Trump must lose, bigly

At last! The day when the achievements of Donald J. Trump will finally be recognised by the American people. And, let’s face it, there are so many achievements worth recognising…

Trump has made infidelity and porn-star sex great again, especially among the evangelical right. Their moral high ground has been redeveloped for condos and a casino, while this president has given permission to future American leaders who might want to speckle their speeches with words like “bastard” and “bullshit”, with the f-word also now entering the lexicon of presidential language. These are sweeping cultural changes that liberals had spent every waking moment since the Sixties attempting to legitimise. Obama tried it and didn’t get further than a tan suit. Who knew the degradation of the body politic could happen so quickly and under a Republican president?

What’s that you say? It’s all worth it given all he’s achieved.

Absolutely. Trump made it possible for Mitch McConnell to pack the judiciary with conservative appointees, some of whom were even older than 36 years old. A few were even qualified for a lifetime appointment to the bench. With a conservative Supreme Court, Trump has also ensured that America will remain hostile to crazy modern notions such as a woman’s right to choose. A majority of Americans might disagree with him but it’s perfectly consistent with an administration accused, only last month, of overseeing a system in which migrant women had been forced to undergo hysterectomies at an ICE facility in Georgia.

Yet if you want more specific examples of Trump’s achievements, then here, I’m afraid, you make your first mistake. Trump’s presidency has been more Zeitgeist than policy programme; more about the 192 Executive Orders he’s signed than legislation. In the last two years of his presidency, the House has failed to bow to his absolute power, meaning Congress has enacted the fewest laws (182) since the Second World War. Thankfully, 22 did manage to rename post offices, dams, wildlife refuges, and a mountain ridge. Meanwhile, thanks to Trump’s mastery of deal-making, he managed to shut down the government not once but twice, the second of which established a new record of 35 days, only costing the U.S. government $5 billion.

If the lack of legislation troubles you then ignore the quality and feel the width. He signed a tax reduction for the middle class that largely helped anyone in the middle class making more than $1 million a year. He hugely increased spending on the military during a time when he also blamed previous presidents for fighting “stupid wars”. This was a president leading the party of fiscal conservatism who would never dream of wasting government money, so he also created Space Force ($15 billion).

It’s thanks to Trump that Bibles are political props again (whichever way up you hold them) and it’s now acceptable to take children away from their parents and lock them in cages. He teargassed those awful people protesting peacefully outside the White House and tried to designate “Antifa” a terrorist organisation despite his own FBI Director explaining it’s “a movement or an ideology” rather than an organised body.

This is the same opposition he faced from his own Homeland Security when he proposed moats filled with alligators or shooting migrants in the legs. Revolutionary thinking, you might agree, but how was he meant to achieve anything when his critics wouldn’t even acknowledge the new Wall-That-Mexico-Will-Pay-For, which now stretches nine glorious miles, all funded by the American taxpayer?

Trump rightly prides himself for signing into law the Veterans Access, Choice and Accountability Act (Obama’s signature on the document was just an accident) as well as encouraging companies such as Ford and Intel to open factories in places such as Michigan and Arizona in deals struck in 2011 and 2015. Since he came to power in 2016, he has also reversed years of decline in other areas too. The fine particulate pollution accounted for by the US has started to rise for the first time in over a decade while, in 2017 and 2018, hate crime was notably higher than in the previous eight years.

In foreign policy, Trump has also stepped up to the plate and made appeasement acceptable again. His relationship with Kim Jong-Un is one of the great romances of the century. Whose heart wasn’t warmed by the stories that Kim shared with Trump about the way he’d had his uncle executed? Well, obviously, the uncle, whose heart (plus the rest of him) was reportedly fed to a pack of wild dogs, but that’s to overlook how good it is to see our world leaders (excluding leaders of NATO countries, obviously) connecting on a personal level rather than disagreeing all the time.

But that is what has made Trump so special. He’s unashamedly a people person and they’re all the “best people”. Sure, there were a few outliers such as Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn, Rick Gates, George Nader, and George Papadopoulos, who ended up convicted or charged with crimes. Yet the only people counting are the same people who refuse to acknowledge how many in the Trump administration haven’t gone to prison, including “Individual 1” who remains an unindicted co-conspirator in the case that left Michael Cohen scratching days served into a cell wall.

These are the same people who won’t admit that how this president simply refuses to live by outmoded conventions. He re-engaged with sections of America that had been ignored for so long: the white supremacists, the anti-Semites, and 17-year olds charged with first-degree murder. Forget bravery on the battlefield. True bravery is standing up for the armed militia while denigrating those men and women in the armed forces who fought and died for freedom. Thanks to Trump, presidents won’t have to respect the sacrifices made by soldiers. Heroes (sorry, “suckers” and “losers”) are there to be mocked, alongside Gold Star Families who were probably so unpatriotic as to give him the coronavirus.

Yet this is why Trump was elected. The American people wanted somebody who would shake things up and look out for the smaller guy. And that’s precisely what he achieved with his trade war. He helped boost China’s profile on the world stage and then helped Russia get back to doing what it does best: throwing its weight around in the Middle East.

Thanks to the forward-thinking of Donald Trump, decades of relationship-building was exchanged for one night’s headlines. He tried his best to trigger a war with Iran by killing Qasem Soleimani but Iran stepped back. Since Trump withdrew from the Iran Deal, they have had other things to keep them busy, such as enriching uranium so they now have 10 times the amount permitted by international agreements. Meanwhile, only Trump could have been brave enough to address the real problem in the region: the Kurds, who he finally abandoned to the whims of Turkish forces.

Trump isn’t just forging a new kind of politics, remember, he’s providing a new kind of leadership. You have to be that special kind of president to be only the third to be impeached in the history of the Republic and lucky too that Republican Senators chose to look the other way. It was shameful the way he was accused of conspiring with the Russians simply because figures among his allies, associates and campaign team had been conspiring with the Russians. Disgraceful too was the way he was accused of seeking help from foreign powers to harm his political enemies. Just because he had been seeking help from foreign powers to harm his political enemies doesn’t mean it was wrong.

And that gets us to his most far-reaching achievement. Only a man of profound insight would have the self-belief to roll back The Enlightenment. We’ve been living with the benefits of science and reason for too long. In that regard, Trump is the postmodern president, steeped in the philosophy of the French school that exposes the lie that there is anything as objectionably quantifiable as “the truth”. It’s under Trump that people now speak “their truth”, being one among an infinitesimal number of truths. There are no lies, just “alternative facts”.

The result is journalism that is disrespected by so many (cherished by a foolish few) as well as a new civic engagement. After decades of people left bored by politics, choosing instead just to go about their lives making a living, raising a family, and enjoying the company of friends, it is Donald J. Trump who has opened up a new world to all of us, so we can argue about things we will never agree about, fight over things that should be blatantly obvious, and refuse to concede any ground that might give our opponent a victory.

The Chinese might have “invented” Covid-19, but it needed a man like Trump to market it right. Epidemiologists argued it could be contained, but Trump knew better. He contracted it, recovered (strongly), and then encouraged other people to contract it, at packed rallies that the fake media never cover. Over 230,000 people are now dead from the virus in the U.S. but none of that is Trump’s fault. He can’t be blamed if they chose not to listen when he advised them to recover quickly and become immune. But that’s the thing about Donald J. Trump.

He has taught us all to be winners and the past four years have been the greatest the world has ever known.