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| The Trump Message and Messenger |
| 2017-03-14 |
| h/t Instapundit Every president has both a personality and an agenda. Sometimes they work in tandem, sometimes they don’t. Bill Clinton’s charm enhanced his platform--until his sexual appetites nearly wrecked it. Barack Obama was both charismatic and snarky, sometimes turning off and sometimes wooing his opponents. Richard Nixon’s neuroses finally empowered his enemies and ruined his foreign policy initiatives. Ronald Reagan’s upbeat persona helped convince the public to "stay the course" with his bitter anti-inflationary medicine. The outsider Donald Trump faces the same dilemma but in a fashion rarely seen before. For now there are two manifestations of Trump. First is Trump’s message: that of the populist counterrevolutionary determined to recalibrate the last half-century of liberal and therapeutic government and its affiliated culture. Second is Trump the messenger: the ex-reality TV star who tweets nonstop in the early morning hours often to the outrage of his enemies, to the delight of his supporters, and to the embarrassment of the undecided. The media focuses on Trump the messenger, either because they are not interested in his message or because they see the personal destruction of Trump as essential to the implosion of his agenda. ...Even as Trump tweets, quietly he is also attempting--both through executive orders and anticipated congressional action--landmark deregulation, tax reform, and health care reformulations. If successful, he will remake the economy, tilt the Supreme Court rightward, and prune the deep state. He has green lighted energy production, including coal, natural gas and oil, whose consequence could prove an increasing bonanza for the United States and its allies. ...The point is not that after two months Trump has achieved radical reform or has won over skeptics, only that he embraced a conservative correction of progressivism beyond what most past Republican presidents have envisioned or what congressional conservatives believed was possible after 2008. Because he has rhetorical gifts and personal charm, Trump could prove to be a dynamic president if his own excesses do not eventually empower his enemies. ...For all of Trump’s blasts, so far he has survived the press assaults and faux-scandals. We have reached a point of progressive exasperation in which New York Times columnists compare him to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor or have asked the IRS (apparently on the theory that the agency was long ago prone to political corruption in the Obama era of Lois Lerner) to commit a felony by leaking Donald Trump’s tax returns. ...In trying to destroy Trump rhetorically, the media has instead committed veritable suicide, and it will never restore the patina that it is fair, disinterested and competent. The tumor of Obama-era obsequiousness has terminally metastasized into Trump Derangement Syndrome. ...For now, only one thing remains certain: the candidate whom the Republican establishment most disliked has the greatest potential in a generation to stop the progressive project and enact the agendas that the Republican establishment most wants. And that paradox has become a source of both great wonderment--and fear. |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |