Category: Politics

A Question about Donald Trump

Things are getting interesting. How long until we collapse into hot civil war? The replacement of the rule of law with the rule of lawfare is a bad sign. The following repost, slightly redacted, is from January 2022, and more relevant that ever.

…………………………..

This from a reader:

It would be very interesting to hear your take on Trump — why do you think that his leadership of the country, despite obvious personality flaws, is less risky for the US and the world than a reasonable alternative? Yes, the ideological, thoughtless, and totalitarian far-left is dangerous, but isn't unprincipled, pugilistic and me-and-my-family first leadership any better? Is your thinking driven by "the lesser of two (or three) evils"?
1) I avoid talk of the lesser or least of evils. I prefer to speak of the better or the worse. 
 
2) Politics is not theoretical; it is practical. There is political theory, of course, and it divides into political science (empirical and non-normative) and political philosophy (normative). But politics is neither of the two, despite the fact that politics is informed by political theory. Politics is a practical game! It is not mainly about having the right views. That does no good unless one can implement them. And no one with practical sense lets the best become the enemy of the good. Politics is a matter of better or worse, not perfect or imperfect.  Politics is about accomplishing something in the extant suboptimal circumstances with the best implementable ideas.
 
3) And which ideas are those? The ideas, values, and principles of the Founders. They arrived as close as anyone ever has to a sound and viable political theory. 
 
4) Now if you accept (2) and (3), then the choice is clear: you support Trump over Hillary, and Trump over Biden. For Trump, unlike Hillary and Biden,  supports those values and not just with words. He proved his support for them in the teeth of vicious opposition by pseudo-cons and leftists alike  in his four years as POTUS.  A long list of his accomplishments could be inserted here. To mention just one, and a very important one: the SCOTUS appointments.
 
5) If you complain about Trump's character, I will agree that he is flawed but go on to point out that the same is true of Hillary and Biden.  Character-wise, either the three are on a par, or the two Democrats are worse. This fact is invisible to many because Hillary and Biden are professional politicians deeply practiced in the arts of deception: mendacious to the core, they know how to hide their flaws, faults, and foibles.  But anyone with life-experience and knowledge of human nature can see that Biden is a fraud and a phony rooted in no principle except that of  the promotion of himself and his family's interests. The same goes for Hillary to a lesser extent. But as I said, they know how to don masks and play the game. Trump, on the other hand, crudely lets it all hang out. He tells you what he thinks. He is blunt, brusque, boorish, and sometimes pointlessly brutal. (I am thinking of that nasty slur he hurled against Carly Fiorina.) He probably knows that his alpha-male strut and swagger is off-putting to many, but he refuses to play the game.
 
6) What decides the question for me is that Trump alone supports the American system of government whereas this is plainly not the case with Hillary or with Biden who is the puppet of puppet masters out to undermine the American system.  That should be blindingly evident to anyone who has been paying attention.
 
7) There comes a time when a corrective is needed, an outsider self-powered, un-owned, and unafraid to kick the asses of the Dementocrats to his Left and expose the fecklessness of the cuckservatives to his Right.  A corrective and a clarifier. No more of the usual Left versus Right. The battle for the soul of America is now a contest between the borderless globalism of the greedy elites and an enlightened nationalism, populist and patriotic.  Hillary/Biden versus The Donald, to personify it.
 
But 'the virtuous'  and the upholders of 'norms' are too scrupulous to rouse the people against their tyrants.

Here:

Describing Wilkes and two of his allies, Walpole wrote, “This triumvirate has made me often reflect that nations are most commonly saved by the worst men in [them].” Why? Because, he concluded, “The virtuous are too scrupulous to go the lengths that are necessary to rouse the people against their tyrants.”

Until the coming of The Donald, that had certainly become the case in recent American politics. Until the Orange Menace loosed the fearful lightning of his terrible swift tweets, the “virtuous,” rather battle-fatigued traditional conservative movement—even when controlling both houses of the Congress—had been out-shouted and outmaneuvered by the unholy alliance of a Left-dominated, morally nihilist pop culture and educational establishment, and what is laughably referred to as the “mainstream” media, all nudging an increasingly radicalized Democratic Party further and further to the left.

 

Black Lives Maga!

The South Bronx comes out for the Orange Man. 

The video is about eight minutes long and puts me in mind of the old "Joe and Eddy" tune from the early '60s, There's a Meeting Here Tonight. 

Black support for Trump makes perfect sense. These black citizens understand that an endless influx of illegal aliens will have a disproportionate impact (to put it mildly) on them. After all, where will the illegals be sent? To Martha's Vineyard?  They will be sent and are being sent to black neighborhoods  where they take over the schools, the playgrounds, drain the social services, etc. 

Black citizens, most of whom are law-abiding, understand that the rule of law is good for them, and that the cadre leftists who have infiltrated and now control the Democrat Party have contempt for said rule, despite their mendacious mouthings  to the contrary, mouthings that are belied by their actions.

My use of 'disproportionate impact' above is slightly ironic, as I am sure my astute readers have noticed. The leftist line is that the enforcing of laws is 'racist' because strict enforcement and appropriate punishment has a 'disproportionate impact' on blacks. And of course it does. But that doesn't make it 'racist' on any reasonable definition of the term.  It can't be racist if it is true.

'Disproportionate impact' is exactly what one would expect given the well-established fact that blacks as a group are more criminally prone than other groups.  And this even after adjusting for police brutality, and other forms of police malfeasance.  

We conservatives are not racists or fascists with an 'authoritarian personality structure.' We stand for liberty and (therefore) for limited government. We appreciate that cops are a necessary evil.  I dilate further in  Cops: A Necessary Evil. 

UPDATE (5/21)

Is Trump the first populist Republican? No surprise The Militant sticks  up for him.  Meanwhile, James Carville, junkyard attack dog, barks himself silly. (Looks like the video I was looking for has been removed.)  What could the lovely Mary Matalin see in him?

Biden Chases ‘Death to America’ Vote

David Harsanyi:

Biden, it should be noted, is a vacuous political zombie who has never met a position he hasn’t dropped for a vote. Today, he is surrounded by Obama-era advisers and Hamas sympathizers . . . who have long wanted the U.S. to be aligned with mullahs of Iran, as a counterbalance to colonialist Western capitalists of Israel. And now that Democrats like Chuck Schumer have sold out the Jews to the vultures for a few votes in Dearborn, nothing holds back progressive Democrats from normalizing the antisemitism that already infects the hard left.  

That's the truth. Just so you know who you are supporting if you support Biden. You may not like Trump, but if it comes down to Trump versus Biden, you must support the former out of self-interest if for no other reason.

Resuming the “Never-Trump Mentality” Thread

Tom Tillett often leaves very good comments, but he is 'slow on the trigger.' As a result, his contributions often get buried and go unread. I get the impression that he is someone who actually works for a living [grin].  Today he left two long but very good comments on the Never-Trump Mentality post.  Here is the first, and here is the second which I now reproduce: 

Bill writes to Malcolm, >>are you prepared to endorse extra-political means to defeat our political enemies?<<

Malcolm writes, >>This is war, and we should do what we can to win, rather than do only what we may, and lose. <<

A difficult question for me, but I am on Malcolm's side on this. I think the question depends on what time you think it is. Attacking and boarding a ship under another nation's flag is an act of piracy and the crew of the attacking ship is subject to criminal prosecution. However, any crew that does the same in a declared war cannot be prosecuted because such actions are under a completely different set of rules and laws.

Likewise, what tactics we adopt from the Left's arsenal depends on whether you think the Left has declared all-out war on the rest of us. I think it's clear that they have, and I believe Malcolm agrees. If so, then this is not normal politics and different, more flexible rules apply as to how we should respond.

How flexible? I dunno. But the clearest case is the reprehensible lawfare the Democrats are engaged in. I think Republican state AGs need to crank up the lawfare against Democrats. How about Adam Schiff running for the Senate in California? Since the DC Courts have stripped Trump of his presidential immunity for acts taken as President, then Schiff has no immunity for his acts and outright lies to the American public while in Congress. Surely there is an obscure statute somewhere that can be misinterpreted to hold [place?] Schiff in the docket.

Bullies need to be punched in the mouth or they will continue to punch the rest of us in the mouth – or worse.

BV agrees with Malcolm and Tom that we are at war with the Left, and he agrees with Tom's use of the phrase, "declared all-out war." The war is over the soul of America.  The question concerns whether we should (i) preserve what remains of America as she was founded to be, and (ii) restore those good elements of the system bequeathed to us by the Founders, while (iii) preserving the legitimate progress that has been made (e.g. universal suffrage), OR whether we should replace the political system of the Founders with an incompatible system which can be described as culturally Marxist.

(This formulation of what the war is about may ignite some dissent among us friends. My approach is restorationist, not reactionary. There is the danger, however, of a merely semantic quibble. The combox is open.)

Tom implies that there are certain rules of engagement in the conduct of our war with our political enemies and that it is not the case that any and all means can be employed to defeat them.  Here is where it gets very interesting. 

I used to say, "You lie about us and we'll tell the truth about you." Now I am inclined to say, "You lie about us, and we'll lie about you." Slander us, we slander you. Smear us, we smear you. Shout us down, we shout you down. And so on.

So here is something we need to get clear about. Given that there are some rules of engagement with our political enemies, and that we cannot, or rather ought not, do just anything to win, what are the rules in this supersessionist (not secessionist, and not successionist) civil war in which we are now combatants? 

America First!

I explain what it means over at Substack. 

I refute the fragile Kristol and articulate what the inarticulate Trump cannot. But to this man of action goes the credit of having put paid to Kristol and others of his pseudo-con ilk as well as to the Bush and Clinton dynasties. Jeb! is toast and Chelsea has been strangled in her political crib. Remember Jeb!? The mendacious Hillary has been put to pasture where she chews her cud of resentment.

Kristol America First

Joe Biden: An Anti-Civilizational, Race-Baiting, Opportunist and Ignoramus

And as all of those things, a worthy representative of the contemporary hard-Left, hate-America, Democrat party. Ben Shapiro has his number:

More importantly, however, Biden's characterization of "English jurisprudential culture" as "white man's culture" is profoundly disturbing. English jurisprudential culture is rooted in the belief in the rule of law, due process of law, equal rights under law; English jurisprudential culture is responsible for preserving the natural rights we hold dear, rights which were imperfectly but increasingly extended over time to more and more human beings, particularly minorities. No less a leftist figure than Barack Obama explained just that in 2009, saying he sought a system at Guantanamo Bay that "adheres to the rule of law, habeas corpus, basic principles of Anglo-American legal system."

Protection of individual rights — and in particular, minority rights — lies at the heart of English jurisprudence. Yet Biden boiled down those rights to racial privilege. And the attempt to reduce the fundamental principles of our civilization to a mask for racial hierarchical power is both false and frightening. It suggests that those principles ought to be undermined for purposes of disestablishing that supposed hierarchy. Get rid of English jurisprudential law, presumably, in order to fight racism.

Ron and Vivek: Their Day Will Come

Both are outstanding patriots. Their day will come. They will serve the republic well if there is any republic left to serve five years from now. We have reason to be hopeful. But Trump is the man of the hour. He alone can get us back on track. When Trump's work is done, the young guys will be well-placed to take over.

Listen to Vivek Ramaswamy's fabulously hard-hitting, content-rich, and super-articulate speech in endorsement of Trump. (7:18) 

Ron DeSantis' speech is also impressive. (4:33)

But no complacency! The filthy Dems will use every Alinskyite tactic and commie-playbook trick to win by any and all means. 

If you are a conservative who can't abide Trump, you are just going to have to suck it up and shut up about the man's obvious flaws.  As DeSantis said, he's superior to Biden — an understatement! — and I would add: superior to any Dem who might run against him. 

No infighting! Circle the wagons. No RINO-fueled circular firing squad. No Libertarian/Losertarian or other third-party circle jerk. As Ramaswamy said, it's a war. In a war, you have to take sides. You can't float above the fray as if you are a transcendental spectator with no stake in the bloody battle below. 

Do you have RINO friends? Confront them brusquely with 'Which side are you on?'

Do you have Democrat friends? Cut 'em off! Make them pay a price for their willful self-enstupidation. Why should they get the benefit of your friendship? (The usual ceteris paribus considerations apply.)

And if Nikki the Neocon should get the nomination? Then too you must suck it up and  support her and not hang back because she's not Trump. She can't turn things around, but she could stave off collapse until DeSantis and Ramaswamy are ready to enter the lists.  

The Case for Trump

Brilliantly made by Sebastian Gorka before the Oxford Union. (12 min.)

See also, National Populism and the Rise of Donald Trump

UPDATE (21 January 2024)

The case for Trump can also be made from the inanity and perversity of the criticisms made of him by our political enemies. Among them are the Never Trumpers at The Bulwark, a rearguard  resistance outlet for discredited and resentful neocons.  Take a gander at this lame outburst: Jamie Dimon Joins the Trump Normalizers.

I was going to respond point-by-point, but thought better of it, seeing as how my readers agree with me on fundamentals. In recent years, as compared to the early years of the blogosphere, we have become 'siloed into our positions' and increasingly convinced of the fatuity and futility of engaging our political opponents in anything that could be called 'productive dialog.'  

The other side of the coin is that a 'surfeit of agreement' — to give it a name — can be annoying, said surfeit being one of the upshots of the 'silo effect' lately mentioned. If we too closely agree, then we end up 'stealing one another's thunder' and boring one another. Productive, clarifying, insight-generating dialogue requires disagreement; the disagreement, however, must occur against the backdrop of broad and deep agreement, where such agreement is the unity that controls the diversity, a unity without which there would be fruitless contention. Here as elsewhere diversity unchecked by unity leads to disaster. Diversity untrammeled by unity is not our strength as woke chucklephucks mindlessly repeat; it is our undoing. Near the top of the indices of leftist self-induced stupidity is the febrile and fatuous emphasis on 'diversity.' 

I am not saying that diversity is not a value; it is. But it is a value subordinate to the competing value of unity. There are fools to my right who think that any talk of diversity is a concession to our political enemies. It is not. Avoid the NETTR fallacy: there are enemies to the right, right-wing anti-semites, for example, though they are at the present time outnumbered by left-wing anti-semites. And there are white supremacists even though their threat to the Republic is nothing as compared to the threat of the race-delusional leftist totalitarians for whom the slanderous Joe Biden speaks.

Self-serving as it may sound, all of my positions are sane, reasonable, balanced, and moderate. If you disagree, and do so respectfully, while giving evidence of intelligence and good will, I will listen.  I am committed to adjusting my views to reality. 

So, to avoid preaching to the choir, I will content myself with giving a list of some of the key terms which our enemies such as the author of the above piece either misuse or exploit to advance false, absurd, slanderous, or otherwise noxious theses.

  • Cult of personality
  • Norm
  • Normalize
  • Dictator
  • Demagogue
  • Insurrection
  • Migrant
  • Xenophobe
  • White supremacist
  • White nationalist
  • Nativist
  • Extremist
  • Dogwhistle
  • Authoritarian
  • Tyrant
  • Third Reich
  • Hitler
  • Insurrection-inciter
  • Rule of law
  • Constitution
  • Democracy

Und so weiter! (Is that a 'dogwhistle'?)

Politics, Lies, and Counterfactuals

Suppose I say

1) Had Jeb Bush won the 2016 Republican  nomination for president, Hillary Clinton would have won the presidential election.

We know, of course, that Donald J. Trump won the 2016 election. Suppose an Anti-Trumper calls me a liar for asserting (1).  Have I lied?  That depends on what a lie is.

What is a lie?

A lie is not the same as a false statement. For one can make a false statement without lying: one may sincerely believe that what one is asserting is true when in fact it is false. The intention to deceive is essential to a lie.  No lie without the intention to deceive. A lie, then, is an intentional misrepresentation of what one either knows to be the case or sincerely believes to be the case for the purpose of deceiving one's audience.

Now what is the case is actually the case as opposed to possibly the case. So on the definition just given, one cannot lie about the merely possible.  It follows that one cannot lie about what might have been or what could have been. Therefore, I cannot be fairly accused of telling a lie if I assert (1). There simply is no fact of the matter as to whether or not, had Jeb won the nomination, Hillary would or would not have won the election.

On my analysis, then, there are two necessary conditions for a statement's being a lie.  (i) The statement must express a person's intention to deceive his interlocutor(s), and (ii) there must be some actual fact about which the one who lies intends to deceive them. Note that one who lies on a given occasion need not be a liar because a liar is one who habitually lies, and one who lies needn't be in the habit of lying.

Can one lie about a counterfactual state of affairs?

It follows from my analysis that there cannot be any lies pertaining to counterfactual states of affairs. Counterfactual conditionals, however, have as their subject matter counterfactual states of affairs, which is to say, states of affairs that are really possible but not actual.  So no counterfactual is a lie. Note that I said really possible, not epistemically possible. I am assuming that Reality, with majuscule 'R,'  is not exhausted by the actual or existent: there are merely possible states of affairs that subsist mind-independently. (That which subsists is but does not exist.) 

But what I just wrote is not self-evident: I don't want to paper over the fact that the problem of the merely possible and its ontological status is deep and nasty and will lead us into a labyrinth of aporiai and insolubilia.  More about this later.

Now (1) is either true or if not true, then false, but no one knows, or could know, which it is. So no one can rightly call me a liar for asserting (1).  

If I am not lying when I assert (1), what am I doing?  I am offering a reasonable, but practically unverifiable, speculation.  And the same goes for a person who denies (2). Consider a second example. 

Donald Trump famously boasted, 

2) Had it not been for all the illegal votes, I would have won the popular vote as well as the electoral college vote.

Leftists, who compile long lists of Trump's supposed lies, had among their number some who counted (2) — an accurate paraphrase of what Trump said, not an exact quotation — as a lie.

But it is obviously not a lie. The worst you could call it is an unlikely, self-serving speculation.  He did not assert something he knew to be false, he asserted something he did not know to be true and could not know to be true. Again, there is no underlying fact of the matter. 

Trump haters who compile lists of his 'lies,' need to give a little thought as to what a lie is; else their count will be wrong. 

Before proceeding to a third example, let me record an aporetic pentad  for later rumination and delectation:

1) Counterfactuals have truth-values: some are true and the rest are false.

2) The true ones are contingently true.

3) Contingent truths have truth-makers.

4) Truth-makers are obtaining, i.e., actual states of affairs.

5) Counterfactuals are about non-actual, merely possible, states of affairs.

These propositions are individually plausible but collectively inconsistent. Is the problem genuine or pseudo? If genuine, how solve it? Which proposition should we reject?  I hope to come back to this problem later.

A third example. London Ed quotes and comments upon a recent assertion of mine:

“He [David Frum] neglects to observe, however, that the devastation of that country [Ukraine] would not have occurred had Trump been president.”

Ed comments:

Trump’s presidency ended January 20, 2021. The invasion of Ukraine was 24 February 2022. What might have happened (another counterfactual) under a continued Trumpian presidency that would have prevented Putin’s invasion? The build up of Russian troops began March and April 2021, although the Russian government repeatedly denied having plans to invade or attack.

What might have happened is that Putin would have been dissuaded from invading  Ukraine out of fear of what Trump would do to him and his country should he have invaded.

Related: Counterfactuals and Hypothesis Testing in Political Science

Dueling Articles

We need to revisit in thought if not in fact the practice of dueling. Later. In lieu of that, here are a couple of dueling articles. You know where I stand. How about you?

David Frum, The Ruin that a Trump Presidency Would Mean

Steve Cortes, Only Trump Can Save America

For the foolish Frum Ukraine is the only issue worth mentioning.. He neglects to observe, however, that the devastation of that country would not have occurred had Trump been president. 

Nothing else seems to interest him. And so he fails to understand Trump's broad appeal. Cortes gets it:

We confront a perilous moment in U.S. history. Our country suffers from sky-high violent crime, the ravages of an effectively open border, a subversive educational system, and the anxiety of an economy that punishes workers – all brought about, deliberately, by Joe Biden and his allies. [emphasis added.]

There you have the explanation of Trump's comeback in a nutshell. There is more to be said, but  the Cortes quotation cannot be beat for pith and punch.  

But let me tweak it a bit. For the average citizen, the order of concern is  (i) the economy, (ii) crime, (iii) the subversion and 'wokification' of curricula with the concomitant labelling of protestors at school board meetings as 'domestic terrorists,' and (iv) the wide-open border. Now I don't expect Joe Sixpack to understand the full ramifications of a wide-open border, but my surmise is that what really rankles him is the fact is that he is being played for a chump: he works long and hard, plays by the rules, obeys the law and has to watch global elitist lawbreakers allow illegal alien lawbreakers to invade his country, and then add insult to injury by smearing him as a 'racist' and a 'white supremacist.'

Without touching upon the deeper issues that exercise right-thinking historians, political scientists, and philosophers, we have in the four points mentioned an adequate explanation of Trump's ascendency.

Addendum

Anent the folly of Frum, vide Francis P. Sempa, "David Frum and the Axis of Errors."

Of Course Trump Won Iowa

Dov Fisher speaks his mind:

There has been only one truly great country in the entire world these past 150 years, the United States of America. 

[. . .]

America’s great secret always was equal opportunity. It remained a step behind its fullest potential as long as it denied equal opportunity to some of her citizens: Italians, Irish, Germans, Asians, Jews, Hispanics, Blacks. But America got past it. By the 1980s, equal opportunity went without saying anymore. That is how Obama got into Columbia with whatever grades he had. That is how he got into Harvard Law with whatever grades he did or did not have. That is how he got to be the president of Harvard Law Review without ever publishing a law review article, something all but unheard of. He became a law professor, building on a resumé that was sketchy. Blacks in America had all the opportunity in the world by the 1980s.

Obama changed America to focus on equal outcomes. Not opportunity that entails great risk but offers enormous reward, but outcomes that guarantee mediocrity for everyone. The Brave New World of Equal Outcomes applies everywhere except in areas where Blacks excel, like professional basketball and football. Notice that there is no affirmative action or DEI or equal outcomes in NBA basketball. Why not? If there is DEI in medicine and medical school, where lives are at stake, in law firms and in Disney, in Hollywood and on Broadway — why not in the NBA? Why not open the NBA to more Orthodox Jews? There is not a single one, although there is one who is competitive. Why not more Irish? More Germans? More Italians? More Plain Whites? If Whites are 76 percent of America, why isn’t the NBA 76 percent White? The NFL?

Obama destroyed America. 

 

Continue reading “Of Course Trump Won Iowa”

Trump is Off-Putting?

Indeed he is. But he's all we've got.

A couple of Fox personalities interviewed him the other night. He kept referring to DeSantis as "DeSanctimonious."

The man has no class. This is a large part of the reason why bow-tied, yap-and-scribble Beltway conserve-nothing cuckservatives can't abide him. But class is overrated in any case and useless in a war if not positively dangerous. It would be great if the civility and grace of a Reagan could be married to the cojones of a Trump, but that can't happen due to human, all-too-human, limitations. 

In a war you need someone who is willing and able to fight, and fight to win. And he has to be electable: he has to have popular support. If you don't think Trump's the man, tell me who is.

And if you don't think the Republic is hanging by a thread, then I recommend you listen to Mark Levin's Sunday night, January 7th show with Douglas Murray and Gordon Chang. 

UPDATE (1/16/24)

Trump won Iowa with 51%: 56,260 votes. Christie brought up the rear, garnering all of 35 votes.  In other news, Bill Ackmann has dumped a cool one mil into Dean Phillips' kitty.  What I am missing, though, are the arguments against Trump. I don't see that Phillips or his pal Ackmann have given any. But then I have read only Ackman's long tweet and Phillips' annoyingly graphic and superficial website to which Ackman links. What are the arguments against the Orange Man? Trump = Hitler? Trump a cult leader? Tell that to some Iowa farmer with his pitchfork at the ready.