What Trump gets right
Judging by my email, Donald Trump’s remaining fans — of which there are many — firmly believe the elites still don’t get it.
As the Republican nominee’s defenders see it, fancypants city-dwellers, well-paid media snobs, academics in their ivory towers — the “monolithic, suffocating liberal swamp” to borrow a delightful phrase published in the Financial Post last week — all fail to grasp what Trump represents. Even some people who don’t particularly like Trump himself, who see him, as Rex Murphy put it, as “a Ferrari of an ego and a Lada of a brain,” find his know-it-all critics hard to take: a bunch of out-of-touch highbrows who haven’t a clue about the world outside their privileged and protected bubble.
Maybe they’ re right, though you’d have to be a particularly dim bulb not to get the message by now. Anyone who paid any attention to the GOP selection process, the 12 debates, nine forums, the primaries and caucuses in 50 states and five territories, culminating in last week’s finale in Cleveland, where the crowd chanted “Lock her up, lock her up” at the mention of Hillary Clinton, would have a hard time missing the fact that a lot of Americans are fed up with the Washington mess.
It’s Trump’s genius that he hit on the right message at the right time for a very large body of people who feel utterly alienated from the process meant to serve their interests, who view politicians as the problem, rather than the solution, who can see no alternative but to burn the whole ugly, self- serving edifice to the ground and replace it with something new.
But even if the Trumpites are right, and the academics, the media hacks, the pundits- for- hire and their vast supply train of selfsatisfied “progressives” have missed the point, there’s still a big hitch in the notion of a Trump presidency. It’s this: Trump may have identified the problem, but he’s manifestly not the man to solve it. His 75- minute oration at last week’s convention was a testament to that fact; the newly crowned presidential nominee offered no concrete solutions other than, “Believe me, it will happen and it will happen fast.”
Sure, he has a vision of an America he’d like to see, one in which illegal immigrants are kept out, trade deals are reworked to favour the U.S ., foreigners are put on notice to smarten up and terrorists are confined to the grave, but he offered no means of achieving any of it, other than his personal conviction that he’s the one and only man able to make it happen.
Tearing down a rotten system is always satisfying, but centuries of experience suggest it’s a dangerous practice to undertake in the absence of a better alternative. You can go back as far as you want: to the destruction of the Roman Republic, leading to 400 years of rule by emperors so powerful they could declare themselves gods, ending in a collapse so all-encompassing it produced 1,000 years of cultural and political darkness; to the overthrow of the despotic, decrepit French monarchy, only to have it replaced by the Terror, the guillotine and ultimately 18 years of Napoleonic wars; or the end to 3,000 years of Chinese emperors and warlords, making way for the brutalities of Mao’s communist regime.
Or, more recently, there’s the case of Washington’s own incursion into Iraq, which ended the savage dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, but neglected to prepare anything workable to install in its place. One of the final speakers in Cleveland, PayPal co- founder Peter Thiel, proclaimed that “it’s time to end the era of stupid wars,” while failing to note it was a Republican president backed by a Republican Congress who started the most recent one. The result is on display across the Middle East for all to see.
Regime change, which is what Trump is advocating for America, does work on occasion. The establishment of democracies in Germany and Japan after the Second World War are notable examples. But it took years to accomplish, trillions of dollars in support and a military presence that continues to this day. Trump says he’ ll have results the day after he takes the oath of office.
Aversion to Trump, whether it springs from elitists or otherwise, doesn’t derive from an inability to understand the problem. It’s based on the belief — backed by mountains of evidence — that he lacks the skills, temperament, character and experience to produce the solution. That, in fact, he’ ll make it much worse. And it will persist until he provides a credible reason to believe otherwise, other than, “Trust me, it’s gonna happen.”
HE CLEARLY SEES THE PROBLEMS. THAT’S TRUE. HE JUST DOESN’T KNOW HOW TO FIX THEM.