The MAGA Doctrine Read online

  Americans themselves dream of “livin’ large,” blowing off steam, throwing a party, and on rare occasions, striking it rich. This country is its mansions and casinos in addition to its churches, malls, corner offices, and suburban homes. We’re eclectic. We’re not contradictory or losing our sense of purpose by being all of these things. That’s America—and Trump is America. Him becoming president is as natural (and as horrifying to the cultural elite) as Reagan becoming president. Reagan was a cross between the cowboy sensibility of the real West and the glamour of Hollywood, with its re-creation of the Old West. The left hated it, but that veneer was accompanied by real, solid conservative principles.

  It makes just as much sense for Trump’s populist brand of conservatism to be yoked to larger-than-life activities such as building, gambling, wrestling, and, yes, self-promotion. Every American is in advertising, in some sense—and that’s OK. It may not look like the quiet, self-effacing Christianity of the Pilgrims or the Amish, it’s true, but it’s not so out of step with the optimistic, success-oriented message of Trump’s childhood pastor, Norman Vincent Peale, the author of The Power of Positive Thinking. One book likely influenced by that tract, though it rarely gets touted as a religious tract, is Trump’s Trump: The Art of the Deal. (Maybe one day it will. Trump himself joked that it was his second-favorite book after the Bible. His coauthor, by contrast, now disavows the book. Trump is a controversial figure, needless to say.)

  The shallow way to look at the deal-making side of Trump would be to dismiss him as greedy—believing the worst interpretations of his charitable giving as well—and to see him as a vivid example of America’s worst excesses. That attitude is easy to adopt if you view all economics from the Marxian perspective in which one person’s financial gain must be someone else’s loss. If that were how economics worked, then indeed a great many people must have lost from Trump’s financial activities. But the Marxian seesaw description of economics was never accurate.

  To the extent that trade is voluntary—you want something, and I am willing to sell it to you—it’s always a plus, or as economists such as Friedman and Mises would say, a mutually beneficial exchange. Not all trades go perfectly or as planned, and many are muted in their benefits by the involvement of nonvoluntary, governmental factors (subsidies, burdensome regulations, etc.), but to the extent everyone involved knew what they were getting into and traded to become a little better off without harming unwitting third parties, the world became a bit better off. In that sense, every deal is a good deal.

  And despite decades of left-wing economic propaganda, most Americans, in both parties, seem to understand that. Yahoo Finance reports a survey showing 59% of the public supports the administration’s pro-business agenda, and 54% say the businesses with which they work have benefited. America’s not turning communist just yet.

  Of course, people of my generation, younger millennials, are sometimes put off by any hint of “social conservatism”—religiosity, culture war, what they perceive as excess machismo. And the left tries to paint Trump as a blinkered right-wing culture warrior as surely as they try to paint him as a heartless Dickensian capitalist. But how convincing is the charge, really, aside from what are deliberately provocative tweets and wisecracks?

  The man is a New Yorker, after all.

  Back in 2000, at the very time Trump was briefly trying to look respectable enough to be worthy of a possible Reform Party presidential nomination, he famously participated in a videotaped sketch for an annual New York media event known as the Inner Circle Show in which he groped then-mayor Rudy Giuliani, who appeared in drag. I’m not saying this is in itself qualification for higher office—and I understand there will be some hard-core social conservatives out there who find such behavior offensive even if obviously done in jest—but I think it’s another indicator we’re dealing with a man who knows how to laugh at himself and laugh at others without hating them. He’s still got Giuliani on his team two decades later.

  Whatever else his years in showbiz, casinos, and the rough-and-tumble of New York business did, they didn’t produce a humorless, tyrannical ogre, however much it might help the leftists’ cause if they had. Most of America keeps laughing with Trump and at the left, even with most of the media trying desperately to make it the other way around.

  Who would have imagined, a generation ago when the left’s main target on the right was the religiosity of groups such as the Moral Majority, that the day would come when young people, in particular, would think of the Republican president as the one who’s in on the joke, the one who understands Twitter and memes, the one who knows how to loosen up a little instead of sounding as if doomsday is right around the corner?

  Bizarrely, both Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders may be faring well in the Democratic primary polls for 2020 in part because they resemble Trump a little, not because they oppose him (though they do). With Biden’s goofy gaffes and Bernie’s rabble-rousing yells, at least the two of them sound a little like they’re enjoying themselves. You look at the rest of the Democratic lineup, and you worry that they could almost take lessons from Hillary Clinton on how to have fun, and that’s a scary thought.

  At the same time, Trump has a sense of duty to something larger than himself. He takes the important things seriously. If he were enamored of power or attention for its own sake, rather than justice, wouldn’t he delight in declaring more wars?

  If Trump loved authority for its own sake, wouldn’t he turn a blind eye to foreign regimes’ abuse of their people instead of pushing for the legalization of homosexuality in several truly authoritarian nations? That’s a push for which he and his ambassadors get no credit from the left, of course, just as the left rarely notes that Trump was the first president to enter office already endorsing gay marriage, a position the Clintons and Obama only gradually adopted, when it was politically advantageous to do so.

  Outside of politics and away from the levers of governmental power, people can continue to call for saintly restraint and decorum, of course.

  Overall, Trump looks more like a part of his age cohort—an early baby boomer—than some of his boomer and boomer-influenced critics are probably comfortable admitting. If he has regrets about his own colorful life, then, fittingly, they are likely to be part of a big tapestry, like Sinatra’s, that overall contains enough amazing victories to justify the missteps.

  And what key attitudes shine through?

  He’s anti-establishment, you say?

  He’s anti-war?

  He’s got an irreverent sense of humor?

  He loves liberty, man?

  He’s letting it all hang out?

  Sounds like a boomer after all. I will not insult a great president by suggesting he sounds like a wild hippie, since that’s obviously not quite right in describing a suit-wearing, drug-avoiding businessman who went into his dad’s business and involves his kids in his own activities. But he sounds more like a man who’s coming to set us free than a man who wants to lock us all up.

  Chapter 10

  The Justice Reformer

  One of the most important laws in the history of criminal justice reform has been achieved on Trump’s watch. It was surprising to people who don’t understand the MAGA Doctrine and its focus on helping powerless people who are up against the powerful.

  Even the New York Times and CNN had to give some credit where it was due on that one, and a big portion of the credit goes to Trump advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner.

  As CNN reported, “The bill’s passage is also a win for Kushner, whom the bill’s supporters credit with working behind the scenes to steer the legislation past significant opposition within the Trump administration and past shifting coalitions on Capitol Hill.”

  There had long been recognition on both sides of the political aisle that the war against drugs, whether a good idea or a bad one, doesn’t seem to be working. Furthermore, haphazard attempts to create rational, predictable penalties for drug-related crimes had merely produced inflexi
ble “mandatory minimum” sentences that were often denounced for their severity by judges from the bench even as those judges were imposing the sentences.

  Compounding those problems, the ostensibly rational sentencing schedules were sometimes in practice quite arbitrary—months for powdered cocaine and years for rock-like “crack,” to take the most notorious example.

  During the Obama administration, some twenty or so would-be reformers within government met in hopes of coming up with a criminal justice reform plan, from leftists skeptical of law enforcement to right-wingers including Ted Cruz skeptical of government in general. Obama hoped for an omnibus reform bill that would fix all of America’s big criminal justice problems simultaneously, combining the best plans from everyone involved, though legislators cautioned him that a plan that ambitious was unlikely to advance in Congress. And most of it didn’t.

  It’s an immense historic irony that a populist president often accused of being an authoritarian—overly sympathetic to police officers—managed, by contrast, to push through a big criminal justice reform bill, complete with the endorsement of a couple of celebrities such as Kim Kardashian, in part by being more pragmatic, more realistic about the issue than his predecessors.

  The First Step Act, as it’s rightly called—since it is just the beginning of some of those reforms that everyone from Obama to Cruz wanted—was passed because of President Trump and advisors such as Kushner focusing on exactly the sort of marginal citizens the Trump movement is falsely accused of ignoring. The First Step Act gives nonviolent offenders increased ability to earn days off their sentences through good behavior, increasing the odds that they will be more easily acclimated to civilized behavior when back in the outside world (the full name of the bill, Congress craving acronyms, is the Formerly Incarcerated Reenter Society Transformed Safely Transitioning Every Person Act).

  You have probably heard a great deal about the conditions in illegal immigrant detention centers (barely any different from the conditions there under Obama), but you probably haven’t heard a word from the mainstream media about Trump pushing this law that guarantees female prisoners feminine hygiene products, limits the use of physical restraints on pregnant prisoners, makes the reduction in the crack/powder sentencing disparity retroactive, and mandates training in conflict de-escalation for guards. Signed into law in December 2018, First Step also gives more compassionate leave time to terminally ill prisoners and urges the geographic placement of prisoners close to family, again increasing the odds that they will be acclimated to a normal support network when reintegrated into society.

  There is an impulse, often found among traditional conservatives, to think any step in the direction of kindness or leniency toward prisoners is a mistake—softness masquerading as mercy. But assuming prisoners are not simply being executed or put away for life (and there are very, very few prisoners for whom that is the case), it is only rational to be concerned about what their lives, and their states of mind, will be when they have done their time and exited the prison system. It doesn’t do innocent, law-abiding citizens any good if prisons are merely a system for turning criminals into even more violent, even angrier, even more dysfunctional members of society. Easing them back in helps everyone.

  Consider what an embarrassment the First Step Act should be for the liberal establishment.

  Democratic presidential candidates for 2020 want you to take it for granted they’re the compassionate ones, Trump the heartless “law-and-order” candidate from a party that uses the drug war as an excuse to harass minorities. But look at the track records of Senators Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Biden pushed for harsher sentences in the late 1980s and criticized then–president George H. W. Bush for not going far enough, saying Bush’s plan “doesn’t include enough police officers to catch the violent thugs, not enough prosecutors to convict them, not enough judges to sentence them, and not enough prison cells to put them away for a long time.”

  Biden would spend much of the 1990s making up for what he saw as the drug war’s softness by using his position as head of the Senate Judiciary Committee to push longer sentences and the creation of more prisons. It is in no small part thanks to Joe Biden that the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, with about two million of the Earth’s total prison population of around nine million located here. About 0.7% of the US population is in prison.

  That’s about twice the rate of imprisonment in Russia and five times the rate in China, which together with the United States account for about half the world’s prison population, one American statistic that shouldn’t evoke pride, whether you think our problem is too many arrests or too many badly behaved people, or both.

  As catalogued by an April 25, 2019, Vox.com article, Biden’s record includes shepherding 1980s and ’90s laws that expanded the use of civil asset forfeiture (seizing the property of people caught with even small amounts of drugs on the assumption whatever they own might be the fruits of drug profits), increased the powder/crack disparity (increasing the racial disparity in sentencing as a side effect), and increased prison funding in order to allow for an expanded prison population. Biden has sent mixed messages since, apologizing for some effects of the laws, promoting counseling for ex-prisoners, and beginning in 2010 to work with then–President Obama to reduce the powder/crack disparity Biden had helped create.

  But he still touted his tough-on-crime record on the campaign trail. Vox quotes Washington Post columnist Radley Balko’s conclusion that “The martial/incarceral state has had no greater friend in Washington over the last 35 years than Joe Biden.”

  Kamala Harris, by contrast, has brought about fewer changes in her role in the Senate. Her opposition to unreasonable bail requirements is an admirable exception—and, to her credit, she has argued in favor of laws allowing prisoners to get high school diplomas—but she was an extremely aggressive drug warrior and prosecutor during her time before that as California’s state attorney general, even allowing the state attorneys working under her to fight to keep people in prison after they were proven innocent, if they had missed filing deadlines for relevant legal forms. She also defended law enforcement officials who got convictions by withholding evidence or falsifying confessions. It is terrifying to think that about an eighth of the US prison population lives in a state with such a coldly bureaucratic conception of justice. (She may have had coldly careerist notions about sex back in the ’90s as well, since she notoriously slept with San Francisco assembly speaker Willie Brown, who was still married at the time, as he appointed her to a series of well-paid city positions.)

  It is hard to imagine someone like Harris becoming a merciful president, if American citizens find themselves running afoul of overly harsh regulations. As for Biden, he’ll shift with the political winds as he always has, talking like a champion of desegregation today but opposing busing of students to integrate racially homogeneous school districts four decades ago. Harris flip-flops as well, sometimes making it difficult to determine what her position is on a given law. She at times opposed California’s three-strikes-you’re-out (for life) laws—but then again, she wanted to jail parents if their kids skipped school.

  She’s not shy about coming down on people with the hammer of government. Is there any person who better represents the opposite of what the MAGA Doctrine dictates?

  Four more years of President Trump looks like the humane choice. With a Republican Congress, while he had one, he got more done on criminal justice reform than the Democrats, who claim to be such bleeding hearts. (Trump is capable of working across the aisle, though, and his call for a Second Step Act to continue the cause of criminal justice reform helped inspire Senator Cory Booker’s introduction of a bill by that name designed to ease restrictions on employment for ex-convicts. Productive ex-prisoners are less likely to re-offend than ones who are left on the margins of society with no means of support.) Best of all, Trump appears to understand the distinction between violent and nonviolent offenders, which i
s more than can be said for most politicians. Great countries don’t usually incarcerate people who haven’t hurt anyone.

  As a New Yorker, Trump may well have learned from the unfortunate experience of the Rockefeller Drug Laws, which replaced the experience and judgment of judges with a table of mandatory sentences, creating a model soon used throughout the country, ostensibly for making the drug war more rational and predictable. Instead, even in the face of changing scientific evidence about drugs and the potential for treatment over imprisonment, mandatory minimum rules enshrined harsh penalties as if in stone.

  We’ve reached the point at which the drug war itself has done about as much damage as drugs. President Trump reminds us it is still possible to temper justice with mercy, to the benefit of everyone involved. A president who gets called racist by the media nearly every day has worked hard to undo some of the overexpansion of the prison population—which happened in part under President Bill Clinton in the ’90s as he strove to prove that liberals can be as “serious” about crime-fighting as law-and-order conservatives. Yet Bill Clinton got rewarded with the affectionate joke—started by Toni Morrison—that he was in some ways America’s “first black president” because of his humble beginnings, love of fast food, and betrayal by the donor class.

  If Trump increased the number of young, black males behind bars as much as Clinton, Biden, and Harris have, they’d say it was evidence he’s Hitler reincarnated.

  Just as it would be simplistic to treat Trump’s views on military action as merely “anti-war” or “pro-war,” since he is trying to be selective and smart about the use of the military, it is wrong to treat his attitude toward crime (or any politician’s attitude toward crime, really) as one of “toughness” or “leniency.” The question is which crimes, which responses.

  Trump sounds tough to the point of ruthlessness in his critics’ minds, but he wants results. You see it not only in his periodically updated agenda but in the appointments he makes. If former attorney general Jeff Sessions had developed a foolproof plan to achieve the sweeping victories in the drug war that eluded all of his predecessors, Trump might well be in favor of it.