The MAGA Doctrine Read online

  Medical regulations are loosened to allow terminally ill patients to try experimental procedures if they so choose, approvals for affordable generic drugs are accelerated, and employers are permitted to create more flexible and varied health plans. Veterans’ medical conditions are processed faster than ever before.

  The president entered the Oval Office already a supporter of gay marriage, the first US president of whom that is true.

  Two solidly conservative new Supreme Court justices are confirmed.

  Over five million new jobs are created, a half million in manufacturing and over a hundred thousand in oil and natural gas transportation.

  95% of manufacturers say they are optimistic the country is headed in the right direction.

  If our hypothetical President Hillary Rodham Clinton achieved all this, how might the press react? Even if the press disagreed with some of her policies and rhetoric, isn’t it likely they would talk about her as competent, respectable, perhaps even an inspiration? How many schools and airports named after her would we have already? They might even call her track record “great,” or at least acknowledge that she gets things done and knows how to deal with Capitol Hill. She would be praised as well by most academics and surely by advocates for the advancement of women.

  Obviously and thankfully, Hillary Clinton never became president, but all of the achievements described above are real—and are the handiwork of the person who became president on January 20, 2017: Donald J. Trump. (Many of these items come from the Washington Examiner’s tally of Trump successes.)

  Most of Washington can’t comprehend how this could have happened. They’re as perplexed by his achievements as they are by his giant crowds. They think they know what competence looks like: a four-hundred-dollar haircut and consultants telling you how not to make news. Never be funny. Take yourself too seriously for that. Meet as often as possible with other leaders who also have spent their careers trying not to generate headlines.

  Where average Americans see in Trump an effort to restore greatness through opportunity and prosperity, the elite see someone alarming. If you can succeed in politics without the help of hundreds of lawyers, lobbyists, and reporters propping you up, an awful lot of members of the elite could be on the verge of losing their jobs.

  However, the caricature of Trump as operating without a philosophical foundation is also wrong. Trump usually operates on what might be called instincts rather than detailed manifestos like those favored by some of his critics. But Trump’s instincts did not arise in a vacuum. Like all Americans, he inherited a tradition that conveys the norms that have enabled us to flourish.

  A lifetime as an entrepreneur taught him more about economics—and about the threat posed by an intrusive regulatory state—than is known by a fashionable socialist such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, despite the pride she takes in her economics degree.

  He has lived in New York City at times of comfort and times of rampant crime, and he understands the importance of preventing violence, whether from Latin American drug cartels or radical Muslim terrorists. Most Americans understand that it is those profoundly decent impulses, not xenophobia, that inspire his sometimes harsh-sounding rhetoric about the need to protect our borders and crack down on real threats.

  He understands the failings of the media because he was a media star. He understands the evil nature of some CEOs because he went to Wharton and has rubbed elbows with those people ever since. The scariest thing about him to the elite is that he has been inside with them, and he’s exposing their secrets to the outside.

  If he often sounds dismissive or impatient, it is not because he can brook no opposition but because, just like many of us, he is tired of seeing American ideals torn down. Unlike so many of his foes on the left, he’s very grateful to this country for making possible all of his success. He’s not a barbarian at the gates, to be fended off by the New York Times or the Ivy League. Trump is a man already comfortably at home in America, at home with its people and its institutions. And the people sense that. They know he is one of them, not just another Washingtonian like all the ones he defeated and defied to become president.

  If the establishment senses in our times something akin to ancient Rome, I suggest they look to a figure very different from Nero for Trump comparisons. They should look a century earlier, to the influential orator Cicero.

  In a fashion eerily similar to the war against Trump waged by the American so-called Deep State (the government’s permanent bureaucracy and more shadowy agencies, who sometimes act in defiance of the popular will), Cicero was declared an “enemy of the state” by Rome in the first century BC, not because he was a law-breaking hooligan but, on the contrary, because he warned that Rome was losing its way, ceasing to be great because it was straying from its long-held republican principles (republican with a small r, meaning characterized by sober deliberation, civic participation, virtue, and self-rule by the people).

  Cicero came from a wealthy family, and through his oratory became what we might now dub a major media star in ancient Rome. He could have enjoyed a life of luxury and avoided conflict but regarded his foray into politics, necessitated by his sense of civic duty, as his greatest achievement.

  He spent much of that political career combating conspiracies to overthrow the republic, in a fashion that might well be dismissed as paranoid by the complacent elitists of our own day. His fears were proven tragically correct, though, as Julius Caesar (sometimes talked about now as if he were the very pinnacle of Roman achievement but in truth a dictator who was the death knell of the Republic) pushed Rome in the direction of empire. Cicero himself ended up executed by government soldiers, his head and hands later displayed on Rome’s central public speaking platform, a final taunt to Mark Antony—one of Caesar’s allies, and after Caesar’s assassination, part of Rome’s ruling triumvirate.

  When Trump-hating media star and CNN hostess/comedienne/filth-purveyor Kathy Griffin held up a fake bloodied Donald Trump head in a photo (subsequently being let go by CNN because of it), she may have been closer to the Rome-like truth than she realized—not because Trump is a dictator deserving death but because he, like Cicero, is targeted by powerful forces who mistake themselves for the Republic’s protectors but are in fact in the process of destroying it.

  Trump’s battle, then, is not just a squabble with a few well-meaning, present-day liberal critics. He represents a centuries-long struggle within Western civilization between the hope of freedom and self-rule by the common people and the continual assertion of aristocratic privilege by those who think they know better and thus should have power. As long as Trump opposes those deeply entrenched forces, who not so secretly view America’s Founding Fathers with almost as much suspicion and contempt as they view Trump, it will not matter how impressive his practical achievements in the economic or foreign policy realms are: They will still be denigrated and cast in a bad light because he is a threat to their own rule.

  I have spent time with the Trump family, and I know President Trump is not a creature of whim or mere temper tantrums. He is guided by a faith that most Americans seemed to share until very recently. Our forefathers founded this country on sound principles, including standing up for the freedom of the individual. These principles with ancient roots have made something wonderful and new possible upon the face of the Earth, a freedom and prosperity never before known.

  The smallest units of society—the individual, the family, the small business, the little towns, the local church and PTA—need to be protected with everything we’ve got.

  When the noise of the current generation of pundits and analysts has long since faded away and historians assess the Trump presidency, I think they will see the broad strokes that his critics wish to deny. They will see the love of country, the defense of freedom, and the irreverence toward the false pieties of our day (and the elites who peddle them). They will also see a record of promises kept, after decades of Americans passively and glumly accepting t
hat politics is all lies and false hopes.

  Some of those future historians will be conservatives like the young people from Turning Point USA, which went in a few short years from being just an idea with barely any funding—a notion to connect rising high school and teen conservative activists into a supportive national network—to one of the most influential youth organizations in the world, hosting a speech by President Trump himself at our July 2019 conference. Those kids aren’t fooled by the establishment narrative, and they’re creating a better one.

  The list of Trump achievements I noted is just the beginning of the greatness ahead. The MAGA Doctrine will continue to guide him through his second term, and will likely affect every president following him.

  His critics have nothing to offer as inspiring and optimistic, as freedom-fostering and deeply humane. They will shift with the prevailing political winds, praising peace one day and unnecessary wars the next, choice one day and the heavy hand of regulation the next. Trump will stay true to his core principles.

  We were constantly told in the three decades after the Cold War that the culture of Washington, D.C., couldn’t be changed: The welfare state is permanent. Regulations must never be rolled back. Defense contractors keep getting their money no matter how many wars are declared over or almost over.

  If only some outsider would shake things up, they’d say. Maybe a Ross Perot. Maybe an intellectual affiliated with neither major party. Maybe a mainstream politician rebranding himself as a “maverick.” Maybe Barack Obama, with what he claimed would be an administration without ties to lobbyists.

  As Politico put it, describing their own 2014 review of Trump’s predecessor, “The Obama administration has hired more than 70 previously registered lobbyists . . . and watched many officials circle through that revolving door, as Obama’s lobbying policy was weakened by major loopholes and a loss of focus over time. What’s more, the current laws around lobbying, which the administration measures were built on, simply ignore many instances observers would regard as lobbying—and the White House never pressed for changes to those laws.”

  Now look at the panic once an outsider—who did not regard the culture of Washington with cautious respect—came along. You’d think Trump was a horde of invading Vandals from the way the media, politicians, and D.C. interest groups reacted to his election.

  Was it because they opposed his ideas? Or was it because they knew he was irreverent enough and courageous enough to try changing Washington’s ways—the codes of conduct, such as doing special favors for donors, that everyone lamented but no one really wanted to see changed because they were all benefiting from? Was Washington fearful Trump would make things worse or that he’d expose their past inaction and lamentations as phony, a little like Hollywood occasionally shedding crocodile tears over the world being too looks-obsessed and superficial, without for a moment wanting to operate in any other kind of world?

  You won’t know if you can fix Washington politics if you never really try. How many individuals have run and gotten elected to Congress, only to turn into the swamp creatures they led us to believe they would oppose? Champions of “smaller government” have grown government at an unprecedented rate. Few things are as permanent as a temporary government program. Individuals who campaigned on term limits have found themselves in the halls of Congress for decades on end, with no end in sight.

  The Latin saying Qui audet adipiscitur—“Who dares, wins”—is evocative of Trump’s ethos. The use of Latin is apt here, since historian Victor Davis Hanson argues that Trump’s desire to Make America Great Again parallels the desire of several great leaders throughout history, including classical antiquity, to restore their own nations in periods of turbulence and corruption.

  In a December 2018 interview with Hoover Institution’s The Classicist podcast, Hanson likens the challenges that Trump faces to the ones that beset Emperor Justinian of the Byzantine Empire, the surviving eastern half of Rome’s empire after the West fell to northern hordes. In the fifth century AD, a century after the West’s collapse, Justinian faced riots in the Eastern Empire’s capital, saw Northern Africa still overrun by the Vandals, and was pressed by the Persian Empire to the East. Despite not speaking the Eastern Roman Empire’s default language, Greek, Justinian promulgated a new legal system, the Justinian Code, expanded the Eastern Empire, retook North Africa as well as Sicily and two thirds of Italy, and launched a period of Byzantine rule over the Aegean that would last some five hundred years, with the Eastern Empire lasting about a thousand years before falling to the Turks in the fifteenth century, its longevity fostered in part by Justinian having stamped out early schisms in the Eastern Orthodox religion.

  Hanson notes that a big key to Justinian’s success was that even though he got maximum publicity value out of new construction and military victories, he was actually quite stingy about such projects—using contractors and what we would now call special forces in his cautious overseas military operations.

  Hanson sees a similar desire to boost national morale while also getting the biggest bang for your cautiously spent buck (or your solidus, in the case of the Byzantine Empire) in many great leaders of the past, including Pericles, Alexander the Great, Justinian’s predecessors Augustus and Constantine, the later Holy Roman Emperors Charlemagne and Joseph II, Queen Elizabeth I and Churchill of England, Catherine the Great of Russia, and Abraham Lincoln.

  They were important not just because of military victories, argues Hanson. They shared a similar nationalist conviction: “They have a historical sense that decline is not a matter of exhaustion of natural resources, or it’s not predicated on enemies over the next hill. Usually, it’s internal.”

  That is, argues Hanson, troubled states in the past faced woes of their own making not so unlike our own: Their currency inflated and thus diminished in value, the treasury depleted, the military weakened yet overextended. What was needed, over and over again, was a changed “state of mind,” he says. Great rulers saw that what was often needed was a dose of “reactionary nostalgia” and “a return to basic principles.” The great leaders in those situations had an intuitive talent for getting people to “go back to first things” by force of personality, back to those things that made England or Russia or other lands succeed.

  Many of those keys to success still apply to nations seeking restoration today. You have to have a balanced budget. You have to have sound money in the economy, beyond the manipulations of bureaucrats. You need transparency instead of corruption in government (or at least a willingness to treat corruption as the great common enemy so that it is constrained). In military matters, you need a sense of how earnestly to fight and what your endgame is.

  The belief that the bad conditions are “inevitable” and unchangeable is a dangerous, self-fulfilling prophecy. We’d been told ISIS and the Paris Climate Agreement were inevitable—just as pre-Reagan America was told by Jimmy Carter that America needed to get over its “inordinate fear of communism” and accept the permanence of the Soviet Union. But these things aren’t unchangeable. Believing that they are beatable can help make them so.

  One must dare to believe greatness can come again.

  Chapter 3

  No More Accepting Decline

  Trump’s critics may not see in the MAGA Doctrine principles that span beyond Trump’s own lifetime and beyond our own shores—but some people overseas do. Just as the United States was an inspiration to people resisting monarchies around the world at the time of the American Revolution and an inspiration to people resisting communist tyranny during the Cold War, the distinctive red Make America Great Again hats of Trump supporters have found their way to Hong Kong, during the 2019 protests there against some of the ways Beijing, back on the Chinese mainland, rules its less-communist “special administrative region.”

  Brave protestors wear Make Hong Kong Great Again hats—and borrow other American symbols, including the American flag. Confused, the American press unhelpfully worries that bad elemen
ts, perhaps even white supremacists, may be infiltrating and exploiting the Hong Kong protestors, though an East Asian protest movement is an odd place to look for white supremacists.

  The simplest explanation is that the protestors, like Soviet teens listening to rock and roll on the sly decades earlier, recognize symbols of Western-style freedom when they see them. And they should: Hong Kong was by some measures freer than the West when it was populated by refugees from the mainland’s communist rule for decades but not yet governed by the mainland (the United Kingdom handed it over to Beijing in 1997 after a century and a half of colonial rule). Let’s hope its freedom and love of the free market endure any crackdowns from Beijing.

  Trump isn’t up against domestic foes as totalitarian as the Communists in Beijing, a few extremists notwithstanding, but, like the Hong Kong protestors, he faces the daunting task of transforming a stubborn, inflexible, corrupt, big-government system.

  One irony of our situation is that the American government got this bloated in part by fighting actual Communism during the Cold War but hasn’t seen much of a “peace dividend” since then, despite the immense opportunity afforded by the collapse of European Communism to reduce military spending. Ryan McMaken, senior editor at the think tank the Mises Institute, notes that there has in fact been an increase in defense spending of about 44% (adjusted for inflation) since 1990, when the Cold War ended. In fact, combined spending on the departments of Defense, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security will reach nearly $1 trillion in 2020, about a quarter of the entire federal budget.

  How can peace be almost half again as expensive as decades of war? The truth is, peace is not expensive. Peace allows people to engage in commerce, to work and to build businesses without fear of violent disruptions. What we have now is a combination of relatively small-scale regional wars as in Afghanistan with low-level police actions—and the maintenance of expensive bases—all over the world.