Moving At Breaking-Neck Velocity . . . Trump Dismays And Delights Backers, Leaving His Direction Unsure

By DEXTER DUGGAN
President Trump definitely isn’t moving his legislative program through the balky Congress at breakneck speed. More like moss-neck speed, where the moss grows over the languishing bills in the Washington swamp until you can’t even read what’s written on them.
However, there’s no doubt Trump has attained breaking-neck velocity, where he lunges so fast from a low to a high that his supporters are in danger of snapping their necks in two, trying to keep up watching where he’s going.
And as for whether moss obscures what he’s saying, forget that. Trump can be so plain in what he declares that he leaves friends and foes reeling, respectively in delight or horror. Can his deeds match his words, though?
Consider his speech to the 72nd session of the General Assembly of the United Nations on September 19. The lead headline on the front page of the left-wing, very Trump-averse New York Times on September 20 shivered over the “Combative UN Speech,” where “Trump Airs List of Threats.”
Where I write in Phoenix, Trump’s talk began shortly after 7 a.m., three hours behind the 10:04 a.m. Eastern Time start of the speech at the UN’s New York headquarters. Before 7:25 a.m. the Phoenix-based conservative talk-radio station KFNX (1100 AM) dumped its regular programming in order to carry the rest of Trump’s 42-minute speech live.
It was as if Trump was addressing the nation and world on some grave matter. In fact, he was. Trump was repudiating point after point of the corrupt globalist worldview that had dragged down the early promise of the UN, just as it poisoned life in nation after nation.
When Trump repeatedly referred to the sovereignty of every nation, he was shaking pillars that upheld oppressive assumptions in the secretive councils of those who consider themselves the wisest beings alive, unchallengeable by any mere mortals who exist only to bow down and obey.
And it was more than sobering to hear Trump raise the prospect “to totally destroy North Korea” because of its wild dictator’s repeated nuclear threats against the United States and its allies. That presumably would mean the deaths of millions of innocent North Koreans under the dictator’s heel.
But only moments earlier, Trump acknowledged Pyongyang’s complete contempt for the well-being of its own people: “It is responsible for the starvation deaths of millions of North Koreans, and for the imprisonment, torture, killing, and oppression of countless more.” Trump once more sternly was signaling the “Rocket Man” dictator, as he referred to Kim Jong-un, that his crazed behavior must cease.
If Kim wasn’t able to understand the horror of his threats to slay hundreds of millions if not billions of innocent people elsewhere, would he at least be shaken into reality by contemplating his entire little homeland possibly wiped from the face of the Earth through Western retaliation?
Former U.S. ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, highly praised Trump’s talk, as did Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who tweeted, “In over 30 years in my experience with the UN, I never heard a bolder or more courageous speech.”
On the whole, Trump’s UN address, with its numerous laudable expressions, is best read and savored at the White House website’s (whitehouse.gov) “Speeches & Remarks” page of the Press Office.
While the president’s high-profile address left many supporters on an emotional high, he had plunged them low into despair at least twice earlier during September.
On September 6 he announced he’d cut a short-term spending deal with the left-wing, minority Democratic Party’s Congressional leaders in the Washington swamp, not his own majority Republican leaders. This naturally meant continuing tax funding for baby butcher Planned Parenthood.
Then in a burst of confusion beginning the evening of September 13, those same Democrat leaders, Nancy Pelosi of the House and Charles Schumer of the Senate, announced Trump was on board with them in agreeing to grant another Democrat dream, the codification of Barack Obama’s illegally created DACA program to allow hundreds of thousands of more illegal aliens to stay in the U.S.
And, the Dems added, Trump wouldn’t link this move to an agreement to fund his long-promised border wall. The following morning, Trump denied that deal was made, but he tweeted in high praise of DACA recipients.
National conservative radio talk host Mark Levin said Trump “is lurching left because he wants to lurch left.”
However, later in the month, Levin enthused on September 19, “I think Donald Trump gave an incredible speech today” at the United Nations, and added later during his program, “It’s truly an outstanding speech.”
On September 14 another national conservative radio host, Laura Ingraham, had worried if Trump would ever be able to get a border-wall deal done. But on September 20 she was delighted at the UN speech, one of the best speeches delivered during her lifetime by a U.S. president at the UN, she said.
Just before the UN speech, Cincinnati talk host Bill Cunningham, guest-hosting nationally for Mark Levin on September 18, said he’d give full credit to Trump for selecting good federal judges and Supreme Court Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch, but the president had no legislative achievements.
Voicing disappointment, Cunningham said he’d fully expected attaining tax reform and the repeal of Obamacare, but instead the nation gets continued Obamacare and support for DACA.
Trump’s only core belief is Trump, Cunningham lamented, and the president will agree with whoever was the last person he talked to.
Similarly concerned on September 14 were Phoenix radio talk hosts Seth Leibsohn and Chris Buskirk, co-hosts of the daily Seth and Chris Show on KKNT (960 AM). They’d strongly linked themselves to Trump’s “American Greatness” agenda. They co-authored a recently published book with that title (reviewed in the August 10 Wanderer, page 3), and are part of the team at the American Greatness website (amgreatness.com).
Leibsohn recalled that GOP President George H.W. Bush had thrown away a 90 percent approval rating in 1991 by repudiating his key “Read my lips” pledge against taxes, and went on to lose the presidency to Democrat Bill Clinton the next year.
The Phoenix co-hosts wondered if the collapse was beginning for Trump’s MAGA agenda.
Indeed, videos burst forth of disgusted Trump supporters burning their proud red MAGA hats.
However, the American Greatness website quickly posted a celebratory article on September 19, “Why Trump’s UN Speech Was a Triumph,” by Roger Kimball. The article soon noted:
“ ‘Sovereignty,’ indeed, was the master word of Trump’s address. The word and its cognates occur 21 times in the 4,300-word talk, centrally in conjunction with the core Trumpian ideal of ‘principled realism’.”
The article’s very next paragraph might well have put its finger exactly on Trump’s outlook:
“ ‘We are guided,’ Trump explained, ‘by outcomes, not ideology. We have a policy of principled realism, rooted in shared goals, interests, and values’.”
Outcomes, principles and values, not ideology.
Even many conservatives don’t consider Trump a fellow conservative, but at least think he’s someone in sympathy, even strong sympathy, with their outlook and goals. Can that be satisfying enough?
And even when conservatives were appalled at the president’s deal-making attempts with liberal Democrat leadership, did Trump intentionally have cards up his sleeve that they didn’t realize?
Some Democrat ground troops loudly protested their congressional leaders having anything to do with the Manhattan multibillionaire they’d become convinced is a monster. Rather than welcoming, for instance, the chance to bring in more waves of illegal immigrants to add to future Democrat voting rolls, some Dem faithful rebelled against contact with the supposedly poisonous president.
The liberal Politico website reported on September 15 about resistance to “cutting deals with a divisive, mercurial president” that “the party intends to run against hard in 2018 and 2020.” It “amounts to dancing with the devil.”
And some conservatives took a perverse pleasure at seeing Pelosi being shouted down by her own “Dreamer” troops at a San Francisco news conference, just as if she were one of those nasty old conservatives the leftists get such satisfaction from stifling publicly.
With Pelosi thinking she was closer to victory on DACA, the shouting, chanting Dreamers wouldn’t let her continue her presentation and rebuked the Dems for having failed to deliver already.
Talk host Ingraham observed on September 19 that this is what to expect from people who don’t observe borders, and this is what happens when an entire class of people is exempted from a subset of U.S. law.
They developed not appreciation but arrogance.
In his UN talk, Trump explained the benefit of sovereign, independent nations acting for mutual benefit, not subservient nations under a globalist heel.
“We do not expect diverse countries to share the same cultures, traditions, or even systems of government,” Trump said. “But we do expect all nations to uphold these two core sovereign duties: to respect the interests of their own people and the rights of every other sovereign nation. This is the beautiful vision of this institution, and this is foundation for cooperation and success.
“Strong, sovereign nations let diverse countries with different values, different cultures, and different dreams not just coexist, but work side by side on the basis of mutual respect,” he said. “Strong, sovereign nations let their people take ownership of the future and control their own destiny. And strong, sovereign nations allow individuals to flourish in the fullness of the life intended by God.”
Without explicitly blaming Obama, Trump rejected the soulless secularism and cruel socialism that flourished in Obama’s mind and actions, as well as Obama’s dangerous deal with Iran.
Trump also called plain attention to the often-ignored serious disadvantages of “migration”: “We have learned that, over the long term, uncontrolled migration is deeply unfair to both the sending and the receiving countries.
“For the sending countries, it reduces domestic pressure to pursue needed political and economic reform, and drains them of the human capital necessary to motivate and implement those reforms,” he said. “For the receiving countries, the substantial costs of uncontrolled migration are borne overwhelmingly by low-income citizens whose concerns are often ignored by both media and government.”
In music to conservative ears, Trump also rejected socialism outright, and named specific countries it has ruined. It’s not that socialism didn’t have a fair chance, he said; socialism had a full chance and still brought disaster:
“The problem in Venezuela is not that socialism has been poorly implemented, but that socialism has been faithfully implemented. From the Soviet Union to Cuba to Venezuela, wherever true socialism or communism has been adopted, it has delivered anguish and devastation and failure. Those who preach the tenets of these discredited ideologies only contribute to the continued suffering of the people who live under these cruel systems.”
On another issue, will Trump’s non-ideological magic work for Republican Luther Strange in the September 26 GOP U.S. Senate runoff election in Alabama? The result, which could tell a lot, should be known a few days after this hardcopy issue of The Wanderer goes to press on September 21.
Fully befitting his name, Strange is being backed strongly not only by Trump but also by standpatter Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky, who has been more of an obstacle than an aid to Trump. Strange lagged behind Alabama conservative hero Roy Moore in the polls, but Trump has blared forth enthusiastic tweets for Strange and announced an Alabama trip to voice his support.
Trump would seem to be delivering another punch in the face to conservatives, but does he again have something up his sleeve besides his fist?