I have written here before, I think, that I was stunned by President Trump’s success in bringing the U.S. economy from a stale, lukewarm status to a simmer in 90 days and to a pretty full boil in less than a year. After 16 years of the stagnant economies of the Younger Bush and Obama, Trump’s success was, of course, welcome but, even more, the speed of the economic growth strongly suggested – to me it mightily screamed – that Bush and Obama had kept their foot on the economy-brake, while piling on federal regulations, to maintain barely more than mediocre economic growth and job-creation for nearly two decades.
How long was this kind of thing going on? Were Bush, Obama, and their advisers just stupid in the economic sense? Or were they what they appeared to be; namely walking, war-loving malignancies who hated working-class Americans – in Obama’s case, especially white working-class folks and their God and guns – and sought broad national government-control over the citizenry, giving not a damn about their prosperity. In other words, were Bush and Obama economic simpletons or were they sadists who took joy in slowly destroying middle-class Americans, their families, and their livelihoods, especially by exporting their manufacturing jobs? My hunch was that they were the latter. I needed another example of sudden Trump-made change to know if my hunch was right.
And now we have that proof. After a half-century of failed U.S. diplomacy, Israeli and Arab intransigence, and unnecessary and always lost U.S. interventionist wars, Trump and his lieutenants negotiated the conclusion of two Middle East peace agreements between Israel and the UAE, and Israel and Bahrain, a deal between Christian Serbia and Muslim Kosovo that brought another recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and, this week, an Israel-Morocco agreement on air travel. A long period of non-leaking talks was followed by the announcement of four completed deals in rapid succession; really, in little more than a month.
This hardly means lasting Israel-Muslim peace and brotherhood; indeed, the media say Israel may have bombed a target in Jordan in the last weekend. It does, however, seem to show that some movement toward stabilization in the Middle East is possible without U.S. military interventionism. Even better, this movement seems to have been achieved in a way that leaves the two deal-making nations – and not the United States, its taxpayers, and its troops — holding the bag if one or the other backs out of the deal. The republic’s part was helping to negotiate the deals’ details, thereafter it is up to the agreeing parties to make the deals work, apparently without any guarantee that the U.S. military will ride to the rescue if discord occurs. (NB: Being determined, like grim death, to avoid sophomoric optimism, I know that there have been times when some of an agreement’s clauses are kept secret because they detail political/military commitments, but I have no way of knowing if any exist in these cases. Frankly, I would prefer not be be involved at all with Arabs and Israelis, except for trade, but its hard to argue against success — unless there are unseen stings attached for the United States.)
Anyway, Trump in the above-noted economic and foreign-policy aspects of his America-first policy has wrecked a longstanding, now demonstrably false, popular belief that American presidents always do their best for the republic’s citizens and their families. Bush and Cheney, and Obama and Biden for 16 years had mediocre economies, not because they could not be spurred to grow, but because the two administrations settled for – or perhaps wanted? – minimal growth. Trump turned that situation around in six months, and is now doing the same thing after the unnecessary lock-downs, facial masks, and over-hyped Chinese Virus.
Just as important, the Bush and Obama administrations produced much talk about working for Israel-Muslim agreements, but produced nothing. Instead, both increased the U.S. arming of Israel and started multiple interventionist wars – none of which they and their generals intended to win — that made such deals impossible. Trump and his administration have started zero interventionist wars in the Middle East (or anywhere else), but they have, at least temporarily, lessened regional tensions and appear to have put the onus for keeping and expanding the start of peace on the two local partners in each agreement.
Trump and his administration clearly deserve full marks for the economic and diplomatic accomplishments above, and even more for overcoming business community and bipartisan political opposition to end an enormous portion of the half-century old illegal immigration disaster. The speed with which these accomplishments were achieved strongly suggests that between Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, no president has had the slightest interest in resolving the problems they routinely misidentify to the electorate as “intractable”, including, to name a few, the social-security trust-fund, politicized/on-the-take U.S. general officers, senior civil servants who terrorize the citizenry in the name of law enforcement or tax collection, campaign-season race baiting, and a federal judiciary that is systematically killing the rule of law and equality before that law.
I suppose it is wise to recall that Joe Biden, Pelosi, Schumer, and many dozens of other congressional Democrats and Rino Republicans have assisted both Bushes, Clinton, and Obama to keep America’s most dire problems festering. If these — to quote Pelosi — “enemies of the state” cannot be summarily hung, they must not be voted for.
It also worth thinking about the astonishing accomplishments of the current president — add to the above, going to North Korea, cutting taxes, confronting and imposing tariffs on China, cutting drug prices, and attacking child-trafficking networks — and wondering if our sainted governing elite has mistaken “appearing and sounding presidential” with actually being presidential in a way connects with and serves the needs of everyday Americans and makes peace for the republic more likely than not.
What’s that old saw about not being able to tell a book by its cover?
