{"id":10686,"date":"2017-10-26T10:38:25","date_gmt":"2017-10-26T17:38:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=10686"},"modified":"2017-10-26T10:38:25","modified_gmt":"2017-10-26T17:38:25","slug":"trumps-constructive-chaos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/trumps-constructive-chaos\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump\u2019s Constructive Chaos"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
by <\/span>Victor Davis Hanson<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n
Defining Ideas<\/em>
\n<\/span><\/div>\n<\/header>\n
<\/div>\n
\n
\n
\n

Almost daily, President Trump manages to incense the media, alarm the world abroad, and enrage his Democratic opposition. Not since Ronald Reagan\u2019s first year in office has change and disruption come so fast from the White House.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s consider foreign affairs first. In response to North Korea\u2019s nuclear threats to hit the American West coast, Trump promised Kim Jung-un utter destruction. And for sport he ridicules him as \u201crocket man.\u201d ISIS is now on the run. The terrorist group has given up on its once-promised caliphate\u2014in part because Trump changed the rules of engagement and allowed American generals at the front to use their own judgment and discretion on how best to destroy their enemies. Trump has bowed out from certifying a continuation of the Iranian deal and sent it back to Congress for reform, rejection, or ratification. In the case of the Paris climate accord, he simply pulled the United States out completely, reminding its adherents that the use of natural gas has allowed America to reduce carbon emissions far more dramatically than have most of its critics. As in the case of the Iran deal, the Obama administration never sent the Paris agreement to the Senate for a treaty vote.<\/p>\n

Domestically, too, Trump has not been afraid to make major changes. In terms of the so-called Dreamers\u2014children who were brought into the United States illegally by their parents and protected by the DACA executive orders of Barack Obama\u2014for now Trump has sent the matter back to the Congress for proper legislative review. On Obamacare, Trump has issued executive orders to free up the health market and remove subsidies and monopolistic regulations on how health plans are structured and sold. His reasoning was that the Obama executive orders on health care were illegal, so revising them was necessary and legal rather than inflammatory.<\/p>\n

On cultural matters, Trump has waded into the NFL controversies, blasting players who refuse to stand for the National Anthem as unworthy to play. Trump\u2014a thrice-married erstwhile womanizer and unlikely moralist\u2014has condemned Hollywood mogul and sexual deviant Harvey Weinstein, and by implication the entire industry of celebrities that appeased and protected Weinstein\u2019s vile behavior while lecturing America on its cowardly inability to call out sexual harassment.<\/p>\n

Polls, to the extent they retain any credibility, are ambiguous about Trump\u2019s chaotic leadership style. They show that the public is in agreement with Trump on most of these hot button issues, while not being especially fond of Trump himself\u2014perhaps in the manner that patients may fear their oncologists but ultimately appreciate their treatments for metastasizing cancers.<\/p>\n

So is Trump creating chaos, or simply cleaning up the political and cultural messes of the past decade\u2014or both?<\/p>\n

The answer is complex. To achieve perceived noble ends, the Obama administration often used dubious means, mostly through executive orders and by deceiving the public about Obamacare, illegal immigration, and the Iran deal. Now, Trump is using Obama\u2019s own tools to reverse what Obama wrought.<\/p>\n

Trump did not create a nuclear North Korea with missiles capable of hitting San Francisco. The appeasement that did was a result of thirty years of prior presidents passing the problem onto their successors in order to avoid a messy confrontation on their own watch. At some point, a reckoning was inevitable: either North Korea would establish a de facto right to deploy both nukes and intercontinental missiles, or be judged to be too unhinged to be allowed into the nuclear club.<\/p>\n

Trump seemingly has deduced that North Korea cannot remain nuclear, and thus is trying to force China to rein in its client, while apprising Beijing that the past few years of U.S. appeasement were an aberration, and the new pushback the more normal American response. It is always easy to lose strategic deterrence, dangerous and costly to restore it.<\/p>\n

Condemning ISIS as a group of medieval psychopaths who can only be stopped by annihilation and humiliation is not very Politically Correct\u2014but that\u2019s what Trump did. Such moral and military clarity is apparently impossible in today\u2019s asymmetrical and unconventional wars of the Middle East. But Trump\u2019s easy reliance on overwhelming firepower was as simplistic as it may have been effective\u2014like Alexander the Great cutting apart the Gordian Knot instead of playing by the rules and vainly trying to unravel the knot\u2019s endless folds and loops.<\/p>\n

By any fair interpretation, the Paris climate agreement and the Iran deal were treaties and thus should have required a two-thirds vote from the Senate. Obama knew that ratification was impossible and would likely be unpopular, so he simply rebranded them as presidential protocols, signed them, and declared that they were legally binding agreements.<\/p>\n

Trump is following the law by turning these agreements over to the Senate for debate and resolution. But he is also following his political instincts by assuming that both of these deals were flawed and put the United States at a disadvantage. Therefore, neither will likely win majority support in the Senate. Praise for stopping an illegal and unwise treaty or blame for reneging on an existing agreement will be shared with the senators rather than rest on Trump\u2019s shoulders entirely.<\/p>\n

Prior to the presidential election, illegal immigration had been ignored. Federal laws were unenforced. The border was not secure. Opportunistic parties leveraged illegal immigration for their own selfish agendas: the Left to recalibrate the electoral college of the American southwest, the right to ensure cheap labor, Mexico to obtain $25 billion in remittances and a safety valve for social oppression, and ethnic activists to perpetuate a near permanent constituency that will slow down assimilation, integration, and intermarriage.<\/p>\n

Trump has not only committed to building a wall and deporting illegal aliens, but he has addressed the problem of sanctuary cities that in Confederate fashion defy U.S. laws. An incoherent multiculturalism often results in illegal immigrants celebrating Mexico and faulting the United States, romanticizing the country that they chose to leave while critiquing the one where they wish to stay.<\/p>\n

As far as the NFL is concerned, the entire enterprise is an easy target. Most football fans are traditionalists and resent players kneeling during the National Anthem\u2014much more so when such protestors are multimillionaires whose lucrative salaries depend on poorer fans attending or watching their games. If a country has no borders and cannot unite to stand for a brief expression of collective patriotism, then it symbolically does not exist as a country. The NFL bet otherwise, hoping that its players could be appeased and its fans would forgive and forget. But the fans have not forgotten and the players have only grown more emboldened by concessions of the terrified owners. Trump\u2019s political instincts proved far more savvy than those of a na\u00efve NFL, given that the league is now losing fans and money.<\/p>\n

Are there any constant themes in all of Trump\u2019s chaotic controversies?<\/p>\n

The Obama presidency was atypical in many ways\u2014even when compared to other Democratic administrations, such as Bill Clinton\u2019s. Obama tried to move the country hard to the left and, in the process, radicalized and then eroded the Democratic Party at the local, state, and federal levels. And with the loss of a once solidly Democratic Congress, Obama was reduced to running the government by fiat and edict rather than through legislative compromise and cooperation.<\/p>\n

The national debt doubled to $20 trillion. The economy stagnated. Labor non-participation rates soared. Near zero interest rates wiped out the purchasing power of middle-class savers. Scandals at the IRS, the GSA, and the VA abounded; the Secret Service, the FBI, and the Justice Department were all politicized. The country divided further along racial and ethnic lines.<\/p>\n

Abroad, Russian reset failed. Efforts to pivot to Asia and to deter Chinese expansionism died on the vine. Red lines in Syria were ignored. There was no containment of North Korea\u2019s nuclear expansion. The Libyan intervention made things worse. The withdrawal from Iraq left behind a \u201csecure\u201d country in word, a failed one in fact. The surge against the Taliban ended up as a telegraphed stalemate. The war against a \u201cjayvee\u201d ISIS stalled. There were many secrets hidden in the Iran deal.<\/p>\n

To address these challenges, Trump could have tried carefully to patch things up in a makeshift and incremental fashion. Or he could have found such ad hoc mending largely a waste of time, and instead found a better solution in slashing and burning the mess that was left, in order to create new policies from scratch. Trump chose the latter option\u2014and predictably, as the old order declined chaos has followed ever since.<\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Victor Davis Hanson Defining Ideas Almost daily, President Trump manages to incense the media, alarm the world abroad, and enrage his Democratic opposition. Not since Ronald Reagan\u2019s first year in office has change and disruption come so fast from the White House. Let\u2019s consider foreign affairs first. In response to North Korea\u2019s nuclear threats […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1105,1102,1092,978,346,124,1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-2Mm","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":10075,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/hall-of-mirrors-in-syria\/","url_meta":{"origin":10686,"position":0},"title":"Hall of Mirrors in Syria","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 10, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"The Corner The one and only. by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ National Review \u00a0 Syria is weird for reasons that transcend even the bizarre situation of bombing an abhorrent Bashar al-Assad who was bombing an abhorrent ISIS \u2014 as we de facto ally with Iran, the greater strategic threat, to defeat\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Putin"","block_context":{"text":"Putin","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/putin\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9862,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-three-headed-hydra-of-the-middle-east\/","url_meta":{"origin":10686,"position":1},"title":"The Three-Headed Hydra of the Middle East","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 16, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ National Review Trump has inherited a matrix of problems that primarily stem from Iran, Russia, and ISIS. The abrupt Obama administration pre-election pullout from Iraq in 2011, along with the administration\u2019s failed reset with Russia and the Iran deal, created a three-headed hydra in the Middle\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "ISIS"","block_context":{"text":"ISIS","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/isis\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10516,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-fire-and-fury-of-presidents\/","url_meta":{"origin":10686,"position":2},"title":"The Fire And Fury Of Presidents","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 25, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Defining Ideas \u00a0 Image credit:Barbara Kelley \u201cWe could, obviously, destroy North Korea with our arsenals.\" \u2014Barack Obama, April 2016 The media recently went ballistic over President Trump\u2019s impromptu promises of \u201cfire and fury\u201d in reply to the latest North Korean threats\u2014and even more so when\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Media"","block_context":{"text":"Media","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/media\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12691,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/trumpism-then-now-and-in-the-future\/","url_meta":{"origin":10686,"position":3},"title":"Trumpism: Then, Now\u2014and in the Future?","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 28, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness What was, is, and will be the Trump agenda?\u00a0 Against all odds, what elected Trump in 2016 was a recalibration of American foreign and domestic policy\u2014and the art of politicking itself. Doctrine and Policy In foreign affairs, the United States would no longer adhere\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10115,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-tar-pits-abroad\/","url_meta":{"origin":10686,"position":4},"title":"The Tar Pits Abroad","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 24, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ Defining Ideas \u00a0 As missiles fall on Syria in retaliation for Bashar Assad\u2019s medieval use of chemical weapons\u2014and as voices call for the use of some American ground troops to expedite his removal\u2014we might reflect upon American military interventions in the post-Vietnam era. America\u2019s major interventions\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bill Clinton"","block_context":{"text":"Bill Clinton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/bill-clinton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11034,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/trumps-generals-are-too-valuable-to-be-dismissed\/","url_meta":{"origin":10686,"position":5},"title":"Trump’s Generals Are Too Valuable to Be Dismissed","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 1, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Town Hall Near-daily gossip surrounds Donald Trump's three marquee generals. The media sometimes blare out rumors that Gen. John Kelly, the White House chief of staff, is proving to be a loose cannon and might soon be fired. Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, Trump's national security adviser,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Donald Trump"","block_context":{"text":"Donald Trump","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/donald-trump\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10686"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10686"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10686\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10687,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10686\/revisions\/10687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}