VDH:
In every single week of the Trump presidency, the investigators and attorneys of FBI Director James Comey or, subsequently, of special counsel Robert Mueller, have leaked information that President Donald Trump was under investigation for either colluding with the Russians or obstructing justice—allegations so far without any substantiating evidence.
In the case of Comey, we now know that his office or sympathetic third-parties leaked to the press false stories that Trump was under FBI investigation at precisely the time that the careerist Comey was privately reassuring the president himself that he was in fact not being investigated.
The appointment of Mueller was a concession to opposition demands that Trump appoint a Lawrence Walsh-type Special Prosecutor. The Comey-Mueller investigations and leaks occur simultaneously with House Intelligence member Adam Schiff’s passive-aggressive and often pompous announcements of evidence of Russian collusion—including raising the specter of a Grand Jury investigation—that are never followed by any evidence.
Since January 2017, the Congress ceased being a legislative body. It is now a Star-chamber court determined to decapitate the presidency.
Never in the history of the republic have there been so many legislative and political simultaneous efforts to 1) sabotage the Electoral College, 2) sue to overturn the presidential vote in key swing states, 3) boycott the Inauguration, 4) systematically block presidential appointments, 5) surveille, unmask, and leak classified or privileged information about the elected president, 6) nullify federal law at the state and local level, 7) sue to remove the president by invoking the Emoluments Clause, 8) declare Trump unfit under the 25th Amendments, 9) demand recusals from his top aides, 10) cherry-pick sympathetic judges to block presidential executive orders, 11) have a prior administration’s residual appointees subvert their successor, and 12) promise impending impeachment.
And that is only the political effort to remove the president.
Simultaneously, the media, Hollywood, popular culture, street theater, and the universities hand-in-glove seek to remove Trump from office through the dissemination of fake news as well as deep state leaks—coarsening the culture to such a degree that Trump is reduced to an impotent pariah.
The hydra-headed Resistance issues both explicit and metaphorical threats of presidential assassination, descends to scatological and obscene smears, cheers on campus disruptions and street theater, and persists in constant harangues in the press that Trump is unfit to remain President.
Why the unhinged furor?
Trump was elected to serve roughly 48 months. His progressive enemies are increasingly desperate. Despite an historic five-month assault that has demonized his person and ossified his legislative agenda, Trump is still systematically undoing the Obama agenda through appointments and Obama “pen-and-phone”-like executive orders.
In terms of losing state legislatures and governorships, the Congress, the Supreme Court and the presidency, the Obama progressive project has all but ruined the Democratic Party. And with such catastrophic losses of political power, the left grows less introspective and only more venomous—as if invective can do what appeals to voters have not.
But can Trump survive the incessant onslaught, as the street, the progressive party and the media ratchet up their collective subversions month by month? Is there any way out of the progressive labyrinth?
Trump’s future hinges on three propositions: 1) legislative momentum that shifts public attention to Trump’s relatively successful nascent efforts to reform government and dismantle the progressive project; 2) a continued upswing in the economy that comes to fruition with 3 percent per annum economic growth; and 3) the creation of political deterrence, characterized by a shift from the defensive to offensive that will warn progressives to cease their efforts at delegitimizing the president.
Momentum. The Congress must ensure that reform of Obamacare and the tax codes are finished this year. At this late date, compromises that achieve 70 percent of the administration’s intention become iconic and far preferable to even principled stasis.
Doing nothing only cements the idea that the Resistance is successfully blocking all Trump’s initiatives and will win more adherents to its supposedly successful efforts. Only legislative motion will change that narrative. If the Republican-controlled Congress cannot pass conservative reform legislation, then the party has all but conceded the 2018 midterm elections, which will usher in Democratic efforts to impeach the president. And if Republicans cannot act when they control both the Congress and the White House, then what good are they anyway as a party? And who, then, will shape the future trajectory of the country—a minority Democratic party, street theater, the likes of Maxine Waters and Stephen Colbert, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, campus bullies, the media, the universities, or Hollywood’s popular culture?
It is Still the Economy, Stupid. Psychology plays an underappreciated role in fostering economic growth. Already employment is up; the stock market is booming; and energy production presses ahead—all on the assumption that Trump’s initial executive orders on gas and oil production and deregulation, as well as cabinet appointments, are mere harbingers of even more pro-growth tax and health care reform to come. The opposite sloganeering of ‘you didn’t build that’ and ‘now is not the time to profit’ is ‘make America great again.’
