I&I Editorial

Many Americans have been hoping and praying for decades for a president whose foreign policy would first and foremost be based on what every other country’s foreign policy is based on – the national interest.

For a president who would slash regulations and red tape, drastically reduce the sky-high corporate tax rate, as well as individual marginal rates, so much so that the stock market would set new record after new record, and unemployment would drop to record lows for both the general public and minorities.

A president who would rely on the Federalist Society to fill vacancies on the Supreme Court and the rest of the federal judiciary with jurists who accept the Constitution and other laws as they are written, and whose opposition to legal abortion was so deeply held that both sides would consider him the most pro-life president in American history.

During Richard Nixon’s first term, in 1970, William F. Buckley, Jr. in The Playboy Interview famously said, “My ideal conservative president would be one who would strike out for certain radical reforms that, in my judgment, would greatly benefit America and augment human freedom. But such a president cannot be elected – at this time – and couldn’t get his program through Congress.”

Buckley added that “in this highly divided society,” Nixon “is a good president from the conservative point of view.” Nixon ultimately would execute many policies that were far from conservative, from wage and price controls to detente with the Soviet Union to appointing the Supreme Court justice who would write the Roe v. Wade abortion ruling.

If Bill Buckley, the intellectual who was instrumental in popularizing and legitimizing conservatism, permanently rescuing it from the political wilderness and allowing it to gain dominance in the Republican Party and ultimately attain national power in all three branches of government, could recognize that Nixon was far preferable to an increasingly left-leaning Democratic Party, there is no excuse today for complacency in defending Trump from a united, aggressive left much more dominant in the Democratic Party today.

Today the impeachment inquiry goes public. The interrogation will star a mobster specialist prosecutor as Democrat counsel, Daniel Goldman, who is an MSNBC contributor to boot, and who a year and a half ago declared in an appearance on the cable channel, “we already now know that the president has committed a felony in order to obtain the office of the presidency.” Goldman was, of course, referring to the Mueller Russia probe, which ultimately delivered nothing damning on Trump.

A compliant media will happily be providing wall-to-wall TV coverage of the hearings, likely sacrificing a hefty share of financially lucrative ratings in hopes of helping to do Trump in. Democratic leaders know conviction and removal, requiring two thirds of senators, is very much a long shot, but their strategy is to taint Trump and GOP senators so badly that they win the White House, retain the House, and possibly even gain a Senate majority a year from now.

Scanning the leading Democratic presidential candidates, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts plans on spending $43 trillion to have the federal government socialize health care, extend coverage to illegal aliens, criminalize most fossil fuel usage, and make college “free.” Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, whose views are a cloning of Warren’s, at least admits he’s a socialist. South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg proposes releasing multitudes of violent criminals from prisons, leading to lots more minority homicides, and systematically tie the hands of police. And if multi-billionaire ex-NYC mayor-turned-UN-climate-alarmism-operative Mike Bloomberg runs, you might need Washington’s permission before choosing what you order for dinner.

Distaste For Trump Vs. What Is At Stake In 2020

Yet from Fox to MSNBC we have commentators either espousing conservative principles or brandishing Republican credentials apparently eager to destroy the Trump presidency. Judge Andrew Napolitano rattles off numerous supposed legal offenses by the president. Left-friendly MSNBC provides perches for George W. Bush White House aides whose personal ill will toward Trump bowls over whatever philosophical affinity they ever had with the conservative policies he’s been enacting – in some respects more conservative than even Ronald Reagan’s.

Political writers devoted to the ideology of shameless self-promotion, like Max Boot and David Frum, who failed to become the conservative movement’s new Buckleys as they planned, see spoils for themselves in a post-Trump conservative landscape if they join in destroying this president. In a similar vein, the more serious and far less-self-seeking Bill Kristol’s bruised ego will apparently never rest until Trump is fully discredited and disowned by the voters.

Frequent conservative Trump critic David French claimed yesterday, “there’s so much first-hand evidence of a quid pro quo tying American aid to demands for Ukrainian investigations of the Bidens and Trump’s pet conspiracy theories that you could (and probably should) bring an entire impeachment case without once mentioning” the name of the whistleblower.

If the U.S. in pushing Ukraine to squash long-standing corruption in its government finds that the leader in the national polls for the Democratic nomination, ex-Vice President Joe Biden, is connected to that corruption through his son, Hunter Biden, how exactly is that an offense, impeachable or otherwise? There are certainly no statutes Democrats have been citing in their talking points that they accuse Trump of violating.

A Senate conviction of Trump has little hope of ever being considered a good bet by Vegas oddsmakers. But if Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, who lost as the 2012 GOP nominee against President Obama, and one or a handful of other philosophically shaky Republican senators, like Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, voted with the Democrats in the Senate trial, the blemish might conceivably doom Trump’s re-election chances, along with the party’s 2020 congressional fortunes.

Importantly, the stain of impeachment might dilute in voters’ minds the extremism of whoever attains the Democratic nomination; that could end up being the key to victory in a close presidential race next year.

Distaste for Trump runs deep within certain corridors of the right. Some loathe his vulgarity. Others fear his erratic decision-making, pointing to high turnover in White House staff and elsewhere within the administration, plus some inscrutable foreign policy decisions. The powerful Matt Drudge, whose reporting two decades ago helped impeach President Bill Clinton, has become a Trump skeptic. But even the most serious objections pale in comparison to the alternative – which in one form or another is aggressive socialism in the form of Democratic Party control of most or all of Washington.

Not only is such opposition to an undeniably flawed (but equally undeniably effective) Donald Trump unwarranted and unreasonable. Considering what the ever-more-radical opposition have planned, anti-Trumpism on the right is mortally dangerous to economic and social freedom in America.

— Written by Thomas McArdle

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