Guess what, maybe Trump deserves a second term
There’s never been a leader who has spoken as badly, as often, as this president— but there is only one way to judge him.
God has a special providence for fools, drunkards and the United States of America.
— Otto von Bismarck
Donald Trump is no drunkard, but can he win in November?
He may not win, but certainly he can.
Should he win in November? This is a rough time for Trump. First the coronavirus pandemic, then the wave of protests and emotion following the shocking death of George Floyd has seen his ratings plummet and the betting odds shorten on his opponent, Joe Biden. But the election is still five months away, an eternity in this era of nanosecond attention spans.
Between now and November millions of words will be written and spoken about whether Trump can win. Less than two months ago the odds were overwhelmingly in his favour. Now they have moved against him. But this cycle could turn another half-dozen times.
Less of any analytical use will be said about whether Trump should be re-elected. The legions of Trump haters in Western media and academe cry out for an end to the horror.
A representative example comes from novelist Salman Rushdie, who claims Trump “rules unchecked, and is on his way to despotism”, which shows there is no political statement so ridiculous that a left-wing novelist will not embrace it.
The smaller legions of Trump lovers will with equal silliness equally regard him as the saviour of Western civilisation.
Beyond those two extremes, which occupy an increasingly large share of the political bandwidth, is there a real case in-principle for Trump’s re-election?
I think there is.
But of course the case against Trump is substantial. The strongest argument is that his mouth is not only undisciplined and frequently crude, it is sometimes malicious and damaging. Here is just one example of peak Trump silliness. In all the riots, there was one case of a policeman pushing a man in his mid-70s out of the way. The man was in the officer’s face and the push seemed fairly gentle. But the guy fell backwards on to the road, hit his head and began bleeding profusely. An unfortunate incident, not necessarily police brutality, not really satisfactory either.
Trump’s unbelievable Twitter response was to claim the man appeared to fall harder than he was pushed and maybe the whole incident was a set-up. That is just crazy. This kind of speech is Trump’s greatest offence. It drives everybody mad.
The first US president I was ever really conscious of was John F. Kennedy. Since Kennedy I have generally regarded the US president as a kind of secular pope — the leader of the free world, not only the political leader but a leader in values as well.
History gave us plenty of bad popes. But there was never one who spoke as badly, as often, as Trump. The actual effects of Trump’s words are wildly overstated of course. Barack Obama’s soothing words did not prevent race riots under his presidency and when they became violent Obama didn’t hesitate to call the rioters “thugs”. When Obama does it, it’s an act of statesmanship. When Trump does it, it’s a gothic American nightmare. Go figure.
There are other big problems with Trump. One is that he keeps endlessly reshuffling his cabinet and senior aides. Trump has sacked a secretary of state, two defence secretaries, three national security advisers, a director of national intelligence, a secretary of homeland security and so many White House chiefs of staff I can barely count them. That management style may work for real estate deals. It’s a bad way to run the US government. All these positions are meant to command great institutions of state and provide continuity and reliability, especially in a crisis.
Another problem is that Trump constantly reverses himself. One day he’s going to abolish NATO, the next day he loves it. One day it’s going to be war with North Korea, the next day he loves Pyongyang’s pudgy Stalinist overlord, Kim Jong-un.
But you know the case against Trump already. If you watch any TV news or read any newspaper or website you get the case against Trump all the time.
Bear in mind that an enormous number of the things said about Trump turn out to be not true. There was no improper collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians. It turns out Trump’s first national security adviser, Mike Flynn, had conversations of almost banal blandness with the Russian ambassador that the FBI tapped. Our own ABC spent a fortune on endless Four Corners programs embracing all the Russian conspiracy theories about Trump and it turned out they were all baloney. Flynn’s initial conviction for lying to the FBI now looks a monstrous process abuse.
This is not to say that Trump behaves like a president should. His conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was pretty scratchy and even a bit grubby, casting about for some information on the Biden family’s business activities in Ukraine. It did not remotely rise to being worthy of impeachment, which the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives passed and the Senate naturally rejected.
Trump is both damaged and helped by the wild overreach of his opponents. It’s worth remembering the same folks demonised Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush too. Trump is constantly attacked, and this affects the way he’s seen, but the attacks are often so exaggerated and disconnected from reality that they offer him a kind of political vaccination. CNN and the Democrats have hyperventilated so long and so excessively about Trump, it’s hard to take them seriously.
The only way to judge Trump, then, is on the basis of what he has actually done. And here his record certainly has its negatives, but there is a lot to say in favour of Trump.
Much of what he has done, domestically and internationally, is what he promised he would do. He cut taxes and cut business regulation. As a result, the US economy grew by 3 per cent last year, a fantastic performance. This resulted in a US unemployment rate of about 3.5 per cent. It also resulted in a black unemployment rate of 5.5 per cent, the lowest since records have been kept.
The Economist magazine hates Trump with a passion and as a result cannot write intelligently about him. But before the latest crisis even it was pointing out that the US had never been richer nor more at peace.
Trump left the Paris climate accords, as he promised to do. The accords meant the US had to reach ambitious targets and China had to do nothing. China is a much smaller economy than the US but a much bigger greenhouse gas emitter. Beijing has a long line of coal-fired power stations planned. Trump didn’t see that transferring US industry to China was such a great deal for America. The US’s hi-tech economy is naturally becoming less greenhouse gas-intense and the US states can do whatever they like, or whatever their voters will support, with renewable energy and the rest.
Trump was militarily prudent in the Middle East. If he gets to November without launching a big military campaign, he will be the first president since Jimmy Carter to complete a term in office without invading someone or taking military action designed to change a regime. That’s what he said he’d do too.
At the same time, Trump has substantially increased the US military budget. With the money the US spends on nuclear weapons and other hidden defence costs, it is not too far south of $US1 trillion.
This is more than would be the case under any other president. All too slowly the US military is beginning the business of repair and reorientation necessary after the long ground campaigns of the Middle East. The process is a bit too slow for the strategic circumstances the US is confronting, but it’s hard to imagine any other president doing as much as Trump.
On China, Trump has got more things right than wrong. He has understood the character and extent of the challenge Beijing poses to Washington, indeed to the world, more clearly than other potential US leaders. A lot that Trump says about China is true. A lot that he says is all over the shop. The process under Trump has been sloppy, messy, at times almost chaotic. But a pretty clear direction has emerged.
Trump did not secure the deal he prematurely announced with North Korea. But the stalemate he has arrived at — no new nuclear tests by Pyongyang and no formal relaxation of sanctions — is pretty much what any competent president would have got. Of course, Trump threatened war along the way and used extremely dangerous rhetoric. But the interim outcome is reasonable.
Trump is widely criticised, and with some justice, for not attending to US alliances more solicitously. Yet the bottom line is he has not closed a single US overseas military base or facility. His administration has announced that it is reducing its troop deployments in Germany, though these will still be substantial.
But if there is a long-running crisis in NATO it is entirely caused by European free-riding. The Germans, with their Nazi past, are naturally a bit phobic about their own military. But World War II finished 75 years ago. The Germans use their Nazi past as an excuse to leave all the heavy lifting to the US. There is hardly a European state that lives up even to the basic NATO commitment of spending 2 per cent of gross national product on defence.
Previous presidents complained about this but tolerated it graciously. Trump doesn’t tolerate things graciously. Trump is often uncouth, but when he talks about European free-riding on the US he is speaking the truth. If the US alliance system fails, and I don’t think it will, it will not be Trump’s fault but the fault of feckless US allies that want Washington to do everything for them.
Trump pulled out of the nuclear deal with Iran. It was a bad deal but so far there is no sign of a better one being negotiated, though Trump has made it clear he is open to negotiations. In the meantime, US sanctions mean Iran has vastly less money to spend on its nukes or on supporting international terrorism.
In Southeast Asia, many leaders were skittish about Trump’s impetuousness. But at the end of the day, every nation except Beijing’s clients wants a greater American involvement.
The same is true for India. Japan has done very well with Trump, as has Australia. Trump’s desire to expand the G7 to include India, South Korea and Australia is extremely good news for Canberra. Even his desire to include Russia reflects a basic strategic realism on Trump’s part. He still yearns, you can see, to pull Moscow away from Beijing.
Domestically, Trump promised to secure America’s borders and he has mostly done that.
Finally, although Trump can never summon the idealism and beauty of the American dream, he is always fighting for America, whereas many of his opponents on the left hate America. The New York Times’ ridiculous 1619 Project (the year slaves first came to America) gives support to the idea that the whole purpose of the American project was racial domination and slavery. Franklin Foer, in a sublimely ridiculous piece in The Atlantic, equates the recent US protests with the colour revolutions against dictatorships in Eastern Europe and implicitly equates Trump with dictatorship.
This is pure nuts.
Coronavirus and the Black Lives Matter demonstrations have hurt Trump and destroyed some of his achievements, especially in the economy. But come November US voters will ask: who is best to lead economic recovery, who can safeguard us internationally, who can provide security and justice on our streets? It is by no means clear, on the basis of his record, that Trump is the loser when those are the questions.
