last week.

Trump Emerges From Dallas With a Chance To Surprise the Pundits Yet Again

Trump Emerges From Dallas With a Chance To Surprise the Pundits Yet Again

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