Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review<\/p>\n
A<\/span>s President Trump finished his first full year in office, he could look back at an impressive record of achievement of a kind rarely attained by an incoming president \u2014 much less by one who arrived in office as a private-sector billionaire without either prior political office or military service. As unintended proof of his accomplishments, Trump\u2019s many liberal opponents have gone from initially declaring him an incompetent to warning that he has become effective \u2014 insanely so \u2014 in overturning the Obama progressive agenda.<\/p>\n Never Trump Republicans acknowledge that Trump has realized much of what they once only dreamed of \u2014 from tax reform and deregulation to a government about-face on climate change, the ending of the Obamacare individual mandate, and expansion of energy production.<\/p>\n Trump so far has not enacted the Never Trump nightmare agenda. The U.S. is not leaving NATO. It is not colluding with Vladimir Putin, but maintaining sanctions against Russia and arming Ukrainians. It is not starting a tariff war with China. The administration is not appointing either liberals or incompetents to the federal courts.<\/p>\n A politicized FBI, DOJ, and IRS was Obama\u2019s legacy, not Trump\u2019s doing, as some of the Never Trump circle predicted. Indeed, the Never Trump movement is now mostly calcified, as even some of its formerly staunch adherents concede. It was done in by the Trump record and the monotony of having to redefine a once-welcomed conservative agenda as suddenly unpalatable due to Trump\u2019s crude fingerprints on it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n On the short side, Trump has still not started to build his much-promised border wall, to insist on free but far fairer trade with Asia and Europe, or to enact an infrastructure-rebuilding program. Nonetheless, Trump\u2019s multitude of critics is unable to argue that his record is shoddy and must instead insist that his list of achievements is due mostly to the Republican Congress. Or they claim he is beholden to the legacy of the Obama administration. Or they insist that credit belongs with his own impressive economic and national-security cabinet-level appointments. Or that whatever good came of Trump\u2019s first year is nullified by Trump\u2019s persistent personal odiousness.<\/p>\n A<\/span>t the conclusion of Trump\u2019s first year, the stock market and small-business confidence are at record highs, and consumer confidence has not been higher in 17 years. Trump\u2019s loud campaign promises to lure back capital and industry to the heartland no longer look quixotic, given new tax and deregulatory incentives and far cheaper energy costs than in most of Europe and Japan.<\/p>\n Trump has now ended 66 regulations for every one he has added. Few believed a Republican president could cut the corporate-tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent while capping state- and local-tax deductions for mostly high earners to $10,000. Those are the highlights of a comprehensive tax-reform and -reduction agenda that will likely accelerate the economy to an even more rapid growth rate than Trump\u2019s first two full quarters of annualized increases in GDP of more than 3 percent.<\/p>\n Dozens of large companies are already passing along some of their anticipated tax cuts to employees through increased wages or bonuses \u2014 dismissed as \u201ccrumbs\u201d by House minority leader Nancy Pelosi. Rising workers\u2019 wages and anticipated tax credits and savings for the lower and middle classes for now are rendering almost mute the age-old fights about state-mandated minimum-wage laws. The mostly unheralded nixing of the Obamacare individual mandate \u2014 once the great ideological battlefield of the Affordable Care Act \u2014 will insidiously recalibrate the ACA into a mostly private-market enterprise.<\/p>\n Domestic oil production is slated to exceed 2017 record levels and soon may hit an astonishing 11 million barrels a day. \u201cPeak oil\u201d for now is an ossified idea, as are massive wind and solar Solyndra-like government subsidies and the mostly unworkable Paris Climate Accord.<\/p>\n Gas, oil, and coal production are expected to rise even higher with new Trump initiatives to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge field in Alaska, encourage more fracking on federal lands and offshore, and complete needed pipeline links while encouraging coal exportation.<\/p>\n For all the political horse-trading over extending or ending the Obama executive orders on DACA, illegal immigration has declined according to some metrics by over 60 percent. It is now at the lowest levels in the 21st century \u2014 even before the ending of chain migration and enacting of new border-security initiatives.<\/p>\n Abroad, the ISIS caliphate is for all purposes now extinct. Its demise is in part due to Trump\u2019s outsourcing of the conflict to Secretary of Defense James Mattis, who liberated ground commanders from Obama-administration-era legalistic rules of engagement. Trump\u2019s appointees, such as Mattis, National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster, U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, CIA Director Mike Pompeo, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, have worked in concert to restore U.S. deterrence. Variously called \u201cprincipled realism\u201d or a new \u201cJacksonianism,\u201d the Trump doctrine has now replaced the \u201cstrategic patience\u201d and \u201clead from behind\u201d recessionals of the prior administration and not emulated the neoconservative nation-building of the George W. Bush administration.<\/p>\n New pressures on nuclear North Korea have prompted the toughest U.N. trade sanctions in history on the rogue state. After Trump\u2019s fiery and erratic rhetoric and muscular displays of U.S. naval and air power in the Pacific, Pyongyang has agreed to landmark talks with Seoul. China is slowly beginning to pressure North Korea to stop launching missiles. Beijing\u2019s Asian neighbors are beefing up missile defense and growing closer to the U.S. For now, the bad cop Trump and the good cops Mattis and McMaster have encouraged friends and frightened enemies, although the shelf life of such diplomatic gymnastics is limited.<\/p>\n Trump almost immediately voiced support for mass demonstrations in Iran, in a manner Obama failed to do in 2009. An ironic fallout of the disastrous 2015 Iran deal may be that the theocracy so hyped its cash windfalls from American relaxation of embargoes and sanctions that it inadvertently raised Iranians\u2019 expectations of a rise in the standard of living. Then it dashed just those hopes by squandering hundreds of millions of newfound dollars in subsidizing Hezbollah, conducting a costly expeditionary war to save the genocidal Bashar al-Assad regime, and likely continuing an exorbitantly costly nuclear-weapons program.<\/p>\n What is different about Iran\u2019s internal unrest this time around is twofold. The Trump administration is not invested in any \u201clandmark\u201d deal with Tehran that requires ignoring protesters in the street. Trump also does not envision revolutionary and terror-sponsoring Iran as a \u201cvery successful regional power\u201d with \u201clegitimate defense concerns.\u201d Rather, he sees Tehran, along with ISIS and al-Qaeda, as the chief source of Middle East unrest and anti-Americanism.<\/p>\n Moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, in line with past congressional mandates, along with threatening to curtail Palestinian aid, only reifies what is now widely accepted. The new Middle East is not the old. There are no longer any ongoing and viable \u201cpeace plans,\u201d \u201croad maps,\u201d or \u201csummits.\u201d America is becoming energy-independent and immune to oil boycotts. There are new and greater threats than Israel to Arab regimes, from nuclear Iran to the scourge of Islamic terrorism in Iraq and Syria. Patience is wearing thin as after 30 years the Palestinians still cannot create transparent and consensual government. Seventy years after the birth of Israel, the Palestinians still insist on being called \u201crefugees\u201d \u2014 when most of the world\u2019s millions of displaced persons decades ago moved on.<\/p>\n Yet as Trump heads into the 2018 midterms, his favorability ratings are unimpressive. Because of loud Democratic threats of using impeachment proceedings to undermine the Trump project, the 2018 fight for the House is taking on historic importance. It is not just a referendum on the Trump agenda, but likely a means to seek to discredit or remove Trump himself \u2014 even if the prosecution in the Senate would likely never find the necessary 67 votes.<\/p>\n In sum, an embattled Trump now finds himself in a war on all fronts.<\/p>\n T<\/span>he first and most important conflict is one of favorability. Trump\u2019s actual approval ratings, as in 2016, are probably somewhat higher than the low 40s reported in many polls. But Trump\u2019s image is still astonishingly dismal in relation to his unappreciated achievements. For congressional Republicans to survive the midterms and retain majorities, Trump perhaps has to hope that the economy will grow not just at 3 percent but even more robustly \u2014 with marked rises in workers\u2019 take-home wages due to tax cuts and labor shortages.<\/p>\n Is it really true that politics can be reduced to \u201cIt\u2019s the economy, stupid\u201d? Obama failed to achieve 3 percent growth per annum over his eight years. As a result he may have lost both houses of Congress, but he also was reelected. More likely, no one quite knows the exact political consequences of economic growth. Between November 1983 and November 1984, the economy grew at 7 percent and ipso facto ushered the once \u201camiable dunce\u201d Ronald Reagan into a landslide reelection victory over a previously thought-to-be-far-more-impressive Walter Mondale. Yet this time it may be that 3 percent GDP growth will not mitigate Trump\u2019s personal negatives but 4\u20135 percent would.<\/p>\n It is said that Trump is also at war with himself, in the sense that his tweeting alienates the key constituencies of women voters and independents. Conventional wisdom assures that Trump\u2019s off-the-cuff invectives only fuel his critics and overshadow his achievements. In the heart of immigration negotiations, Trump was quoted secondhand as having called Haiti and other formerly Third World countries \u201csh**hole\u201d countries and thus undesirable sources of mass immigration to the U.S. Whatever the reliability of reports of the slur, Trump is certainly not the sort of politician to have said instead, \u201cIt would seem wiser to encourage diverse immigration, including immigration from the most developed countries as well as the least developed\u201d \u2014 even as many people privately agree with Trump\u2019s earthy assessment that immigration should be far more selective and include a far greater variety of countries of origin.<\/p>\n Both Trump\u2019s spoken and electronic stream-of-consciousness venting can be unorthodox, crude and cruel, and often extraneous. But can anyone measure whether and to what degree his Twitter account energizes and widens his base more than it loses him supporters otherwise sympathetic to his agenda? The orthodox wisdom is that Trump should let his achievements speak for themselves, curb his raucous campaign rallies, and restrict his daily tweets to expansions on his agenda and achievement and leave the feuding to subordinates.<\/p>\n When Trump has avoided ad hominem spats, and been filmed conducting policy sessions with his cabinet and congressional enemies and friends, he has looked and acted \u201cpresidential.\u201d How good then must Trump\u2019s record become to overshadow both the prejudices against him and his own inner demons to achieve favorability ratings that will provide coattails for his congressional supporters and fuel an even more ambitious second-year agenda? Again, time is running out, and in the next ten months the economy must boom as never before or Trump must learn to sound more like a Ronald Reagan than a Howard Stern.<\/p>\n Trump is simultaneously at war with Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Once again, the critical element is time in the sense of the looming midterm elections. So far, after months of media speculation and press leaks, there is no evidence of Russian\u2013Trump collusion. Robert Mueller\u2019s investigative team has been riddled by charges of conflicts of interest, workplace unprofessionalism, and political bias.<\/p>\n The basis of the entire writ against Trump, the Fusion GPS\u2013Steele dossier, is now mostly discredited. The file\u2019s lurid sexual accusations alone likely won it notoriety in 2016 among journalists and Obama-administration enablers. The more that is learned about the Steele opposition-research file \u2014 paid for by the Clinton campaign, polluted by Russian rumor-mongering, peddled to the FBI, manipulated by the Obama administration to justify FISA surveillance, likely leaked to pet reporters by Obama-administration and Clinton-campaign officials \u2014 the more apparent it may become that Mueller is investigating Russian collusion in entirely the wrong place.<\/p>\n Another irony is that pushback against the Mueller fishing expedition may prompt reinvestigations into the earlier election-cycle-aborted inquiries about Clinton email improprieties. The Obama administration also likely acted improperly in ignoring the Clinton\u2013Uranium One connections and Hillary Clinton\u2019s violations of agreements with the Obama administration to report the sources of all private donations to the Clinton Foundation during her tenure. So far resistance at both the Department of Justice and the FBI to releasing documents pertaining to all these avenues of interest has stymied House and Senate inquiries.<\/p>\n If the Republicans lose the Congress, these investigations will shut down entirely. Democratic majorities will give Mueller a free hand to do as he pleases without worries about past complaints over the ethical shortcomings of his investigation. Select Intelligence and Judiciary Committee hearings will likely give way in the House to impeachment proceedings.<\/p>\n But if within the next nine months there are new explosive revelations about the improper or even illegal uses of the Steele dossier and the Clinton scandals, while the Mueller team settles for face-saving indictments of former Trump subordinates for transgressions that have little to do with the original Mueller mandate to investigate Russian\u2013Trump collusion, then Trump will win the legal war. In that case, Trump finally will not only weather the collusion crisis but find himself a political beneficiary of one of the most scandalous efforts to subvert a political campaign and improperly surveil American citizens in recent American history.<\/p>\n Trump wages a fourth war against the proverbial mainstream media, whose coverage, according to disinterested analyses, runs over 90 percent anti-Trump. Negative Trump news fuels Trump-assassination chic in popular culture, the rants of late-night-television comedians, the political effort to grandstand with impeachment writs, calls to invoke the 25th Amendment, and lawsuits alleging violations of the emoluments clause. The threats of a Madonna, the raving of Representative Maxine Waters, the boasts of the \u201cResistance,\u201d the efforts of blue states to nullify federal immigration law or to dodge compliance with unwelcome new federal tax statutes, and the conspiracy fables of Representative Adam Schiff are all fueled by media attention and preconceived narratives hostile to Trump. The anti-Trump news is still determined to accomplish what so far the Clinton campaign, Obama holdovers, and deep-state bureaucrats have not: so discredit Trump the messenger that his message becomes irrelevant.<\/p>\n Trump apparently fights his war against the media in the fashion in which toxic chemotherapy battles cancer. His personal and electronic rants against \u201cfake news\u201d and \u201ccrooked\u201d journalists are intended to exhibit media biases and thus discredit negative coverage just before the public tires of Trump\u2019s own off-putting venom.<\/p>\n On the one hand, Trump\u2019s anemic approval ratings might suggest the media are winning in their 24\/7 efforts to portray Trump as a Russian colluder, rank profiteer, distracted golfer, tax cheat, sexual predator, trigger-happy warmonger, or senile septuagenarian.<\/p>\n On the other hand, the media are polling worse than Trump. And his battle has nearly destroyed the credibility of CNN, which has fired marquee journalists for false anti-Trump narratives, been embarrassed by hosts mouthing scatological venom, suffered employees\u2019 hot-mic wishes for Trump\u2019s death, and seen its anchors and special correspondents reduced to on-air rants. For now, no one knows whether Trump\u2019s war against the media is pyrrhic, in that he may defeat his journalist enemies and even render their entire networks discredited, but at such costs that he is no longer politically viable.<\/p>\n Trump is waging a fifth and final war against Democrats. So far Trump has sucked all the oxygen out of the Democratic atmosphere. Politicians and operatives are so obsessed with proving Trump a liar, a cheat, a pervert, a con artist, or an incompetent that they have offered so far no viable opposition leader or alternative agenda. But will just being not-Trump make Democrats preferable?<\/p>\n The centrist Democratic party of the 1990s no longer exists. It has become instead a coalition of patched-together progressive causes. The redistributionism and neo-socialism of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are now Democratic economic mainstays. Barack Obama\u2019s lead-from-behind legacy remains Democratic foreign policy. Identity politics still constitutes the culture of the party establishment.<\/p>\n In more practical terms, for all the animus against Trump the person, his agenda \u2014 tax cuts, deterrence, reindustrialization, middle-class job growth, closing the borders, the melting pot \u2014 is increasingly polling well. In many cases, Trumpism is more popular than Democratic signature issues such as tax hikes, larger government, more entitlements, open borders, more identity politics, and European Union\u2013like internationalism.<\/p>\n The idea of Oprah Winfrey as the 2020 Democratic nominee and the unwillingness of Democrats to secure the border reveal what can happen when a party is reduced to defining itself as not being the incumbent president. The Republicans learned that lesson in their four-time failure to defeat the hated Roosevelt. Democrats in the 1980s had little to offer the country other than not being the supposed buffoon Ronald Reagan. Shutting down the government is also rarely a winning strategy for an out party \u2014 as the Republicans learned in their politically disastrous 1995\u201396 showdown with Bill Clinton.<\/p>\n In 2018, it may be enough for congressional candidates to run on anti-Trump invective without expressing strong views on the issues or identifying with any particular national leader. But it won\u2019t be so in 2020, especially if the Trump agenda grows more popular and Trump allows it rather than himself to become his signature message.<\/p>\n F<\/span>or now, all that is certain about Trump\u2019s first year is the 2016 truism that past prognostications and current polls are irrelevant. The jester candidate, Donald Trump, destroyed, not just beat, his 16 primary rivals. The doomed candidate Trump defeated the most well-financed, experienced, and media-favored Democratic candidate in memory. The inept President Trump\u2019s first year was not liberal or directionless, but marked the most successful and conservative governance since Ronald Reagan\u2019s.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s critics insist that his comeuppance is on the horizon. They assure us that character is destiny. Trump\u2019s supposed hubris will finally earn an appropriately occasioned nemesis. But in the meantime, nearly half the country may be happy that the establishment was not just wrong but nearly discredited in its non-ending, prejudicial dismissal of the Trump agenda and, so far, the successful Trump presidency.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review As President Trump finished his first full year in office, he could look back at an impressive record of achievement of a kind rarely attained by an incoming president \u2014 much less by one who arrived in office as a private-sector billionaire without either prior political office or military […]<\/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":[1160,1092,1091,1090,1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-2Qx","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":11961,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-mythical-trump-hydra\/","url_meta":{"origin":10945,"position":0},"title":"The Mythical Trump Hydra","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 29, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness Many are the hissing heads of the\u00a0polycephalic\u00a0Donald Trump\u2014at least according to the progressive Left and the NeverTrump Right, who see the president of the United States as some sort of mythical nightmare. Here are a few of his supposedly monstrous manifestations. Trump, the Profiteer\u00a0\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12100,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/victor-davis-hanson-democrats-addicted-to-attacking-trump-even-if-impeachment-drive-hurts-them\/","url_meta":{"origin":10945,"position":1},"title":"Victor Davis Hanson: Democrats addicted to attacking Trump \u2013 Even if impeachment drive hurts them","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 15, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Fox News Donald Trump\u00a0certainly is mercurial at times. He can be uncouth. But then again, no president in modern memory has been on the receiving end of such overwhelmingly negative media coverage and a three-year\u00a0effort\u00a0to abort his presidency, beginning the day after his election. Do we\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11994,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/victor-davis-hanson-trump-wages-war-on-progressive-culture-dems-respond-with-trump-derangement-syndrome\/","url_meta":{"origin":10945,"position":2},"title":"Victor Davis Hanson: Trump wages war on progressive culture \u2013 Dems respond with Trump Derangement Syndrome","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 20, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Fox News President\u00a0Trump is\u00a0waging\u00a0a nonstop, all-encompassing war against progressive culture, in magnitude analogous to what 19th-century Germans once called a \"Kulturkampf.\" As a result, not even former President George W. Bush has incurred the degree of hatred from the left that is now directed at Trump.\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12914,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/trumpism-without-trump\/","url_meta":{"origin":10945,"position":3},"title":"“Trumpism without Trump","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 4, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness Six weeks ago, Americans were assured that Donald Trump had left the presidency on January 20, 2021 disgraced and forever ruined politically.\u00a0 Trump was the first president to be impeached twice, and first to be tried as a private citizen when out of office.\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12741,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/trump-faces-a-critical-choice-about-his-political-future\/","url_meta":{"origin":10945,"position":4},"title":"Trump Faces a Critical Choice About His Political Future","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 1, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Donald Trump\u00a0is nearing a crossroads. Those who allege that he has endangered the tradition of smooth presidential transitions by not conceding immediately after the media declared him the loser suffer amnesia. When Trump was elected in 2016, the Washington establishment lost its collective mind.\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12916,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/trumpism-without-trump-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":10945,"position":5},"title":"Trumpism\u2014Without Trump?","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 5, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness Six weeks ago, Americans were assured that Donald Trump had left the presidency on January 20, 2021 disgraced and forever ruined politically.\u00a0 Trump was the first president to be impeached twice, and first to be tried as a private citizen when out of office.\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10945"}],"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=10945"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10945\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10946,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10945\/revisions\/10946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}