The MAGA Doctrine Page 8
This is a president who pursues peace not as if it were a hazy dream on the horizon, something to which we pay lip service while quietly sending in military “advisors” to lay the groundwork for larger later military deployments, but something achievable in concrete, piecemeal fashion the way business deals and nation-by-nation trade agreements are. Think of the specificity of the implicit deal he presented to North Korea’s Kim Jong-un: Stop behaving like a rogue who lobs missiles at Japan, and you could be seen as the leader who brought your people peace and brought them normalized trade with the outside world.
Of course it was in part an appeal to Kim Jong-un’s vanity—it would be insane not to appeal to vanity when you’re negotiating with an unchecked dictator. Trump knows that, despite the shameful and disingenuous efforts by the American press to depict Trump as a genuine, naïve fan of Kim (or any other foreign dictator). While the press dreams of going through the usual empty motions—Bill Clinton’s worthless paper agreement with the prior Kim, Obama’s poetic assurances of an eventual better future—Trump sets specific goals and sizes up the person with whom he’s dealing, dangerous or not, to figure out how to get the result best for the United States. He decides what his criteria for success are, and in a far more concrete fashion than most of the world’s windbag leaders, he meets them.
Better that than the sort of sleepy march to world government you see happening in the European Union or the United Nations, all talk and no results except more bureaucracy. A nationalist leader who loves his country can make wise decisions on its behalf—and even love his ostensible enemies overseas as the fellow human beings they are. The cold-blooded international (and domestic) bureaucracies in which we’ve been asked to put our trust for the past several decades, by contrast, seem somehow to keep spilling blood all over the globe. They call it peacekeeping instead of war. Time for a new approach.
Chapter 6
Making the Economy Work Again
The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up about 9,000 points since President Trump was elected, as I write these words two and a half years into his first term.
Just a few weeks ago, at the July 2019 Turning Point USA conference I organized in D.C., President Trump, speaking to the crowd of conservative activist teens in attendance, said, as he has many times, that “sixty thousand factories and plants” have closed in the United States in the twenty-first century. Interestingly, though he attributed part of that loss to “dumb trade deals,” he hinted at a solution other than imposing higher tariffs—a solution that probably goes a long way toward explaining the outburst of optimism among traders and businesspeople when he won the 2016 election.
He alluded to the improved tax and regulatory environment he is fighting to give the United States. One of his first actions upon taking office was to declare a de facto freeze on new regulations, also urging the executive branch regulatory agencies to repeal more regulations than they create.
Since the MAGA Doctrine is looking out for the little guy, Trump saw that this wasn’t about the rich versus the poor. It was about individual workers and entrepreneurs up against regulatory bureaucracies and international trade agreements.
Liberals like to pretend that every regulation is a safety-conscious rule against poisoning customers or crushing workers with machinery, but most regulations do nothing to enhance safety that wouldn’t be done by firms’ own desire to keep their insurance premiums low (not smart to kill workers and customers if you don’t want to get sued), and regulators add layers of needlessly rigid procedure, often merely because those procedures were the standard ones for industry leaders in years past—not a good way to create innovation through competition.
As Trump said in his TPUSA speech, those sixty thousand factories “didn’t cease to exist. They moved to places that are easier to operate.” In the long run, Trump doesn’t want to wall off the United States from trade—far from it. He wants to make the United States once more the kind of place where it’s easy and profitable to trade, and you make it that way in part through streamlining such as his tax reforms and his regulatory relief. He mainly deploys tariffs as one weapon that can be used to get rid of regulatory and tax obstacles US firms face from foreign governments when they try to engage in commerce overseas. (And even full-fledged free-traders like two of my heroes, economists Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman, have noted that if one must have a government, it is arguably better, and slightly less disruptive to commerce, to fund it with a tariff on imports, partly paid by people outside the United States, than with numerous internal taxes.)
Trump has been tough in his remarks about unfair behavior by China—violating US intellectual property, engaging in industrial espionage, using its military to subsidize many of its industries, pressing prisoners into factory labor—but he said in his TPUSA speech, “I don’t blame China.” He didn’t mean he forgives their unfair or inhumane practices, but he understands their natural, nationalistic desire to make their own country richer by whatever means they think will work. “We should have done that,” he added—meaning pass laws for a change that make it easier, not harder, to do business in the United States.
The Democrats have for decades approached regulatory decision-making—and the imposition of high corporate tax rates—as if businesses can overcome any obstacles government creates for them. They assume that there is no burden business can’t carry, and that none will go looking for opportunities where the burdens are lighter. Then, when companies flee overseas, they whine about the outsourcing and offshoring they helped cause. To Make America Great Again, one obvious thing to do—obvious to anyone other than a leftist ideologue—is to make America hospitable to business again.
Judging by some of the basic economic facts about America during the Trump presidency, that’s happening. Over 150 million Americans are now employed, the most people who’ve ever worked in this country, for starters. That’s 150 million Americans less likely to become dependents of the government, more likely to shape their destinies and live their lives.
And as the president observed in his TPUSA speech, he’s achieved other things that for a long time we just thought couldn’t be done—things we’d almost given up on as too politically volatile. ANWR, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—for years a green-politics hot potato—is now open for drilling (using pipelines safely distant from almost any ecologically significant land), one of several factors making the United States a net exporter of oil after decades of being dependent on the vicissitudes of Middle Eastern politics for our supply.
The media noticed such achievements, said Trump. “And their reaction? Impeach!”
Again and again, policies that would have been treated by liberals as commonsensical decades ago—or even immediately prior to Trump winning the 2016 election!—are now depicted as causes for outrage.
As Trump went on to say in his speech, liberals, including former president Bill Clinton, used to say, “It’s the economy, stupid” when explaining political priorities. But once the economy starts booming under Trump, we stop hearing the media talk about it.
They used to say what matters is “jobs, jobs, jobs,” recalled Trump. Yet when unemployment stats drop to historic lows, including for minority groups too often untouched by the broader prosperity of America, suddenly the media lose their long-time interest in tracking day-to-day unemployment percentages. “They drop that once we win on it,” as Trump said. They turn their attention elsewhere, looking for ways to discredit the effort to Make America Great Again and denying we’ve begun to make the economy work again.
In a reminder that Trump is not, as is so often alleged, motivated by xenophobia in his policy recommendations, he also noted in his speech that the European Union is “worse than China” on trade. It’s bureaucracy and red tape that he hates, not a short list of foreign foes, and he has begun working out better trade terms with China. Trump’s foreign policy toughness ends up affecting our domestic economy in a good way, too. His historically unprecedented success in
getting our European allies in NATO to cough up an additional $100 billion in defense spending shows what a leader can do when he refuses to pick up the check for every nation except our own. His penchant for tough deal-making in his private-sector life pays off big for the US public sector (and all of us who pay taxes to support that public sector).
Trump is not out to antagonize Europe or make that a continent of enemies. However, getting them to pay up—instead of letting the United States carry nearly the whole load of the NATO military alliance’s expenditures—is one important way of showing we’re putting America’s interests first for a change instead of letting Europe slowly bleed us of funds while more hostile nations literally drain our blood.
“Somebody said President Obama is much more popular in Germany than President Trump—he should be,” added Trump in his TPUSA speech. “If I start getting higher poll numbers in Europe, I’m doing something wrong.” Trump was elected to govern the United States—and to govern for the United States—not to cater to a disapproving international audience that doesn’t always share our values.
Trump sees that these issues—sound economics and a nationalist foreign policy orientation—go together for reasons much more logical than knee-jerk opposition to all interaction with foreigners. His instinctual wariness of deadbeats and moochers leads him to be skeptical of both Europe’s socialist redistributionist tendencies in economics and its post–World War II tendency to let the United States carry most of the military defense load.
In the current relatively peaceful climate, why not let Western Europe have a little more control over its strategic destiny while also paying for that destiny like responsible adults? We have domestic priorities in need of attention, and we don’t need to indirectly subsidize the welfare system of other prosperous states.
As Trump put it in that same speech to TPUSA, the Democrats like to pretend they understand Europe better than he does, but as usual, they opt to “understand” only the left-leaning, socialistic aspects of what they study. They point to Europe as a beacon of sophistication when its elites are on the same page as our left-liberal elites, wanting to tax more and regulate more. When Europe starts drifting away from that half-century-long pattern of “social democracy” (basically vast welfare states)—when populists win elections in Italy or Hungary or the United Kingdom and make the social-democratic consensus look more fragile—suddenly Europe isn’t seen as so sophisticated by our elites. Suddenly it’s described as too white, too old-fashioned, too unstable, or frighteningly populist.
Trump said in his speech that when you behold the initial batch of 2020 Democratic presidential candidates, “there’s not a Winston Churchill among them.” That is, no leaders who are willing to fight when necessary, make peace just as vigorously, and always remain on guard against those who, while sounding soft and gentle, would turn all our resources and decision-making power over to the state. “Socialism is not as easily defeated as you think,” warned Trump after some obligatory jibes about young left-wing Democrats such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
He says he worries about the maintenance of the American entrepreneurial spirit that made us the ultimate capitalist success story “when I’m up there [on the debate stage] with some maniac” offering “free” handouts of every kind (in reality wasteful government projects supported by bilked taxpayers) to everyone, even illegal aliens—that stunning last wrinkle a topic for a later chapter and a new point of firm agreement amongst the “generous” Democrats.
But then, an uncritical unanimity in thought and collectivism in economics seem to go together quite naturally. Or, as Trump told the TPUSA crowd, “Socialism cannot survive when people are free to think for themselves, and America will never be a socialist country.”
Though the Democrats have lately abandoned any embarrassment they used to feel about being labeled socialists—and now treat that failed philosophy of central planning as if it is the exciting future of their party—the undeniable historical fact is that the United States became rich enough to entertain such juvenile economic fantasies by being the least socialist large country in the world. Consider what happens when America’s one large experimental socialist zone, the state of California, goes its own way:
California has 12% of America’s population
Yet they have 50% of America’s homeless population
And who has run and represented California for decades? People like: Nancy Pelosi
Dianne Feinstein
Maxine Waters
Kamala Harris
Eric Swalwell
Gavin Newsom
Democrats in the Obama era didn’t do much to spur economic growth but prided themselves on an endless variety of redistributive mechanisms. From green energy subsidies to encouraging the Federal Reserve’s “quantitative easing” as a euphemism for money-printing (and the resulting low interest rates that hurt people who save their money), from Medicare and food stamp expansions to keeping people on unemployment for years, the Bush-era Republicans were happy to play along with anything as long as it came with bailouts for their fat-cat cronies on Wall Street after the 2008 crash.
Trump intuitively understands that you do not Make America Great Again by arguing over who gets the handouts, the perpetually poor or the well-connected-but-undeserving. There will never be enough government largesse, magically conjured from the wallets of other members of the population, to spark greatness and inspire creators, only enough to salve wounds and keep people dependent.
Trump famously began his 2016 presidential campaign with the seemingly pessimistic declaration that “the American dream is dead.” He did not mean, though, that the American dream should be dead. He meant that unless we changed course, moving away from endless debt, endless wars, and spending without regard to consequences, our house of cards would come crashing down. By contrast, it is the left that so often declares the American dream, even when achievable, a veiled nightmare.
Those Republicans who are guided by the MAGA Doctrine—of putting America first and once more encouraging all its citizens to flourish while standing on their own two feet—know that the real testament to a flourishing economy is not how many new government handouts we are offering (like the dizzying array of medical and other giveaways touted by the 2020 Democratic candidates for president) but how few people need such handouts. Wouldn’t it be truly great if no one needed the assistance of government? Never forget that the more people getting government benefits, the greater the number of likely Democrat voters.
President Trump has moved some five million people off of food stamps—by helping to free up the economy and create more jobs, not just by cruelly kicking the former recipients out onto the street to starve. Where was the reporting on that beautiful accomplishment in the press that is supposedly run by reporters so concerned for the worst-off? After sixteen years where President Bush added eleven million people to the SNAP program (the official term for food stamps) and then Obama added sixteen million more, we finally have a president who has gotten over five million people off food stamps. How many reporters obsessed with the hardships of everyday Americans touted that achievement?
Although the Democrats can outdo “country club” Republicans on shoveling government subsidy money to cronies in industry—through sweetheart contracts, no-show jobs, and special tax breaks—there are times there is only one “business” they really trust to get bigger and bigger: government.
Trump, by contrast, arguably got his start in politics by tackling a very local New York City problem: the complete failure of that Democrat-dominated town to maintain the potentially lovely Wollman skating rink in famous Central Park. Despite the fact that anything as prominent as that often-visited park’s skating rink should have been a point of pride for the city, the cracked and disused rink had languished ignored and in need of repair from 1980 to 1986, when Trump, then just a private citizen but one used to getting things built—and getting things done—offered to repair the rink partly at his own expense,
within six months.
It was finished two months ahead of schedule and $750,000 under budget.
Think of the MAGA Doctrine as a simple code for turning that sort of practical problem-solving into a can-do approach to national governance. It’s not about Trump bossing people around like a tyrant—it’s about him demolishing obstacles so that the rest of us are free to rebuild. And even to skate.
Chapter 7
No More Low-Energy Nation
In 1990 to 1991, two years before I was born, America fought what is now sometimes referred to as “the first Gulf War” in Iraq, to repel Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein’s invasion of neighboring Kuwait. That war lasted only seven months and claimed only 146 American lives (about a third of all allied deaths), or so it seemed at the time.
The resulting political and military tensions in the region would erupt again periodically for three decades, most notably in the far more protracted Iraq War that the United States started in early 2003 (after several years of occasional punitive bombing raids on Iraq) and the Iraq portion of the sprawling war a decade later against the terrorist group ISIS and its affiliates.
In Iraq alone, the United States had suffered over four thousand deaths and thirty-two thousand injuries by the time Trump took office. As Trump lamented during his 2016 presidential campaign, the United States has now, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the surrounding regions, spent some $6 trillion waging war since 2001, largely as a reaction to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks by al-Qaeda, which controls neither Iraq nor Afghanistan.
That $6 trillion is roughly equal to a quarter of the entire federal debt.
And throughout those wars, and ever since I was born, I heard the refrain, usually from protestors on the left, that the United States should spill “no blood for oil.” It sometimes seemed like just another anti-corporate, Marxist taunt. But the more lives and money we expend fighting over regions that likely wouldn’t matter to us so much if they had no oil—and which surely wouldn’t have as much money to spend arming their local terrorist groups if they didn’t have such a large share of the world’s oil—the more sense the anti-war refrain makes.