Donald Trump Goes Full Democrat
Noah Rothman 2015-10-26
For Republicans with even a passing attachment to the principles of conservatism, as opposed to merely the personalities who count themselves among the movement’s members, the fatalistic refrain so often repeated over the course of 2015 has been that “nothing matters.”
The latest Republican of dubious loyalty to be thrown into the stockades by the movement’s purity police is soon-to-be Speaker of the House Paul Ryan. The Wisconsin representative and former GOP vice presidential nominee has done more to advance conservative principles and a Republican agenda in the age of Obama (and has taken innumerable arrows for it) than virtually any other elected official. For the alleged heresies of preventing a financial meltdown in 2008 with his TARP vote and for supporting comprehensive immigration reform, Ryan has been branded a “RINO.” This is unhinged in the most literal sense. It is an opinion divorced from reality and lent legitimacy only by the critical mass of angry Republicans who have also succumbed to this mania.
There is no small irony in the fact that many of those conservatives who are supposedly so committed to principle that Republicans like Ryan, Rick Perry, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio — et cetera, et cetera – have been judged suspect are foursquare behind Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy. It has been demonstrated again and again that Trump is an orthodox liberal with a hawkish stance on immigration, but it matters not to Trump enthusiasts and those conservative media figures that seem to think their influence is enhanced by linking themselves to his movement. As he becomes more assured of the blinkered devotion of his fans, Trump appears to be shedding even a pretense that his candidacy is a conservative one. For most of his career on the fringes of American politics, Trump has demonstrated that his instincts are generally liberal, and he appears to be reverting to form.
To the extent that Donald Trump has a position on reforming America’s ballooning and unsustainable entitlement obligations, it is whatever he thinks the audience in front of him at any given moment wants to hear. More often than not, however, Trump has contended that he does not favor changes to Medicare or Social Security’s present structuring. He would address budgetary shortfalls, he says, by liquidating American military expenditures abroad and maximizing federal revenue collection at home. He has in the past added that changes to entitlements are too politically risky, which is objectively true. That is why Paul Ryan was pilloried by Democrats, accused of “throwing grandma off a cliff,” and what led radio host Mark Levin to call Trump a “clown.”
As Trump has encountered a potent rival in the form of Dr. Ben Carson, he has taken to differentiating himself from the candidate by, among other things like attacking his “energy” level and questioning his faith, contending that Carson would reform entitlements. “Ben Carson wants to abolish Medicare – I want to save it and Social Security,” Trump wrote on his Twitter account on Sunday evening. This was a flip-flop in record time. Not hours ago, Trump appeared on ABC News where he was asked if he would support health savings accounts in order to render Medicare unnecessary. “Well, it’s possible,” he told host George Stephanopoulos. “I think it’s a very good idea, and it’s an idea whose probably time has come.” Apparently that time came and went in the interim between breakfast and dinner on Sunday.
A creature of the media, it is rarely wise to underestimate Trump’s willingness to parrot the dominant narrative in the press. The latest and least well-founded contention among media professionals is that the Benghazi select committee’s questioning of Hillary Clinton was a total bust for Republicans. Given the gravity of the revelations about Clinton’s conduct and the administration’s knowledge of the nature of the attacks while they were ongoing, much of which was revealed at that marathon hearing, this claim is nothing short of a rearguard action to shield Clinton from criticism. Leave it to the Republican Party’s presidential frontrunner to legitimize this media narrative. “It was very partisan, and it looked quite partisan,” Trump averred on CNN on Sunday amid his endless whirlwind media tour. Maybe, but it was also quite productive. Moreover, most Republicans on the panel (and Democrat Tammy Duckworth, to her credit) behaved in a dispassionate and prosecutorial manner. To give succor to the liberal storyline that this was a partisan exercise lends validity to the Democratic contention that Hillary Clinton emerged a “winner” out of a process that should be immune to such parochial characterizations.
And what of the fevered passions with which Trump-backing conservatives decry the apparition of “amnesty” for illegal immigrants, the specter of which haunts their imaginations and crowds out virtually any objective or rational thought. In an interview with Larry King, Trump was asked if his unfeasibly aggressive deportation proposals have any redeeming character in the form of compassion for those families he proposes to break up. “We will do something that will be done with heart,” Trump vowed. He added, however, that he would not be more specific. “I don’t want to comment on that one right now, Larry, because that’s the sort of a question where I just don’t want to answer it right now,” Trump said. He has already claimed that he would reintroduce the “good” illegal residents he deports in some expedited fashion. Perhaps this is the start of Trump’s embrace of a pathway to grant amnesty to this population that avoids the cost and redundancy of his imagined re-importation process.
Trump’s retreat on immigration should not surprise anyone who is acquainted with Donald Trump’s liberal predispositions. Trump has in the not-too-distant past called Jeb Bush a “bright, tough and principled” Republican, scolded Mitt Romney for the callousness of his contention that illegal immigrants should face conditions in America that compel them to “self-deport,” and told a group of DREAMERs (the non-citizen children of illegal immigrants) that they had “convinced” him to support their pursuit of full, unqualified citizenship.
To all of this, we turn again to the pessimistic exhortation that none of it will matter. Not to Donald Trump supporters, at least. The candidate is almost secondary to the emotions he produces in his followers, which are previously unknown influence and satisfaction over the irritation his candidacy is causing the political system’s stakeholders. “I feel, for the first time in my life, that I am not invisible,” a devoted Trump fan told Washington Post reporters this weekend. For the candidate’s most indefatigable supporters, Trump’s policy positions are secondary to how he makes them feel. The candidate’s leftward drift is a window into how he would govern, but it’s a window into which his admirers would rather not peer.
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Donald Trump Goes Full Democrat
Must-Reads from Magazine
Fossil Fools
Fanaticism.
Noah Rothman 2018-06-13
Over the weekend, the Democratic National Committee voted in favor of refusing all future donations from fossil-fuel companies. They’re so proud of the decision that it was only publicized on Tuesday, and then only by reporters who had to do some digging to learn the news.
The resolution will bar the national committee from taking any donation tied to corporate political-action committees linked to coal, oil, or gas companies. Marveling over the news, ThinkProgress quoted a variety of progressive activists who are thrilled that the DNC has finally lived up to the spirit of the Democratic Party’s platform. That platform, if you’ve never read it, calls for the elimination of tax incentives and subsidies for fossil-fuel producers, demands a “phase down” of the development and extraction of new sources of carbon fuel, and calls on the Justice Department to investigate them for misleading the public on “scientific reality of climate change.” Absent from ThinkProgress’s account of this wondrous turn of events, however, is any comment from the DNC.
The Democrats’ reluctance to trumpet their righteous decision to decline donations from the fossil-fuel industry—a sector of the economy that employed 7 million people and made up 5 percent of U.S. GDP in 2017—is, perhaps, understandable. According to ThinkProgress, the Democratic Party’s hostility toward fossil-fuel producers is so intense that 90 percent of the industry’s political donations go to the Republican Party as it is. In that sense, every time a Democrat fills up her car or takes a flight, she’s contributing to Republican candidates or causes. Hypocrisy is, after all, the tribute vice pays to virtue. Today, that tribute amounts to $2.91-per-gallon.
Maybe the most bizarre aspect of this fanatic fealty to the tenets of green absolutism is that the Democrats could make a salient point about clean energy and market economics without branding the entire fossil-fuel enterprise a bête noire. The coal industry is in decline, and it has been for years. In the last 15 years, coal has declined as a share of the energy market by one-third. Oil, too, has declined slightly after a marginal resurgence. In the same period, renewable energy sources have increased from 5 to 10 percent of the market as the costs of production have declined, but every source of energy pales in comparison to natural gas. Revolutionary new technologies like hydraulic fracturing have made gas cheap and ubiquitous, to the point now that, for the first time since 1953, the United States is projected to become a net-energy exporter by 2022.
Not only does that mean that the U.S. will benefit from a kind of energy security that seemed like a fantasy just a decade ago, it means that America can relieve the energy burden on its allies, which are dependent upon exports from states like Russia and China. Even if national and economic security arguments don’t move climate fanatics, the environmental benefits of America’s transition to reliance on natural gas should. Burning natural gas emits about 50 percent less carbon into the atmosphere than coal, and the shift to natural gas has contributed to the precipitous decline of carbon emissions released into the atmosphere over the last decade in the West.
Of course, the left’s environmentalist wing doesn’t want to hear any of this. They’d prefer to hear how fossil fuels could be relegated to history’s dustbin by force of will alone. They want Democrats to treat this vital sector of the economy like apartheid South Africa. With the DNC’s vote, it would seem like the Democratic Party agrees with its left wing on the immorality of supporting in any form fossil fuel production and exploration. It makes you wonder, then, why Democrats don’t seem to want to talk about it.
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Canada Comes to Its Senses on Iran
Iran's isolation won't be reversed.
Sohrab Ahmari 2018-06-13
I have never been mistaken for a fan of Justin Trudeau, nor will I ever be so mistaken. On the whole, I agree with Ben Shapiro’s assessment of the Canadian prime minister (“Justin Trudeau is what would happen if the song ‘Imagine’ took human form…”). Trudeau’s commitment to full-spectrum progressivism, combined with his vanity and moral preening, make him one of the least serious figures ever to lead a major Western power. Even so, I found myself cheering Trudeau’s Liberal government on Wednesday after it backed a resolution in the House of Commons to “immediately cease any and all negotiations or discussions” with the Iranian regime.
The resolution also designated the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist entity under Canadian criminal law, condemned the mullahs for their “ongoing sponsorship of terrorism around the world,” and denounced Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei for “calling for genocide against the Jewish people.”
Liberal support for the resolution marked a striking about-face. Trudeau had campaigned for restoring Ottowa’s ties with Tehran, severed in 2012 by the previous, Conservative government. “I would hope that Canada would be able to reopen its mission” in Tehran, Trudeau told a CBC interviewer in June 2015, just as Barack Obama was concluding his nuclear diplomacy with the mullahs. “I’m fairly certain that there are ways to re-engage.”
It turns out that even Trudeau-led Canadian Liberals have their limits when it comes to dealing with the Islamic Republic. As the Canadian broadcaster CBC reported, Ottawa dispatched two diplomatic missions in 2017 to explore a rapprochement. But there were two stumbling blocks. The Iranians insisted that Tehran should be removed from Canada’s list of terror-sponsoring nations, and the Canadians were determined to free various hostages held by the regime. The Iranians were apparently immovable on the matter of the hostages–that’s how they roll–and the Canadians were, in turn, unwilling to deny the basic truth about Iran’s role in sponsoring international terror.
Passage of the resolution doesn’t mean Canada is rethinking its support for Obama’s nuclear deal. But it underscores Iran’s growing isolation, as a new generation of Western leaders comes to learn that there are no “moderates” and “hard-liners” in Tehran–only tyrants and terrorists.
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PODCAST: Un Singular Sensation
Podcast: How bad was it?
John Podhoretz 2018-06-13Was the Singapore Summit nothing, or bad, or the worst thing ever? This is the question we debate. We also examine the meaning of the primary defeat of Republican anti-Trumper Mark Sanford and what this portends for the GOP. Give a listen.
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Qatar and the Columbia Journalism Review
A conflict of interest.
Sohrab Ahmari 2018-06-12
Should Al Jazeera–the broadcast organ of Qatar’s pro-Muslim Brotherhood regime–be required to register as a foreign agent in the United States? Alexandra Ellerbeck and Avi Asher-Schapiro of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists think the answer is no, and they have a long essay in the Columbia Journalism Review laying out their case.
Requiring Al Jazeera to register under the Foreign Agent Registration Act, they argue, would have a chilling effect on its journalism and empower a “notoriously opaque unit within the Department of Justice to draw an impossible line between propaganda and journalism.” They also contend that using FARA to pressure outlets like Al Jazeera would encourage repressive governments abroad to take similar action against critical media and civil-society organizations.
The problem: Ellerbeck and Asher-Schapiro failed to disclose their own conflict of interest when it comes to Al Jazeera.
To wit, Al Jazeera program host Mhamed Krichen is a member of the board of directors of the Committee to Protect Journalists, Ellerbeck’s and Asher-Schapiro’s employer. The authors quote numerous Al Jazeera officials and highlight the broadcaster’s reporting “accolades.” But they eschew or only lightly touch on Al Jazeera’s less savory aspects, not least the fact that its Arabic network has long served as a platform for Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood preacher.
In a 2009 speech broadcast on the network, Qaradawi praised Hitler and the Holocaust: “Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the [Jews] people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them–even though they exaggerated this issue–he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers.”
The failure to disclose is especially to embarrassing for the Columbia Journalism Review, which trades on its association with Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and the Pulitzer prizes. Perched on Morningside Heights, CJR regularly subjects other outlets to journalistic scrutiny, doling out “hits and misses” and “darts and laurels.” To his credit, CJR editor Kyle Pope was quick to issue a statement and amend the story when I reached out to him.
“This piece was written by two CPJ staffers, not by CJR folks, and was labeled as an analysis and not a news story,” he said in an email. “That said, you raise a fair point. While their board member is a program host, and not an executive, at Al Jazeera (and while a lot of media outlets CPJ writes about have some connection to the organization), we added a note of disclosure to the text.”
Readers can judge for themselves if the conflict of interest influenced the substance of the essay.
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Making a Monster Stronger
Gifts we cannot take back.
Noah Rothman 2018-06-12
New York Times reporter Alex Burns seemed to approve of the “intellectual honesty” on display Monday night when Barack Obama’s former director of national intelligence, James Clapper, defended President Donald Trump’s diplomatic engagement with North Korea as hard-nosed realism. “We’ve had diplomatic relations with plenty of brutal dictators when it has seemed to suit our interests,” Burns recalled Clapper saying. Advocates of this approach to foreign affairs want to believe their Olympian posture amounts to the absence of undue judgment, but it’s more like the absence of critical thought. On that score, both Donald Trump and Barack Obama share many similarities. Kim Jong-un is not just one dictator among many, and the Democratic Republic of Korea is not just another country.
North Korea is a prison in which up to 200,000 people are consigned to gulags. Sometimes the prison population consists of whole families, some of which have no hope of leaving the camps alive, as the country has a policy of punishing three generations for the so-called crimes of one individual. The number of people in hard-labor camps is only an estimate—there have been no human-rights observers in the country since 1995—but enough defectors scramble across the Yalu River to give us an accurate idea of what happens inside North Korea. Those defectors, if they survive the escape, are terribly malnourished and plagued by chronic infections and parasites. North Korea’s people are hostages, subject to extortion, indoctrination, and grotesque torture in a violent and corrupt environment without equal on the face of the earth.
North Korea manufactures and exports opiate narcotics and weapons on an industrial scale to destabilize the world around it. It is willing to offer its support for any rogue state or non-state actor that requests it, including state sponsors of terrorism and genocidal despots such as the theocrats in Iran and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. It executes terrorist attacks using complex nerve agents on foreign soil and in crowded public places. It has violated almost every treaty to which it was a signatory, including those related to nuclear non-proliferation when it began covertly developing a functional nuclear deterrent.
For all these criminal acts, this mafia enterprise disguised as a state should be squeezed and isolated until the thugs in epaulets who have enslaved millions meet the kind of justice that can only be meted out by a righteous and abused people. Instead, Donald Trump has chosen to follow in his predecessor’s footsteps—indeed, to expand upon his ignominious legacy—and usher North Korea by the hand into the international spotlight.
What happened on Monday in Singapore was a disgrace. What was billed as a summit designed to secure a negotiated end to the crisis on the Korean Peninsula—a crisis that the North Korean regime alone inaugurated and aggravates—became Kim Jong-un’s coming-out party.
Kim arrived in Singapore to great fanfare; paparazzi snapped his picture and onlookers called his name like he was a boyband heartthrob. The man who murdered his half-brother, uncle, and ex-girlfriend, among scores more, took selfies with democratic figures and toured the town before the main event: a meeting with the leader of the free world.
Donald Trump, the legitimately elected president of the world’s most powerful free republic, beamed as he pressed the flesh with the warden of the world’s largest prison—a country with an annual GDP comparable to that of Eugene, Oregon. They dined together on short rib confit and soy-braised codfish—a Korean favorite, in deference to Kim. Trump said it was “my honor” to greet Kim, who is a “very talented man.” “We have a terrific relationship,” he added. They took photographs before a backdrop of American and North Korean flags. It was a scene suggestive of a relationship between equals, which is something Americans with a cursory understanding of history and a functioning moral compass have previously denied the Kim dynasty.
At no point in the last three months has the president or his administration appeared to understand that the summit itself was a considerable concession to the Kim regime. The North Korean government sought the summit, as it has for the last quarter century, and the administration finally accepted the overture as a chance to achieve “denuclearization.” But once this grandiose affair got underway, “denuclearization” seemed an afterthought.
Trump talked up the concessions he got from the 30-something dynast king; the repatriation of the remains of U.S. soldiers and the dismantling of a missile-engine testing site, on top of the return of the Americans that Pyongyang abducted and held captive for years (thanks ever so much). But Trump gave, too, above and beyond the spectacle he had arranged for the pipsqueak he elevated to peer.
Trump pledged to halt U.S. military exercises with America’s true friend, the Republic of Korea, but he didn’t call them “exercises.” He called them “war games,” which, he added, were expensive and “very provocative,” borrowing and legitimizing propagandistic language used by the North Koreans to describe the sovereign affairs of two free nations. A joint declaration from Kim and Trump pledged to “work towards the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” but reaffirmed only the vague and aspirational objectives to which South and North Korea agreed in April. Former CIA Deputy Division Chief for Korea, Bruce Klingner, said the “denuclearization” language was weaker than that to which North Korea had agreed during the Bush administration, and we know how that ended.
The statement pledged to pursue “follow-on negotiations.” There, perhaps, the U.S. might offer North Korea more concessions; everything from economic assistance to diplomatic recognition and a U.S. embassy in Pyongyang to a drawdown of U.S. troops on the peninsula is on the table. Anything to get North Korea to give up its hard-won nuclear deterrent. But that will not happen. Why would it? The lavish concessions associated with this summit have made lower-level agreements on the dismantling of nuclear weapons harder to envision. Look at all that a few functional fission devices have conferred upon the Kim regime. Why would they give them up? Why wouldn’t any other rogue state follow in the Kim Dynasty’s footsteps?
This whole affair ratified Barack Obama’s efforts to bury the U.S. concern for human rights under a mountain of moral equivalencies. It sacrificed America’s pursuit of concrete security guarantees from rogue actors to the cowardice that masquerades as realism. North Korea isn’t just another dictatorship; it is not Turkmenistan or Eritrea. It is a unique horror. The victory North Korea won at the negotiating table is the product of a narcissism that Obama and Trump share. It is a narcissism that views the status quo, which was forged and maintained by political, diplomatic, and military professionals over the course of 70 years, as a failure rather than a success. After all, if this were only about the utilitarian work of neutralizing a threat, the president would avoid the appearance of triumphalism. He and his allies have done just the opposite.
If anything positive emerged from this escapade, it is the extent to which the North Korean regime allowed its people to get an eyeful of what life is like in a developed Asian country. If that and a recklessly conciliatory U.S. posture eventually weakens Kim’s hold over his people and leads his criminal regime to the slaughter, only then will this affair have been worth it. America’s goal cannot just be “denuclearization,” because the North Korean threat is not limited to its nuclear arsenal. America’s ultimate objective should be the total dissolution of the worst country on earth. Sadly, it seems for now as if this pomp and pageantry only made Kim Jong-un and his gangsters stronger.
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