Thoughts on the Alabama election and Donald Trump

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It would have been nice to have kept the Alabama seat in Republican hands, but the truth is Trump doesn’t need it for now — he’s doing great on his own.

Illustrated edition Trump not a sexual predatorI’d be lying if I said I was pleased about what happened tonight in Alabama. I strongly feel that no Republican candidate should be taken down at the last minute by scurrilous claims based upon long ago memories from women who have shown themselves to be unreliable or even dishonest.

The reality, though, is that the media has been pounding away for weeks (“pedophile, pedophile, pedophile”) and that stuff seeps into people’s brains subliminally. It’s like old commercial jingles. Just being alive in the 1960s and 1970s meant that you could then (and probably still can now) sing a word-perfect rendition of the Oscar Meyer Weiner song.

Thanks to the media, Alabamans were starting to sing, “My candidate is a pedophile,” something that was grossly untrue even if one gave maximum credence to the WaPo’s attack dogs. Even if one assumed solely for the sake of argument that those women had no agenda and were remembering with perfect accuracy events from 40 years ago, the worst facts adduced were that Moore liked teenage girls, which does not pedophile make. That didn’t stop anyone on the Left, though, and apparently affected enough people on the Right.

Here are a couple of other thing to consider is that, while Moore is a stalwart conservative, he’s also a loose cannon. Anything he did that was the least bit . . . um, eccentric, would have been used to tar Trump and Republicans. While it’s true that Trump is successfully beating back the media, his life will be easier if he doesn’t have to deal with a whackadoodle Republican in his train.

The second thing to think about is that, had Moore been elected, the media and the Democrats (as if there’s a difference!) would have used him as a cudgel to drive Trump out on sex scandal grounds. I’ve already explained why I think that’s a ridiculous standard in Trump’s case (the voters knew who he was and elected him anyway) but, again, this deprives Lefties of some ammunition.

That’s the Moore issue. I want to make the rest of this post about Trump. Let me start by repeating Trump’s pitch-perfect congratulations to Doug Jones, along with his cheerful reminder to supporters that the ideological battle is scarcely over:

As I see it, Trump has gotten little mileage out of Congress until just a few weeks ago, when the Stupid Party finally got its act together about taxes. Before that, Trump may as well not have had a majority in Congress. Moreover, if tax reform is as good for America and Americans as I think it will be, the elections in November 2018 really will be a whole new ball game for Trump and those Republicans who’ve learned any lessons from his presidency to date. And what would those lessons be?

Trump’s biggest successes as president have had nothing to do with Congress. He’s successful despite it.

An email is making the rounds among my conservative friends in which they share what they think about President Trump. The consensus is that they don’t like the man, but they sure do like what he’s doing. And that’s what I’ll talk about here.

I’ve decided that, unlike my friends, I like Trump quite a lot. I like him because, as Evan Sayet said, “he fights.” McCain and Romney were too “dignified” to fight, so they lost ignominiously.

Trump’s texts and bizarre statements are part of his pugilistic charm. He makes the Left crazy and he keeps drawing Lefties into unforced errors on their part. We’ve certainly seen that in the past week as an unhinged media published one false story after another.

Those mis-typed tweets or off-the-cuff statements usually prove that Trump isn’t a moron but is, rather, crazy like a fox. It was thanks to his Pocahontas remark at a ceremony honoring Code Talkers that most Americans got introduced to a fact that previously only conservatives knew: namely, that Elizabeth Warren had lied about her ancestry in order to obtain a staff position at Harvard. Americans don’t like liars and cheaters.

I definitely like Trump’s appointments to the federal judiciary, from Justice Gorsuch on down. As you may recall, I was one of those who argued during both McCain’s and Romney’s candidacies that the Supreme Court mattered and that people had to hold their noses and vote for those jokers. As Justice Scalia’s untimely death reminded us, we were fools to hope that elderly Leftist judges would leave the bench during Obama’s presidency. Sadly, it was an elderly conservative justice who did.

Thinking about it, though, maybe we’re lucky that McCain and Romney missed the presidential boat. Both would undoubtedly have nominated squishy conservatives who, in an effort to appease the writers at the New York Times, began to trend hard Left over the years. Trump, bless his heart, has managed to get Gorsuch on the Supremes and several stalwart strict constructionists into the lower courts.

With Jones in Congress, that’s going to stop, but I hope only temporarily. By November 2018, voters should realize that Trump needs a Republican Congress if for no other reason than to rein in a maddened judiciary that believes it’s a little bit legislative, a little bit executive, and a whole lot unconstrained by the Constitution.

I truly like that Trump has allowed the military to run wars. He sets the goals and the parameters and then lets them fight. The result is that ISIS, which seemed unstoppable while Obama led from behind and micromanaged minimal military action, is now a squealing bunch of former bullies who need to be obliterated as thoroughly as the Nazis were.

I love that Trump finally followed through on the long-standing American promise to move its embassy to Jerusalem. This isn’t just because I’m a Zionist and believe that Jerusalem is not only the historic capital of the Jewish people (the de jure capital, if you will), but is also the de facto capital of the modern state of Israel. Pretending otherwise is not only foolish and cowardly, it allowed the Palestinians to have a cause. That cause is gone now and, with Sunni Arabs making nice with Israel over their fear of Iran, it’s high time the Palestinians acknowledge that the caravan has moved on. They need to stop barking and start building a healthy community. Trump’s decision to align American reality with Israeli reality will help.

I really like that Trump believes in America and Americans. Instead of telling us that we’re racist, lazy, and selfish, as Obama did, Trump tells us that we’re a great people — and clearly expects us to live up to his praise. I know people associate Trump with Norman Vincent Peale’s “Power of Positive Thinking,” but I also associate Trump will Dale Carnegie. Carnegie understood that, while there’s a time for constructive criticism, no one inspires people by berating them; instead, virtuous and charismatic leaders inspire people by recognizing that which is good in them and encouraging them to live up to their own best qualities.

But most of all, I really like Trump because he is slowly but steadily returning America to the rule of law. The single most toxic thing Obama did was to abandon the rule of law. He did this through executive orders that violated Congressional laws. He did this by allowing his agencies to avoid the normal review process and write actual laws. He did this by refusing to implement America’s laws, most notably the laws about immigration. (As always, I like immigration. I just believe that a nation must follow its own laws. If it doesn’t like the outcome, it changes the laws, rather than flouts them.) He did this by allowing his Justice Department to become completely politicized — so much so that it’s entirely possible that the DOJ and FBI used a fake, Democrat-produced Russian dossier to obtain a FISA order to spy on the opposition candidate during a presidential election, something that dwarfs Watergate, the Teapot Dome scandal, and any other scandal in federal history.

A nation without the rule of law is a banana republic. Business gets done in a banana republic through corrupt and brute force. It is the antithesis of what America was and what America should be.

Trump, by reversing unconstitutional executive orders; reining in rogue agencies; and seeding the federal court system with judges constrained by the Constitution, statutes, and case precedent, rather than using their emotions as a legal yardstick, is well on his way to becoming the most consequential president since Lincoln or Jefferson.

And here’s the really good news: While it would have been nice to have an entirely Republican Congress, the fact is that, having passed the tax law, Trump will manage just fine for the next few months without a bunch of lying, campaign pledge breaking, cowardly, querulous politicians doing nothing but degrading the conservative brand.

*****

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