Summer 2019—On The Trump Train Now: Warming To The President And Thoughts On The 2020 Presidential Election

On November 24^th of 2016, I wrote the following passages as part of my fall blog post:

“I was never a fan of Donald Trump. Part of my refusal to jump on the ‘Trump Train’ arose from my suspicion of his policy goals. Too many of Donald Trump’s ideas seem to be colored by notions originally conceived and championed by socialists in the Marxist tradition. That said, it is undeniable that Donald Trump won the presidency because of a wave of anti-socialist sentiment that has swept the nation from coast to coast; once he becomes our president, Donald Trump MUST abide by his mandate and abandon whatever socialistic plans he may have had for leading the American nation. If he does not do this, many of his most enthusiastic supporters will abandon him.

“This Thanksgiving, I am grateful that Hillary Clinton is not going to be my next president. I am glad that many Americans seem to be awakening to a sense of our nation’s awful situation: that government is getting too big and that too many of our politicians have succumbed to the unyielding myth of Marxist socialism…a myth which teaches the dangerously false notion that government can and should solve all of our problems. That myth is certainly not what the United States of America was founded upon, and I am thankful to my Heavenly Father that I have been raised in a family where the truth about America’s greatness has been consistently taught since my childhood. I take this occasion now to rededicate myself to the principles that have made my freedom, peace, and prosperity—all the things I celebrate on Thanksgiving Day—realities to rejoice over and ideals worth defending.”

I think I can hardly be blamed for having such feelings about Donald Trump back then in 2016. After all, my first introduction to Donald Trump as a political figure took place somewhere way back in the dark days of the Obama administration, when as a college student I vividly remember watching a video put out by Trump in which he assured me that he was in possession of a bombshell announcement that, once released, would topple the Obamas from the White House once and for all. Naturally, this bombshell announcement never materialized the way Trump assured me that it would, and I quickly came to think of Donald Trump as an overly-theatrical nut-job who didn’t deserve to be taken seriously in the realm of politics.

(Insert awkward cough right here)

Originally, I never took Trump seriously. I never looked closely at Trump’s plans for making America great again because he always sounded so scatterbrained, so inconsistent, so unnervingly self-contradictory…

…But now that he is president, he has thus far proven himself to generally be a man of his word where his commonsense campaign promises are concerned. After getting over (well, not quite) the shock of his 2016 general election victory, I’ve learned more about Donald Trump’s outlook on America and his plans for its return to greatness, and I can now honestly say that I hope he continues to implement most of them.

There are legitimate reasons for me to talk about the Obama years as dark times, and at the risk of disappointing my leftist acquaintances, “dark” times does not represent an expression of racism. Rather, my use of that term is reflective of the unfortunate trends that became commonplace in America while Barack Obama was president. For eight years, the size and scope of the federal government grew at an alarming rate that clearly put Americans’ economic freedom in jeopardy; the federal debt nearly doubled between the end of 2008 and May of 2016 because of reckless government spending and expansion into even more sectors of private life. Because of this disturbing trend, our country spent the Obama years moving ever closer to a point where our country will be forced to spend far more money servicing the national debt than taking care of our national defense needs, and I think Americans need to wake up and realize that we cannot possibly sustain these levels of federal spending and borrowing. In terms of the national debt, it is tragic to think that there is currently no politician on the horizon who seems willing and able to do anything about federal spending and overreach. Because of this trend, I fear that Americans will continue to see their own economic freedoms becoming more and more limited in the near future.

Increased federal spending has always been accompanied by an increase in federal power, and during Obama’s eight years in the White House, the bureaucratic tyranny of the regulatory state grew at an alarming rate as well. According to the Heritage Foundation, starting in 2009 “the Obama Administration imposed 229 major rules at a cost of $108 billion annually…[but] the actual costs are far greater, both because costs have not been fully quantified for a significant number of rules, and because many of the worst effects—loss of freedom and opportunity, for example—are incalculable.” As a public school teacher who almost lost his job with a California school district this last school year simply because of an ideologically driven and completely impractical set of state regulations, I can personally attest to what the Heritage Foundation referenced as the “incalculable” costs in human freedom and opportunity resulting from the overbureaucratized society in which we now live.

Finally, I think it’s important to note even just in passing that the eight Obama years created a U.S. military and national defense posture that were smaller and weaker than they need to be if America wants to hold any hope of confronting challenges to our sovereignty and freedom from Islamic terrorism and rogue states like North Korea and Iran, let alone major geopolitical foes like Russia and China. I won’t go into the details of how President Obama and his people wrecked America’s foreign policy and gutted our country’s willingness to proactively defend its sovereignty and borders; if you are interested in reading more on those subjects I would direct you to some of my previous blog posts.

Looking back at 2016, all I can say is that I knew what America needed…and what I was so incredibly doubtful that American would get. Back in 2016, our country needed a government that helped give all Americans a chance to provide for their families, participate in positive ways in their communities, and pursue dreams of their own conceiving and shaping. In 2016, I didn’t think we would get that.

I didn’t think we would escape an Obama “third term” in the shape of a Hillary Clinton administration. But escape we did, and despite all my hesitations about the man, Donald Trump has exceeded all my expectations as president of the United States. In general, I believe that because Donald Trump has been our president, our country has enjoyed a stronger economy, a stronger society, and a stronger national defense. More importantly, I am willing to go on record as saying that my belief in the Trump administration’s positive effect on our country justifies my voting for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.

I don’t really care about how anyone might feel about President Trump; regardless of those feelings, I think we should all be able to agree that he has done a great deal to shatter the status quo in Washington, D.C. Everything about American politics has been in flux since his election to the highest office in the land, and it is for this very reason that leftists hate Donald Trump so much. Despite the fact that Donald Trump is far less conservative than a Ted Cruz or a Mike Lee in the truest sense of the term, his disruptive arrival in our nation’s capital and explicit intention to “drain the swamp” of federal politics has big government leftists squirming in uncontrollable discomfort.

Jim Jordan, a Republican representative to Congress from Ohio, once explained this phenomenon that makes Trump so attractive to conservative voters who might otherwise feel trepidation about supporting the president: “The bottom line is [Washington, D.C.] doesn’t like the president because this town is not used to people coming here and doing what they say. But the American people, you all appreciate that very fact. It’s something I appreciate…when you’re around the president, you can sense the love he has for our troops, for our law enforcement, for the American [people]. You can just feel it. And that’s what you want in a commander-in-chief.”

I can add my own testimonial to what Representative Jordan is talking about. As I have watched Trump evolve as a politician and work towards or accomplish his stated campaign goals, I have grudgingly come to appreciate and even admire to a certain extent the man in the White House who has done so very much to dissolve the American left’s hold upon the reins of political and cultural power in our country.

Despite his glaring moral imperfections and stylistic eccentricities (and that’s putting it mildly), there is very little doubt in my mind that Donald Trump has done more to disrupt the American left than someone like Mitt Romney was ever capable of doing or George W. Bush was ever willing to do. Again I say that Donald Trump’s election to the White House has disrupted the political status quo that I have lived under ever since I started paying attention to such things when I was about ten years old.

So many of our politicians said that Obama’s Iran nuclear deal was the only way for the U.S. to move forward in its relationship with that terrorist-sponsoring country, and yet, Donald Trump was willing to call out the deal as nothing more than a way for Iran to feign moderation while stealthily continuing to acquire nuclear weapons. Because President Trump was willing to cancel the deal, and because he was willing to lead the United States in its initiative to diplomatically and strategically isolate Iran as well as impose crippling sanctions on the Iranian economy, the mullahs’ regime is, for the first time in years, struggling to stay afloat.

So many of our environmentally conscious  activists said for years that acceding to the Paris Climate Accord was the only way the United States could appropriately signal to the wider world that it was taking seriously the threat of manmade climate change. President Trump, however, was willing to call the Accord out for what it was: an attempt by global elites to shackle the United States morally and economically while transferring wealth, resources, and sovereignty to the “developing world” of China and the European Union countries.

So many of our diplomats and European allies insisted for years that American support for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was a given, an inherent and unquestionable U.S. security commitment that was far too important to dispense with simply because Europe has become a community of free rider nations totally unwilling to pay for their own security needs DESPITE being more than happy to criticize American foreign policy at almost every turn. I will confess that I was partially taken in by this unthinking status quo, and I will admit that when candidate Trump came along and started bashing NATO, I felt very, very uncomfortable about it. And yet, as President Trump has cajoled and embarrassed some European nations into finally increasing their defense budgets, I have come to admit that questioning the “givens” like NATO is probably exactly what our country needs more of.

So many of our educators and strategic thinkers spent years predicting that China was destined to replace the United States as the world’s foremost superpower, that there was nothing anyone could do to halt the communist regime in Beijing from ruling over the planet and restoring China’s ancient place in the global hierarchy as the center of world commerce and political power. But none of that has stopped Trump and his allies from pointing out that China is actually run by a barbaric government that puts tens of thousands of people into prison camps, rounds up minority groups into concentration and reeducation centers, curtails civil liberties and regularly disregards human rights, and engages in a mercantilist-style economic cold war against the rest of the world that China is winning at only because it cheats, steals, and manipulates its way to the top. I’m not so sure Trump’s trade war against China will work, but I have to say that I am at least grateful to have someone in the White House who is willing to call China’s rulers out for the bullies and disreputable autocrats that they are. According to some of Trump’s economic advisors, China’s threat to our economic dominance of the world is the single greatest political battle of our time. I am not sure that I am ready to embrace the direness inherent in that statement, but I’d rather have a federal government concerned about China than not.

So many of our so-called moralists spent decades pontificating about the moral equivalence of the Holy Land’s Palestinian Islamists with the legitimately democratic society that is the besieged state of Israel. Most delightfully, President Trump has turned that outlook on its head. Trump threw the leftists’ treasured positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict back in their faces by moving the American embassy to Jerusalem and declaring the Golan Heights to be unquestioned Israeli territory. After eight years of Barack Obama’s shameful treatment of Israel, Donald Trump’s close and unflinching support for Israel has been a true breath of fresh air…not to mention that it makes all the strategic, ideological, and moral sense in the world.

So many of our cultural elites predicted with smug certainty that America’s best days were irretrievably behind her. These supposed sophisticates moaned and wailed about the new normality of an inevitable decline in U.S. manufacturing activity, industrial might, economic growth, employment rates, and standards of living. And yet, because of Trump’s attitude, America’s economic outlook for the foreseeable future seems bright again. Economic strength and self-sufficiency are finally being taken seriously again at the federal level of government, and even though dangerous ideologues and charlatans like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and former vice president Al Gore continue to rant and rave that pursuing such goals will only destroy the planet in the very near future, the Trump turnaround in our economy has already offered our nation the potential to soon become the world’s greatest producer and exporter of energy in the form of natural gases and petroleum…another little something I’ve been told almost my entire life would never be possible. But since President Trump has been in office, the United States has moved to become the world’s greatest producer of natural gas, and for the first time in half a century, the United States is exporting more oil than it imports.

So many of our economists assured us that the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency would lead to the Second Great Depression, that by simply allowing Trump in the White House, his irrationality would forever wreck the economy. Instead, after two years of Trump, many people are saying we are now enjoying the best economy our country has seen in the past twenty years. The “Obama economy” of yesteryear is behind us, and economic growth, according to some analysts, has doubled since Trump took office. This is a rather remarkable development given that under Obama, the economy did recover from the Great Recession, but at a far slower rate than has been historically expected. Trumponomics has proven to be all about putting American business interests first and acknowledging that economic growth is everything. Indeed, Trump and his advisors have correctly surmised that growth makes all of the country’s other economic problems far more solvable, and that includes the national debt. Appropriately, the Trump Administration has accepted that deregulation is key to facilitating a pro-growth business environment, and although Trump is regularly derided as a protectionist, he himself has avowed that he does not embrace the term when applied to himself. Rather, Trump’s approach to international trade is centered upon ensuring that other countries which have historically taken advantage of the United States are made to play fairly and by the rules.

So many of my Republican Party leaders insisted for years that all they could ever hope to achieve was a slowdown of America’s suicidal march towards a socialist European-esque future in which the United States was sure to lose its sovereignty, its sense of itself as an exceptional civilization in history, and its unique and religiously-inspired culture of freedom and individual accountability and achievement. Through all my years of observing and participating in politics, I have only rarely encountered truly inspirational political leaders on the right, and very few of them have fought against the left with the ferocity demonstrated by Donald Trump. In fact, in the words of historian Victor Davis Hanson, “Trump so unhinged the left that it finally tore off its occasional veneer of moderation, and showed us what progressives had in store for America.”

I’m happy that the left’s mask has been so stripped away. The choice offered by the two significant American political parties has rarely been this clear. Recently, I heard a caller to the Rush Limbaugh radio program explain that in the presidential election coming up in 2020, Americans have to make a very simple and straightforward choice: the choice between socialism and capitalism. Right now, the Democratic Party has unabashedly become the party of socialism, the party of “Medicare for All,” prohibitively high taxation, the packing and politicization of the Supreme Court, and the restriction of our First Amendment freedoms and the elimination of the spirit of the Second. The Democrats are, without a doubt, the party of open borders, race-based reparations, the irresponsibility of eliminating student debt, the immorality of abortive infanticide, and the complete breakdown of law and order.

And on the other side, we have the Republicans. We have Trump. And to all those horrors mentioned in the previous paragraph, Trump says “no more.”

Can President Trump win reelection in 2020? Earlier this year, Ben Shapiro commented favorably on one of President Trump’s more reasonable Tweets by saying that the president needs to stick to the message that the Democrats have become nothing more than the party of on-demand abortion, crime, open borders, and high taxes. According to Shapiro, this will be the best strategy to ensure that the Republicans maintain control of the White House.

It’s important to remember that back in 2016, Donald Trump  defeated sixteen Republican primary rivals (many of whom were, quite honestly, some of the most talented and gifted politicians of our day) before going on to defeat Hillary Clinton in the general election, an election which I was sure would be hopeless for candidate Trump. Does the incumbent President Trump have a chance in 2020? In 2016, Trump enjoyed an advantage that I falsely trusted would be his undoing—if it was true, which was something that I actually doubted at the time: he was the ultimate outsider, a surprise David who went into the fight with his Goliath with far more faith than I ever could have mustered on his behalf. Some commentators believe that people like me need to have more faith in Trump’s ability to use his record to convince voters that he is still the better option in any presidential race against what the Democrats are offering up to us. According to this line of thinking, as long as unemployment remains at or near current levels, as long as inflation doesn’t rear its ugly head, and as long as we stay out of any major military conflicts, Trump seems destined to win another presidential election. It is true that Trump seems to enjoy a far more favorable position going into his reelection bid than some of his more recent predecessors; despite all the media hype I heard from major news sources, the 2018 mid-term elections actually weren’t all that disastrous for Republicans, who should have taken far more significant hits in Congress when historical election patterns are considered. I’m not entirely sure that this signifies an easy victory for Trump in the near future, but I did get the sense that during the 2018 mid-terms, Republican candidates who distanced themselves from Trump generally fared poorly in the end. I also get the sense that when push comes to shove, and voters are faced with the stark choice of Donald Trump versus the eventual Democratic nominee, many might actually pull the lever for Trump if only to vote against another Hillary Clinton-esque offer of returning to the era of Obama. Indeed, I believe it would be wise for Donald Trump to portray himself as the much-needed defender of American capitalism in the face of outright Democratic socialism.

It seems to me that the Democrats cannot help themselves on this count; it seems evident, thus far, that they are nearly incapable of stopping the hard-left ideological turn their party has taken in the last three years. They continue to push the most outlandish of leftist policy proposals, some of which were pointed out by Victor Davis Hanson back in March of this year: the Green New Deal, a wealth tax, income tax rates of 70 percent, the abolition of the federal government’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, the abolition of the Electoral College, race-based reparations for slavery, legal infanticide masquerading as abortion, the cancellation of student debts, free college tuition, Medicare for all, and the banning of private insurance plans! Hanson himself expressed confidence that if the Democrats do end up running on a platform including many of these policy proposals, they are sure to lose and Donald Trump’s reelection will be ensured as he will enjoy the benefit of being viewed as the more moderate and stable choice. I wish I could be as confident as Professor Hanson, but I am not. Candidates like Joe Biden scare me. Even though Biden is a poor excuse for a political leader, in my imagination all it could possibly take to put him in the White House would be for Barack Obama, the “Magic Negro” himself, to heartily endorse and campaign for him. In many ways, I think the Obama touch could make something as sinister as the Mueller investigation pale in comparison in terms of its damaging effects on the Trump reelection bid.

Despite some worries from others on the political right, I don’t actually feel that investigations into Trump’s alleged past misconduct are going to yield any substantive results for leftists who hope to abort the Trump administration and boost the Democratic candidates’ chances in 2020. Thus far, I think such shenanigans have ultimately helped to make Trump more popular or, at the very least, more energized as a political campaigner. I sense that high-level players like Nancy Pelosi understand this. All-in-all, I believe that Trump may be in a stronger position for reelection than most of his less savvy political foes may be bargaining for. As the political left continues to drag the Democratic Party further and further down the road of cultural, moral, and social insanity, I think Trump’s position will be strengthened. When it comes to choosing a moderate candidate capable of making a commonsense appeal to the American people, the Democrats are looking at an ever-shrinking window of opportunity; as 2016 hinted at, the American electorate probably isn’t quite as far gone as Christopher Peterson assumed in the wake of the devastating presidential election of 2012.

Democratic chances at victory in the upcoming presidential election may not be too rosy. While commentators like Victor Davis Hanson go on and on about Trump’s virtues, the editor of National Review, Jonah Goldberg, recently pointed out weaknesses in the Democrats’ political agenda and how those will factor into the election. According to Goldberg, Trump usually seems to lose in polls that ask American respondents to consider Trump against a generic, theoretical Democratic candidate. Personally, I think Mr. Goldberg is on to something with this; in my estimation, American voters would find it easy to abandon Trump in favor of a conceptually perfect Democratic candidate that figuratively rides in on a white horse to save Election Day at the last minute. But there’s the problem!  On Election Day in 2020, President Trump will most likely not be running against a generic Democrat (I still think someone like Joe Biden could be an exception to this)! President Trump, for all his lack of likeability, has at least stuck to the principles of his original campaign; he has actually tried to keep his campaign promises, and many of those original principles and promises resonated deeply with a wide swath of the American public. Even though Trump is seen as a callous brute by many voters, I suspect many of those same voters share my grudging feeling of admission that Trump’s ideals are at least more in line with reality when compared to the far-left Democrats. It is for this reason that I would urge President Trump to do everything he can to go on the offense and illustrate the left’s insanity to the American people. After all, that insanity seems to only be increasing as time goes on. Campaigning on kooky policy ideas and a hatred of Donald Trump are pretty much guaranteed to be significant ingredients in the 2020 Democratic strategy. Trump should do everything in his power to get the Democrats to overplay their hand. According to Jonah Goldberg, President Trump may not be able to win the election on his own merits, but in the context of a basically binary election between himself and what the Democrats are currently offering up to the American people, he can certainly pull off a 2020 election victory.

As always, the election will be determined by the voters of this country, not some scheming international cadre of Russian-sponsored intelligence agents. The 2020 presidential election will be decided by an electorate that still manages to surprise me from day to day. I recently heard a story related by Stephen Moore, an economist who advised President Trump during his run for president and during the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. In the telling of this story, Moore explained how he often tries to maintain his anonymity in casual run-ins with others because he knows so well the hateful characterization of Trump and his supporters that has currently gripped most American media sources and outlets. A while back, Moore was walking the streets of Houston, Texas during a break in activities related to a speaking engagement he then had in the city. As he was walking the streets, a Hispanic woman recognized his face from one of his previous television appearances. This woman approached him with the exclamation, “Hey! You’re the guy who appears on TV and talks about economic stuff!” Incorrectly sensing a confrontation in the making, Moore denied knowing what the woman was talking about. However, the woman was insistent and stood her ground, forcing Moore to sheepishly admit his identity and relationship with President Trump. As he braced for the impact of the woman’s assuredly scornful remarks, Moore was shocked when the woman asked him to deliver a message to the White House whenever Moore eventually returned to Washington, D.C.

What was that message?

The woman simply told Stephen Moore that for the first time in a long while, she had received a bonus from her boss at work, an additional $2,500 that she was planning on using for a family vacation that had been in postponement for years.

“Tell Donald Trump, ‘thanks,’” she said.

By the end of election night in 2016, I had many, many reasons to be surprised. Despite what the media says, despite my living in the heart of the “Resistance” to Trump here in California, and despite my own ingrown cynicism and gloominess, I am eager to be similarly surprised on election night in 2020.

--Christopher Peterson, July 30^th, 2019