Saying What No One Else Wants to Say About Trump

He’s been called everything nasty under the sun and has been subjected to the most massive, determined, and irrational campaign to destroy him any president has ever faced. At CPAC he showed how he has weathered the storm. His presentation was relaxed, conversational, refreshingly and appealingly candid, and very much in command of his growing base of supporters.

Those who back him have praised him for many things. For being a fighter, a deadly counterpuncher, a bold outsider, a shrewd negotiator, a skillful tactician, and a tireless achiever and survivor. What no one seems to want to say out loud about this man who arrived on the presidential stage with no previous political experience is what should be dead obvious to everyone, friend and foe alike. Donald Trump is a brilliant politician, very possibly a political genius without peer in American history.

Democrats can’t admit it because it’s indispensable to their characterizations of Trumpian incompetence that he NOT be a politician at all, but an amateur accident hopelessly over his head in Washington DC. The GOPe can’t admit it for the same reasons. And the army of ardent Trump devotees can’t admit it because it doesn’t square with the symbolism of his — and their — electoral triumph. He is the man on the white horse, the bull in the china shop, the fly in the ointment, the U.S. Cavalry arriving in the nick of time, the “flying fickle finger of fate” poking the DC Uniparty and its legions of corrupt professional politicians in the eye.

The pundits know but can’t bring themselves to say it, because it makes them look as dull, cliched, shallow, and myopic as they are. He is a far more gifted student of politics than they could ever be in their wildest dreams.

How great a politician is Donald Trump? If he were a pitcher, he’d have the best curveball, slider, screwball, knuckleball, spitball, beanball, change-up, AND (if all else fails) blazing fastball in the game. His winning of the nomination and election wasn’t luck. It was a combination of a strategy and tactics so original no one was prepared for them. The campaigns did not consist solely of bravado and instinct. Trump’s electoral math and consequent patterns of campaigning and spending were deadly precise. His whole campaign cost a pittance and not only defeated but sank the whole fleet of 20+ candidates who were all, always, running directly against him more than any other. That’s no amateur political performance. That’s a political masterpiece.

His survival in office — and concurrent policy successes — after an inauguration that featured staged riots against his election were no accident either. Two of the most lauded presidents in history for their political acumen were Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon. Both endured their own grave presidential ordeals to which Trump’s can be compared.

Clinton managed his way through the Lewinsky scandal, escaped conviction in the Senate after being impeached for perjury, and finished out his second term with a checkered legacy we needn’t debate here. His survival strategy was to send out phalanxes of legal mouthpieces to doubletalk the charges away for so long that in the end everyone was simply too sick of the whole topic to keep going. If Clinton had made the unforced errors Nixon did during Watergate, he would have been knocked out of office. Perjury is a more serious crime than the Watergate burglary was. But Clinton always had his party and powerful political constituencies behind him, willing to say anything, in exactly the same words, until something really became nothing in the public mind, while the press reported the news with a veneer of objectivity, or neutrality or patience with the process or whatever you want to call their thumb on the scale, that also served to exhaust the electorate.

Nixon failed to remain in office a year and a half after being inaugurated for his second term, won by the biggest electoral landslide in history. The Watergate Scandal that led to his resignation was, as I have written* previously, a successful political coup orchestrated largely by the press and supported eagerly by the Democratic Party, always unified to the nth degree when they smell blood in the water. If Clinton had faced the same monolithic wall of press hostility Nixon did, he could not have survived either. Both Nixon and Clinton were bloodied and rendered politically impotent by the gauntlet they had to run.

Now consider Trump. His electoral college win was prodigious, but he lost the popular vote and so began in the MSM reportage as a minority president and possibly an illegitimate one. The Democrats hated him as much or more than they hated Nixon, and they had the fevered, even outrageously unethical, backing of a press whose Trump coverage was more than 90 percent negative from the 2016 nominating conventions onward, up to this very day. Trump’s own party was aggrieved by his crushing of the GOPe candidates, embarrassed by the exposure his immigration stance represented to their own lobbyist-paid positions, and infuriated by both his amateur status on the national political stage and the apparent hubris of his seeming so unconcerned by their hostility. Meanwhile, the forces arrayed against Trump weren’t a gang of postgraduate radical activists masquerading as journalists but the gray troops of the government legal establishment itself, the FBI, the Department Of Justice, the IRS, and layers of bureaucrats in the State Department, as well as key judges in the FISA and federal district courts. Plus all of the print press, cable and broadcast news networks, Hollywood’s most outspoken celebrities, and even supposedly conservative magazines like National Review and The Weekly Standard.

Trump’s own Attorney-General betrayed him right out of the gate, recusing himself from the investigation of ginned up Russian Collusion rumors about the campaign, and the anti-Trump mole who inherited Sessions’s abdicated responsibility chose a special prosecutor who was a walking forest of conflicts of interest, with ties to Trump foe James Comey, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama, among many others.

Thus began a highly organized, well financed, and blatantly illegal conspiracy to overthrow a sitting president of the United States, with the mainstream media serving as eager accomplices in a 24/7 propaganda effort that beggared whatever Clinton or Nixon had to face.

As is becoming finally known now, from the first there was no substance to, no evidence for, the collusion accusations. The strategy for taking out Trump was to use his political inexperience against him, to press him so hard that he would make one or more fatal mistakes even the pros make — fall into one of the prosecutor’s perjury traps, ignore some letter of the law that could be defined clearly as obstruction of justice, interfere illegally in the processes or with the personnel of the investigation staff, or attempt illegal coverups after the fact of events, people, and transactions being scrutinized in microscopic detail by ruthless federal attorneys.

The result? None of it worked. Trump navigated the perfect storm of legal, political, and media forces united against him without making the anticipated fatal errors and somehow managed at the same time to 1) get two conservative justices approved for the Supreme Court, 2) pass one of the biggest tax cuts in the nation’s history, 3) renegotiate trade deals with Mexico, Canada, China, and the EU, 4) withdraw from the socialist-led Paris Climate Accords, 4) eliminate ISIS as a hegemonic threat in the Middle East, 5) begin the first serious negotiations for the denuclearization of North Korea, 6) end the ObamaCare mandate on which the failed program depends, 7) eliminate 30,000 business-damaging federal regulations, 8) begin building his famous Wall at the southern border, 9) achieve energy independence for the U.S. for the first time in decades, 10) effect enormous improvements in American economic performance, including the return of 300,000 lost manufacturing jobs, record lows in black and Hispanic unemployment, a 3+ percent growth rate thought gone forever, a booming stock market, and a return to high levels of consumer confidence in the future.

A president who avoids malevolent political traps while simultaneously achieving more policy successes in two years than any previous president in the last hundred years cannot be described as an amateur politician, a mediocrity who bluffed and blundered his way to some lucky outcomes, or an instinctive con man who could sell ice cubes to an Eskimo. He is a politician extraordinaire, a politician’s politician, and no matter how much one and all hate to admit it, he knows what he is doing. Whatever happens from this moment on, he has already been a great president. That’s a bitter draft for the egomaniacal cretins who have tried to block the path of this tank on the move.

* See also Nixon’s Watergate Downfall @rflaird.com.