The MAGA Doctrine Page 10

  His idea of fun is celebrating the American flag. Sounds good to me. If that’s his idea of mischief, let him be mischievous. It sure beats burning the flag.

  If Trump is smart enough to recognize that the values embodied in that flag explain the incredible wealth and happiness of the United States, I’d say he’s no dope or reckless redneck. He looks to me more like a stable genius.

  Pride in the United States used to be something that both the Republicans and Democrats had in common.

  By today’s standards, President John F. Kennedy sounded like a conservative when he said, “We dare not forget that we are the heirs of that first revolution”—and Kennedy even sounded a little like Trump when he said, “The American, by nature, is optimistic. He is experimental, an inventor and a builder who builds best when called upon to build greatly.”

  When Kennedy repeatedly used the old adage that “a rising tide lifts all boats,” he was not calling for a complete repudiation of the prior American fashion of doing business. He was not saying, like Democratic representative Ocasio-Cortez in early 2019, that slight improvements on current American policy would be only “10% better than garbage.” He would not likely have laughed, like Representative Ilhan Omar in a 2013 interview, at the fact that people say the name al-Qaeda with a tone of menace, whereas “you don’t say America with this intensity,” as if—funny thing—to suggest there is something far more dreadful about al-Qaeda.

  On the contrary, Kennedy in his inaugural address reaffirmed to the world the special role of the United States, saying, “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

  (At the same time, to his credit, Kennedy was not an enthusiast of all military intervention, once remarking, according to a source in his administration quoted by the New York Times, that he “wanted to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds” because of its foreign meddling. There are echoes of that sentiment in Trump’s wrangles with the Deep State, as he calls it, about which more later.)

  Part of what makes the United States great is its capacity to examine and correct its mistakes, to grow. In fact, the right to free speech—and the robust debate it allows about how best to improve this country—is one of America’s greatest institutions. But in the six decades since Kennedy’s time, a radical, partly post-colonial strain of leftist criticism has arisen that at times treats the United States as we have known it more like a foe than like a beloved parent in need of healing. That specific strain of thought, more subversive than constructive, does have its ultimate roots outside the United States, and it is antithetical to our own philosophical roots.

  One of those revolutions I mentioned earlier that took some of its inspiration from ours was the French Revolution of 1789, and at the time the revolutionaries of those two nations and others saw themselves as natural allies, but with the benefit of historical hindsight, America’s 1776 and France’s 1789 look in some ways like opposites. America’s revolution was not so much a break with all prior history as an affirmation of the best lessons learned from that history—and explicitly from British history, even as our country declared its independence from Britain. The English legal tradition was rooted in the rights of the individual and limits on the power of the state and sovereign.

  France, at first glance, appeared at once more optimistic and far more pessimistic. The French revolutionaries could not just announce to the world, as America effectively did, that it was a commercial republic separated by an ocean from its former monarch. Monarchy and aristocracy were deeply rooted in every aspect of French society and would not easily be removed. The French revolutionaries, who should perhaps have compromised and remained, as France had briefly been, a constitutional monarchy, decided to tear out the old regime root and branch.

  Monarchs, aristocrats, their sympathizers, anyone suspected of sympathizing with them, and, in time, any among the revolutionaries who too loudly questioned the direction of the revolution, could be sentenced to death by guillotine. That viciousness—the sense of a revolution as a sort of purifying fire—is a zeal rarely seen in US history or British history, unless one counts the current fervor of the left’s so-called social justice warriors, who do sometimes beat, egg, or Molotov-cocktail their political enemies, though for now they more often just strive to purge their enemies from social media platforms and campus speaking engagements.

  The difference between the American Revolution and the French Revolution is the respect for individual liberty.

  About forty thousand people were murdered in the French Revolution, sometimes called the Terror. Naturally, the left claims they don’t want to repeat the bad parts of revolutionary history—they never do—but the French Revolution was a model for later violent revolutions. While the relatively sedate revolutions going on in the United States and, a century earlier, England itself took their inspiration from individualist philosophers such as John Locke (and coincided with the rise of free-market economics as espoused by thinkers such as Scotland’s Adam Smith), the more sweeping and bloody French Revolution took some of its inspiration from a different strain of the Enlightenment intellectual era: the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

  Rousseau, sounding like a clear forebear of today’s leftists, earnestly longed to correct all of society’s inequities, beginning almost literally at birth, replacing the immobilizing swaddling clothes and rote educations inflicted (as Rousseau saw it) on helpless children with nature-worshipping, free-spirit-encouraging educations that sound quite pleasant until you hear Rousseau’s stealthy hope for those educations: remolding young minds to make them conform to the “General Will” of society, never questioning it—and coming to regard society as a single, unified organism explicitly resembling a phalanx of ancient Spartan soldiers.

  A nightmare by Trump-era conservative standards, Rousseau was a little like the ultimate left-wing professor: teaching you just enough to convince you to submit yourself to domination by a super-state. Non, s’il vous plait.

  It is no accident, as the Marxists would say, that revolutions taking their cues from Rousseau or economic radical Karl Marx would place such an emphasis on denigrating the past. They intended to build things radically new, quite possibly brutal and imperfect, and it wouldn’t do to have people pining for the way things used to be. And, after all, the old way was shot through with injustice.

  People had to be persuaded, like citizens of Cambodia in the 1970s when the communist Khmer Rouge regime killed nearly a third of the population, that almost everything about the old way of life was evil and had to be eradicated. In short, people had to feel shame about every aspect of their lives before the new, revolutionary regime, like cult leaders, could be entrusted with total power to make things anew.

  That bloody-minded fanaticism had never quite come to the United States, but I fear the constant guilt-trips of today’s left, and the constant harping by college professors on all the reasons that mainstream American society should feel guilty, are ways of affecting a soft version of those total revolutions from history—of weakening our resolve to oppose today’s anti-American revolutionaries. Constant charges of racism, for example, not just against the president but against almost anyone who dares to honor a literary or philosophical great from the Western canon, or to take inspiration from the music or art of a foreign land without getting the left’s permission, or to make an un-PC joke online somewhere, leave malleable young people, in particular, frightened that they will cause outrage if left to make their own decisions.

  Free speech is deeply American, and these debates are well worth having—as long as the left doesn’t use the institutions they control to punish anyone who debates them.

  The temptation grows to let the new revolutionaries call the shots. It’s less of a struggle, even if giving up that struggle means part of the American spirit dies.

&nb
sp; By contrast, even President Trump’s old foe Hillary Clinton would sound a note of traditional American optimism (albeit yoked to Progressive plans) when she said things in her speeches such as “America’s best days are still ahead.” Would it be heresy for me to say that sounds a little like the futurist sentiment Trump sounds when he says we’ll “Make America Great Again”?

  The new guilt-trippers don’t want to add a few flourishes to the vibrant America mosaic. They think that Americans, especially those from marginal populations, got shafted by the whole project that is America. This nation is like one ongoing crime in their minds, and it has to be stopped, the perpetrators punished, and a strict rehabilitative regimen imposed (by them).

  It sounds cornball, but I’m not ashamed to be an American. I’m not ashamed of America. And I can tell President Trump feels much the same way. Whatever else the MAGA Doctrine may be, it is surely a prescription for making America more fully itself, more recognizable to those who are already this nation’s friends, not some invention of the latter-day Rousseaus and Marxes.

  Chapter 9

  An American Great

  Like many of his political peers, Donald Trump is rich, estimated to be worth about $3 billion, according to Forbes magazine.

  It is hinted in his opponents’ rhetoric from time to time that there is something scandalous or hypocritical about this, since he talks like a man of the people, eats food from McDonald’s, and so forth. But he has made no secret of graduating from the prestigious Wharton business school or making his fortune by going into the real estate business that his father, Fred Trump, went in before him.

  One does not as often hear, say, former senator and secretary of state John Kerry’s credentials as a spokesman for the American people questioned because of his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry’s, fortune, estimated by Forbes at $1 billion. Former senator and vice president Joe Biden talks about his middle-class origins—his dad having gone from oil-family wealth early in life to struggling as a used car salesman during Joe’s childhood—but talks less often about the over $15 million he’s made in just the short time since the Obama administration ended, according to his tax returns.

  Maybe it’s a good sign—a sign of rapidly growing wealth in the United States—that instead of the left being made up of poor people condemning millionaires, it’s now made up of millionaires and billionaires condemning multi-billionaires. (Even socialist senator Bernie Sanders famously dropped the “millionaires” part from his angry mentions of “millionaires and billionaires” around the time he became a millionaire himself.)

  I hope none of them forget their roots.

  Trump’s real financial crime, as it were, in the eyes of his peers may be that he sounds to their ears nouveau-riche. As he said to a huge crowd in Fargo, “We got more money, we got more brains, we got better houses and apartments, we got nicer boats, we’re smarter than they are, and they say they’re the elite.”

  The president added, “You’re the elite; we’re the elite.”

  He’s rich, but he’s not interested in pretending to be an aristocrat. Instead, he looks like a man who’s doing something very American: He’s having fun.

  It may be his greatest strength. If you look at every presidential contest since the rise of television, it’s easy to argue the nomination and the presidency went, every time, to the candidate who looks like they had the most fun.

  We can debate his political philosophy and secret, innermost psychological motivations endlessly, but let’s take a moment to marvel at the things about Trump that are most visible and understand why people like them.

  Trump has been a larger-than-life personality for decades. He took the time to have funny on-air conversations with radio shock jock Howard Stern. He not only ran beauty pageants but has a stunning ex-model wife. Here is a man who could remain the aloof, cold CEO if he so chose and yet has been willing to throw down in the professional wrestling ring in his numerous WWE appearances, pretending to throw punches and forcibly shave wrestling mogul Vince McMahon. (Is anyone surprised Trump has theatrical tendencies? For many on the left, his association with WWE may be the thing they hate the most.) He is entertaining and likes to have a good time. He takes palpable delight in things like having a helicopter instead of treating such things as just a business necessity.

  How can you look on and not sympathize? He’s doing the things so many Americans dream of doing. Trump is fun.

  One of Trump’s fellow New York/New Jersey area celebrities, author Fran Lebowitz, famously and rather insightfully said, “He’s a poor person’s idea of a rich person. They see him, they think, ‘If I were rich, I’d have a fabulous tie like that.’” Critics repeated the line as if it were damaging: Trump the rube, Trump the tacky. Who lines his walls with gold, I mean, really? But the critics were inadvertently reinforcing the idea that Trump is not one of them. He’s one of the regular people, the masses over whom Trump’s elite critics want to rule. Maybe if they were thinking clearly, the critics could have made Trump sound like evidence of capitalism’s excess. They could have tried to out-populist Trump.

  Instead, they kept sounding more snotty than he ever does. They thought they understood both wealth and politics—the private sector and the public—better than Trump, but their seeming mastery became a twin liability. They alienated the general public they had so long pretended to be shepherding to a Progressive paradise. When Hillary Clinton tried to label a few hateful Trump supporters “deplorables,” Trump supporters got the underlying message clearly enough, as did many moderates: She’s looking down on us all.

  Only a candidate as inept as Hillary Clinton would show up in a coal state like Kentucky and declare that she would put a lot of coal miners out of work. Only an elitist Massachusetts senator like John Kerry would flaunt his windsurfing while speaking fluent French on the shores of ritzy Monaco. Do these politicians want to make us think of Uncle Sam or Marie Antoinette? And for a long time, both parties have displayed their elite status. The Bushes were proud residents of Kennebunkport, students of Yale, members—like many politicians—of elite secret societies. The American middle class, needless to say, has trouble relating to this.

  My good friend Donald Trump Jr. often tells a story of how he would spend weekends with his father on construction sites. The elder Trump would inspect every inch, nook, and cranny. He would even pick up dropped nails from construction sites. Everything counted toward the bottom line. So while the Romneys showed off their dancing horses (not a joke, look it up), George H. W. Bush sped around in a boat in Maine, or John McCain lost track of how many homes he owned while running for president, it was the billionaire from New York who picked up dropped nails and ate McDonald’s who related more than anyone to everyday Americans.

  That is why he’s in the White House and most of the elitist snobs are not.

  Some in the media and online have pushed a false narrative that my father, Robert Kirk, designed Trump Tower in New York City. That is untrue, and I’ve never said it. True, in the 1980s, my father was an entry-level architect, and his firm was involved with the construction of various properties, including Trump Tower. My father interacted with Donald Trump on a handful of occasions, and I remember hearing about Trump’s attention to detail and him being a visionary. Today, I work with the president directly on multiple projects. Several times a year, Turning Point USA is invited to the White House, and I can attest to his same focus on detail and his visionary thinking. But there is no connection between my relationship to the president and my father’s. Architecture is Dad’s department, politics mine. Both those fields and others have been shaped by the recurring figure of Donald Trump.

  Though Trump had famously voiced opinions on politics since the 1980s, in interviews with Oprah Winfrey and others, you sensed that he was quite pleased being above the fray. He said time and again that he might run for president if it appeared the country needed him and if he was sure he could win, conditions he didn’t think were quite met until the 2016 campaign
.

  “If I did decide to do it,” he told Winfrey in 1988, “I would say that I would have a hell of a chance of winning.”

  If his interest in politics were just a big publicity stunt, you’d think his views would shift around randomly over the years, but despite some changes in emphasis, certain recognizable themes keep popping up—including his reluctance to wield political power, an admirable trait. He told Winfrey he was hesitant to run. “I probably wouldn’t want to rule it out totally because I really am tired of seeing what’s happening with this country, how we’re really making other people live like kings, and we’re not,” he said.

  In other words: stop being taken advantage of and put America first.

  Does a political message of that magnitude and seriousness jibe with spending the 1980s creating a network of lavish casinos sporting names like the Trump Plaza and the Taj Mahal? It does if you think American success looks like people enjoying themselves. At least part of the American story is that, and much of the world loves us for it. They are less enamored of our war-making and our puritanical tendencies—such as our anti-drug crusade that sends helicopters on crop-destroying missions far beyond our borders.

  For most of the past century, the Republicans have been playing the part of hectoring moralists. Trump reversed that, revealing what young conservatives already knew: The future of the Democrat Party is whiners and killjoys. The future of the Republican Party is winners.