Can anyone believe that Bush Republicans or the “Never-Trumpers” are the future of the party when one considers the massive and visceral reaction of millions of Trump voters even to the idea of conceding his defeat in this election?
In the first two decades of the century, President-elect Joe Biden’s choice for secretary of state supported U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen. He was an ever-reliable liberal interventionist.
This same Antony Blinken could spend the first years of a Biden presidency helping extricate our country from the misbegotten wars he championed. What establishment Democrats like Biden and Blinken helped to do in previous administrations, they will likely now have to undo.
Who effected this sea change in national thinking? Donald Trump. Much that was said and believed before he came down the escalator in 2015 is no longer said or believed by the majority of Americans. And no institution has been more altered than the Republican Party.
George H. W. Bush’s vision of a “New World Order,” launched at the after-party of his Gulf War victory, died with his presidency. George W. Bush’s crusade for global democracy to “end tyranny in our world” has been forgotten. Bush Republicans no longer speak for the party on foreign policy, trade or immigration.
NATO will never be the same again after Trump rudely demanded that freeloading nations pay their fair share of the collective defense or the Americans would pack up and come home from Europe.
Former Defense Secretary Gen. James Mattis may call for the ash-canning of the phrase “America First.” He will fail. For, as both national motto and national policy, the slogan has put down roots in American soil because it comports with the will of the silent majority. Whatever the establishment believes, in the clash between nationalism and globalism, globalism has lost America.
Moreover, the world is going this way.
Does not Xi Jinping put his own country first as he claims for China all the waters and islands for hundreds of miles into the East and South China seas? Does not Vladimir Putin put his own country first as he seeks to bring back under Moscow’s wing the former republics of the Russian federation?
Does not President Erdogan put Turkey first as he sends arms and troops to pursue his country’s interests in Libya, Syria, Cyprus, the South Caucasus and the Eastern Mediterranean in clashes with Greece?
What does Bibi Netanyahu put first, if not his own country, Israel?
If country and nation are not first in the hearts and minds of Americans, what should replace them? Some nonexistent New World Order? The U.N.? NATO? A multilateral caucus of global institutions?
Under Trump, economic nationalism has displaced free trade globalism as the trade policy of the party and government.
The GOP elite that backed Bill Clinton on NAFTA, supported a new transnational World Trade Organization, invited China to join the club, and accorded Beijing most-favored-nation trade status is now silent.
Tariffs to force open foreign markets and punish predator-traders who take advantage of American workers have replaced the free trade fundamentalism that had been dogma since Dwight Eisenhower’s days.
Nor is the Republican Party likely to return to free trade, as long as “China First” is the undeclared policy pursued by the nation that has now displaced us as the world’s leading manufacturing power.
The George Bush-John McCain Republican Party was for amnesty for illegals and open borders for new migrants. Today’s GOP supports the deportation of illegals and the 30-foot Trump Wall on the Mexican border.
Not only is Trumpism triumphant in the GOP’s ideological battles, but its victory was validated in 2020. While Trump may have narrowly lost states that gave him an electoral majority in 2016, he grew the GOP presidential vote by 10 million, held the Senate and added GOP votes in the House, an almost unprecedented feat for a defeated President.
Trump did not establish the new relationship with Russia he had promised, nor did he end the forever wars of the Middle East. Yet, the U.S. is closer today to the exit ramps from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen.
Can anyone believe that Bush Republicans or the “Never-Trumpers” are the future of the party when one considers the massive and visceral reaction of millions of Trump voters even to the idea of conceding his defeat in this election? After the dust has settled from this election, Trump’s achievements will begin to be recognized.
He cut tax rates and federal regulations and produced in his fourth year the lowest unemployment rate ever among Black Americans, women and racial and ethnic minorities. He remade the Supreme Court, producing a 6-3 constitutionalist majority no predecessor was able to achieve.
He crushed ISIS in Syria and eliminated the caliphate there. He pulled us out of the Paris climate accord, the Iranian nuclear deal and the World Health Organization. His Operation Warp Speed initiative helped produce two vaccines for the worst pandemic in a century within less than a year. And he brought the Dow back up to 30,000.
A not unimpressive record, though our media elite will never concede it.
Republished with gracious permission from Mr. Buchanan (November 2020).
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The featured image is a photograph of President Donald J. Trump delivering remarks at the National Christmas Tree Lighting 2019 ceremony Thursday, Dec. 5, 2019, on the Ellipse in Washington, D.C. (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian). It is in the public domain and appears here courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Thank you Pat Buchanan as always for an uplifting, hopeful, and positive message.
I voted for Trump twice and have now regretted it. While I agree there are areas which Trump did well (Judiciary) but he is a profound embarrassment to the country and yes, to GOP. In particular, his haphazard isolationist foreign policy is puzzling to me. I don’t agree with Bush’s hyperactive foreign policy, but this isolationism of Trump and Buchanan is naive at best. To leave Russia, but particularly China, to their own devices is dangerous. Why Soviet Russia united Anglo-American conservatives in the latter half of the 20th century, but not the threat of Communist China today is baffling. China is clearly as much of a threat to the free world now as the Soviet Union was, and burying our heads in the sand will not make the United States any stronger.
You and many others continue to entirely lack an understanding of what the globalist contingent have been up to for the last century and a half, and why it took someone like Trump to finally challenge their barely hidden hegemony. Nationalism is the only moral and courageous response to the authoritarian takeover that they have been enacting in stealth for so long, enslaving entire nations with their corrupt central banking system. But no more. Their theater of war against all humanity is coming to its closing act. Thanks be to God.
Jason, look at the population differences between China with its several billion and then Russia with all of 136 million and enough land to require ten time zones. China wants more land and also doesn’t at this point allow any religion to insert itself into their value system. Putin, however, has really made serious efforts to bring back and build up the Russian Orthodox Church.
It was the false Russia, Russia, Russia screaming that took place over the past 4 years here that literally pushed Putin into a bit of a corner with China in case he needed a back up. Russians are really not interested in becoming China’s northernmost province.
If you go to YouTube and listen to Putin when a few times a year he does an audience and call in program with people all over the country you may feel a bit better. My sense of what has gone on is he felt he was getting boxed in and put money he didn’t want to into their military. His fondest goal is to see the standard of living for all Russians rise and he knows that takes money. He appreciates the good parts of capitalism and to me the saddest part of these past four years is the Democrats succeeded in keeping Trump away from Putin. They would have most likely gotten on well and that is not what Democrats or the Chinese want to see.
As a supreme diplomat on the world stage, Putin’s strategies may be opaque to observers much of the time (which is necessary to a certain extent), but he has undoubtedly acted by the necessities for his country’s survival, and Russians know that. It’s why Western outsiders who try to denounce “Putin’s Russia” don’t understand that it’s actually “Russia’s Putin.” Big difference.
Since Putin’s great efforts to rein in the central bank in Russia were largely successful, with the result that the banking controllers could no longer call the shots, the increased hostility towards Putin by the globalist contingent (e.g, using NATO forces to surround Russia, and applying additional pressures using Ukrainian) actually managed to drive Putin and Xi Jinping closer together, which means they will have come to agreements (during their many meetings) that the West is not entirely privy to.
In any case, I trust the political process of all these players, because the dangerous machinations of the globalists and their deep state require strategic care and planning to defeat. To that extent, I believe that they are more “on the same page” than not.
The Danish Conservative Peoples Party is not untouched by president Trump’s aspirations, to put every nation first, before globalization, but on certain principles, especially pro-life, we still have a long way to go against woke ideology. The latter are collectivists and socialists who turn capitalism upside down, away from private property, religious liberty, and identity, towards central banking, abortion genosuicides, and migration globalization. Few people grasp that woke capitalism is worse socialism than China. My prayer to Americans, that you let us pay our fair share in N.A.T.O., so we accept Russia as one of our best friends (never at war with Denmark). Congratulations with president Trump’s almost reelection. Thank you for four years without war.