In all Trump gave us — the good, the bad, the hilarious, and the unsettling — his administration brought much-needed clarity to the GOP and the country.
At the end of his second term, amid the early retrospectives about his presidency, George W. Bush reportedly remarked, “the true history of my administration will be written 50 years from now.” It was a wise reminder that the passage of time generally yields a more honest, dispassionate analysis of events than is often allowed by the heated political present.
While we are left to wonder how history will judge the last four years of President Trump, it will hopefully be with more fairness than the often-unhinged levels of coverage he’s received to date. Yet as the nation’s self-appointed purveyors of truth dutifully tap out their think pieces about how Trump brought fascism to America, it’s worth reflecting on what changes Trump did bring to Washington.
Trump Engaged on Policy Literally, Not Rhetorically
I have worked in and around Republican politics in Washington for nearly 15 years observing Republicans of all stripes. Trump is different. What is most notable, however, is how he is different, and what he accomplished because of it.
To put it frankly, Trump dared to meaningfully go where nearly every Republican politician in my lifetime has feared to tread: culture. For instance, Trump, with his typical rhetorical flourish, refers to his administration as the most pro-life administration in history. He’s not too far off the mark.
After years of empty rhetoric from Republican politicians, Trump shepherded more substantive gains for the pro-life movement than nearly every president before him and certainly every Congress: ending federal funding for new medical research using fetal tissue from aborted babies; giving states the ability to exclude abortion providers from their federally supported Medicaid programs; and prohibiting federal family planning dollars from flowing to organizations that “perform, promote, or refer for abortion,” a move that resulted in Planned Parenthood — the nation’s largest abortion provider — rejecting the funds altogether.
Trump wasn’t a pick-and-choose culture warrior, however. Perhaps one of the most striking things about his presidency was how willingly he showed up to the culture war, something the Republican base has been begging their leaders to do for years, to no avail. Conservatives, in particular, have felt under attack from every significant culture-shaping institution: public schools and universities, Hollywood, the media, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and major corporations.
Rather than shirking from these fights with limp excuses about “leaving private business alone,” or encouraging people to “build your own Facebook,” Trump recognized these institutions have grown powerful on the largesse of government policy as well as on dollars from the taxpayers they now want to banish from polite society. He didn’t give an inch.
Perhaps Trump intuitively understood the stakes that Andrew Breitbart so keenly laid out years before — that politics is downstream from culture. Or perhaps he bristled at the various ways corporate media characterized him and his voters as dumb, ignorant, racist rubes.
Regardless of the reason, Trump waded right into the Woke Wars, defending statues as important to the lessons of America’s history, threatening the government subsidies that have built the billion-dollar tech companies now tyrannizing the free flow of information, taking on the insidious racism of critical race theory in the government, and decrying the...
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2 comments:
He ain't gone yet.
Do we really think this man is going to go away? "Quit" is not part of his vocabulary.
But they will try to kill his future by a new round of ten million paper cuts. They want to destroy him and are counting on wearing him down now that he has not the power accorded a President.
But he is not going to lie down; he is a genuine leader; think of what he could have accomplished were it not for the globalists surrounding him!
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