The MAGA Doctrine Read online

  Dedication

  To President Donald J. Trump.

  You came, you saw, you fixed. Thank you for the sacrifices you’ve made and continue to make. You’re putting our nation on the right track by ending wars, making government smaller, and enabling Americans to succeed.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Preface: What Is the MAGA Doctrine?

  Chapter 1: The Great Disruptor

  Chapter 2: The Outsider from the Inside

  Chapter 3: No More Accepting Decline

  Chapter 4: America First

  Chapter 5: Ending the Endless Wars

  Chapter 6: Making the Economy Work Again

  Chapter 7: No More Low-Energy Nation

  Chapter 8: America Is Not a Mistake

  Chapter 9: An American Great

  Chapter 10: The Justice Reformer

  Chapter 11: Making America Well Again

  Chapter 12: The Tech Sector

  Chapter 13: Protector of the Bill of Rights

  Chapter 14: Judicial Legacy

  Chapter 15: Promises Kept

  Chapter 16: The Great Agitator

  Chapter 17: The Opposition to MAGA

  Chapter 18: Never Surrender

  Chapter 19: An American Heritage

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Preface: What Is the MAGA Doctrine?

  Americans don’t like to be told what to do. By anybody.

  They don’t want their options limited by social justice warriors, EPA busybodies, or UN blowhards. They didn’t like Jimmy Carter telling them to put on a sweater and turn down the thermostat, and they didn’t like Michelle Obama lecturing them on what to eat. The entire elite political class is obsessed with lecturing their constituents. In fact, Donald Trump may be the first president in any of our lifetimes who doesn’t periodically take to the bully pulpit to tell us how to live our lives.

  At every turn, Americans are told they are breaking the rules, written and unwritten, both legal and moral. This is a strange fate for a people whose nation was built upon individual liberty and a historic break with old-world tyranny. Liberty is the shield with which we have protected individuals, families, churches, and communities—including groups that can’t easily fight back by themselves.

  Accompanying liberty is a healthy dose of skepticism about authority figures and experts who think they know best. That skepticism sometimes means listening to one wise farmer instead of a UN or EPA agriculture committee when regulations are suggested. It may mean listening to one online voice instead of the Silicon Valley cartel united against him—or one conservative professor censured by a left-wing Ivy League university. (Even the left understands this, even if they swear they don’t. They recently elected a bartender to Congress, after all, and claimed that was what made her worth listening to.)

  A people this rebellious do not take kindly either to a government that intrudes into every area of our lives (in the name of everything from defense to ending poverty, while achieving neither)—nor do we take kindly to a media elite that tells us we can’t vote for an outsider presidential candidate. They can bury us in fake news aimed at training us to hate that outsider candidate, but Americans still don’t like to be told what to do.

  In fact, that outsider candidate may start to sound more like a fellow rebel to them than like a threat.

  The MAGA Doctrine is a book about what happens when the two political parties stop listening to the people and the people win anyway. We live in a democratic republic, but this is still a near miracle. We will examine how the most controversial president of modern times managed to transform American politics in just a few years and how politicians and pundits raced to keep up.

  Throughout the stories of policy wins and political battles, we will explore two key ideas. The first is the false claim that Trump’s political base is not forward-thinking. The slogan Make America Great Again may use the past as the benchmark for greatness, but we are not advocating a return to mid-century America. Turn on the television or read newspaper columns calling modern conservatives backward-looking, and you can see why they consistently get President Trump wrong. They misread what is happening. They offer false predictions on what will happen next.

  If you think we are not calling for a brighter future as a strong, dynamic country of free and equal Americans, you will never understand the revolution happening before your eyes.

  Heading into the 2016 election, both parties assumed the presidency would be decided on the same old issues, presented in the same boring way. They prepared accordingly. The Republican base found a better choice, and caught a dying Democrat Party off guard.

  Why has there been so much misunderstanding around the president’s popularity and plans? In the pages that follow, I’m going to argue that even members of his own party continue to misunderstand the permanence of the change among the base.

  That brings us to the second, deeper idea here. Critics of the president can’t see that the giant, lumbering institutions they run—from the Deep State to the New York Times—are the ones not well prepared for the future. The reasons they feel so smug about running the country for decades to come are, in fact, the reasons they will soon lose control of everything.

  They find Trump’s constant battles against the urban elite puzzling. A television celebrity attacking the media? A billionaire attacking billionaires? A Manhattanite in a suit winning over stadiums full of farmers? What they don’t understand is that the masses have been looking for someone to stand up to the powerful, and who else could get away with it? Trump may be the freest man in the world.

  What is the MAGA Doctrine? Bigger is not always better. The role of government should be so small that it is barely noticeable. Yet, over the past several decades it has ballooned into an enormous enterprise thanks to both political parties. Too many institutions created to counter the power of government, from the media to Wall Street, have practically joined forces with it. Fake news is out of control and defense contractors have taken unprecedented advantage of the American taxpayer.

  Protecting individual liberty from the tyrannical forces of government is the idea our nation was built upon. It is the only way to protect the individual’s rights, the family, local churches and schools, and other groups who can’t fight back themselves.

  Be skeptical of everything, especially your government. Ask questions, fight for your rights, and never surrender.

  President Trump has been under attack from the moment he declared he was running. Neither electoral challenges nor impeachment threats can erase the Trump legacy. He has brought about a reawakening. I have actually been a supporter of Donald Trump since well before his 2016 presidential campaign. Way back in 2011, I tweeted to him, “Run Trump Run! Your country needs you!” I guess you could say I was MAGA before it was cool. I was thrilled eight years later when, as president, Donald Trump said, “I want to thank Charlie. He’s an incredible guy. His spirit, his love of this country. He’s done an amazing job.”

  From the first time I briefly met Donald Trump Jr., son of the future president, at the 2016 Republican National Convention to my hosting events through the organization I founded, Turning Point USA (themselves drawing tens of thousands of student activist participants), the past few years have been an amazing journey.

  Now, I should reveal the philosophy motivating it all—and motivating the president.

  Turning Point USA started before the Trump 2016 presidential campaign but exploded in size around that time, as the student activists who make up the group’s ranks began to hope that they might soon have a president who heard their voices. The
group doesn’t exist just to cheer on one politician—our well-attended annual events such as the Teen Student Action Summit, Young Black Leadership Summit, and Young Jewish Leadership Summit attest to that. We are strictly an educational organization dedicated to preaching the values of free markets, the Constitution, and American exceptionalism.

  But Turning Point USA participants, including former Turning Point USA staff member and BLEXIT founder Candace Owens, have a shared philosophical impulse, and a basic political desire, that is roughly summed up in President Trump’s slogan, seen on the ubiquitous red hats of his supporters: Make America Great Again, abbreviated MAGA. As I will explain, MAGA is more than just a slogan. There is a set of principles, however roughly hewn, behind the president’s vision of national renewal—one that is both familiar and eternally in need of clear, firm restatement. The MAGA Doctrine didn’t spring into existence in 2016—because it is the core philosophy by which our whole society has come to be over several centuries.

  I’ve seen President Trump speak in front of high school students, my fellow young conservative activists eager to hear him—and afterward, I often hear students ask me, is there a key book or manifesto I can study to really understand the philosophy behind this burgeoning movement? Behind this rising new sensibility that is partly conservative, partly libertarian, partly populist, partly nationalist, and yet not just an old-fashioned, textbook case of any of these strains of thought? Now there is. I would not presume to speak for the president, but I will try as best I can to explain the old ideas underlying the fresh thinking he brings to a country that desperately needs it.

  One important reason to offer a defense of the MAGA Doctrine as Donald Trump faces reelection is that if those of us who support him do not make our case, our political opponents will not hesitate to “explain” the MAGA Doctrine for us. We know what their description of our philosophy will be: Trump supporters are racist. Trump himself is a fascist. Trump’s policies fly in the face of common sense and shred the Constitution.

  They will claim our thinking is un-American even as they trash the American traditions of liberty and limited government they claim to be defending. These elites deride Trump supporters even as their own philosophy threatens to demolish the very things that made America great.

  What philosophy is considered hip among many people from my millennial generation? Socialism! One of the most disastrous ideologies ever devised. To that rival faction in particular, I offer these stats (some of the many such facts I like to share on my Twitter feed and podcast):

  Two hundred years ago,

  84% of the world lived in extreme poverty. Today, 90% don’t.

  83% didn’t have a basic education. Today, 86% do.

  1% lived in a democracy. Today just 44% don’t.

  The child mortality rate was 43%. Today, it’s 4%.

  All thanks to the free market socialists want to destroy. If anything, economic growth rates and progress have slowed in the past few decades as the welfare state, to which the socialists give all the credit for such advances, grew. The new socialists and Democrats steadfastly ignore these facts. And it is this delusion that makes the MAGA Doctrine more important than ever.

  The MAGA Doctrine is, in part, a path back to the brave, pioneering spirit that made not just survival but explosive growth and visionary changes possible in America. Join me now in tracing that past and pointing the way, with Trump’s help, to an even brighter future.

  Chapter 1

  The Great Disruptor

  Two days after Trump won the 2016 election, I found myself up in famed Trump Tower in New York City, invited by Tommy Hicks of the America First PAC, who is now co-chair of the Republican National Committee. I was in the building in part to see if Donald Trump Jr. had been serious when he said during the campaign that he wanted to help draw attention to my organization, Turning Point USA. Plenty of politicians and their relatives are eager to be your friend during a hard-fought campaign but ditch you—and everything for which you stood—once they’ve secured their victory.

  In fact, Donald Jr. famously said during the campaign, when I offered to help spread the word about his father, that the last thing the campaign needed was another person too young and inexperienced to know much about campaigning. Would he be dismissive now, despite promising to help?

  But Donald Jr. was as good as his word and plugged my efforts by thanking me for our role in his father’s victory. That connection helped spur the amazing growth of Turning Point USA over the past three years. The group had existed for a few years before that, but it was increasingly clear it would be a vehicle for the shifting mood in the country, and in particular the shifting hopes of young people who for so long had been taught the left owns the future and is the only natural vehicle for the rising generations’ political aspirations.

  Don Jr. understood that the next generation matters. All too often our youth are exposed to liberal ideas at school, at college, on television, and online without any counterbalance. Groups such as Turning Point USA provide an alternative. Accompanying Don when he appeared at events with a big Turning Point USA presence would often be his smart and beautiful girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, who always helped get the crowd fired up. A former prosecutor and a natural speaker, Guilfoyle spent a decade hosting the highest-rated shows on Fox News before joining the Trump campaign to assist with the 2020 reelection.

  With the moral support of a few such allies, in the past few years Turning Point USA has gone from a budget of about $2 million per year to $20 million per year, enabling us to have an ongoing presence on some 1,600 campuses, about 70% of them colleges and 30% high schools. Our annual December conference draws about 3,500 students. A big part of that growth has been the general Trump political momentum, but the kind words and helpful advice of Don Jr. and Ivanka in particular have made a palpable difference.

  I would like to think maybe Donald Jr. sees in me and in Turning Point USA something just a little like his dad: a force for disruption, one the old guard resents sometimes because it shows up the hollowness of that old guard’s prior efforts. Like President Trump, we have tried to combat decades of political “conventional wisdom” with common sense.

  I can understand political intellectuals being reluctant to admit that Donald Trump has changed the course of American politics. Big changes in politics are “supposed” to come from longtime party leaders, philosophers, professors, experts, think tanks, elite intellectual cliques. How could one man, even riding an immense (and indeed global) wave of populist sentiment, possibly shatter our longstanding political models and arguably rewrite the political spectrum?

  One key to Trump’s success is that he sensed how terribly out of touch with its constituents the political establishment had become. It’s his job to notice market opportunities, and the two major political parties, foolishly, had created a big one. Think of the way Fox News viewers embraced Trump quicker than the pundits and producers of Fox did. Think of how pained the pundit class was at his verbal sparring with Fox host Megyn Kelly and yet how readily her viewers sided with him. Even at that solidly conservative network, in other words, there was a gap between what the public was thinking and what the experts were saying in their name. The conservative experts—the talking heads—were espousing an old party line that, though it has a venerable history, may not resonate so much anymore.

  The gridlock that the two major parties had fallen into, and the tired repetition in their messages, may have been an inevitable long-term side effect of the majority-rule structure of our democracy. The two parties were not written into the Constitution, and it was several decades before their organization and names were even formal, as opposed to names for loose and shifting coalitions of legislators. But if an absolute majority of electoral college votes is required to win the presidency and winner-take-all has been the norm in both national and state elections, one governing coalition—regardless of its stated ideology—has an incentive to try to win just over 50% of public support, wh
ile the other governing coalition has an incentive to do the same. Eventual gridlock may be the inevitable destiny of any majority-rules democratic system.

  And then the two dominant coalitions, now formalized as two semi-permanent parties—the Democrats and the Republicans in our case—start getting used to each other. Far too used to each other. They squabble. The party with the upper hand and the party with the lower hand in current national affairs shift slightly from time to time, but a 50/50 stalemate starts to seem just, well, natural. Probably permanent.

  Once those two parties get comfortable, resigned to the fact that neither is ever going to completely destroy the other, they can get down to furthering shared interests—“horse trading for votes,” as the saying goes. You give my district something big at the taxpayers’ expense in the next appropriations bill, which my district will thank me for, and I’ll give your district something expensive that they’ll thank you for.

  A two-party cartel, entrenched and self-serving, soon looks like the most natural manifestation of democracy imaginable.

  The heads of those two parties argue when they must, each party hoping to differentiate itself from the other just enough to eke out a victory in the next election—but neither wants to argue for, or if elected institute, change so fundamental that it would destroy all the stuff that the leaders of the two parties have in common with each other and not with you, the general public: unearned use of $4 trillion a year, the power to regulate, and the endless attention of fawning lobbyists and Washington powerbrokers.

  Both parties, to varying degrees, have favored a large welfare/regulatory state and constant military interventions overseas. We see each of the two parties talking to itself, regurgitating the same rhetoric decade after decade, and changing essentially nothing about governance itself aside from letting spending levels constantly inch slightly upward, debt constantly deepen, and the military, frustratingly, bloat and age at the same time.