A New Trump Administration

Seriously intelligent columnists, like the kind that write for the Financial Times, are far more interesting than the columnists at America’s leading daily.

But, I will not belabor the obvious. Today, we can examine two FT columnists, Edward Luce and Rana Foroohar reflecting on what a new Trump presidency might entail.

Surely, it beats the ambient hysteria promulgated by the chicken littles of the political world-- The sky is falling! End climate change!

Luce begins with a cautionary note for his fellow leftist travelers. He denounces their rhetoric, explaining that their hysterics ar not going to change anyone’s minds:

You cannot keep telling people that they are idiots or racists and expect that they will see the light and change their vote. Is the American left in the business of defeating Trump, or merely of feeling unsullied when he wins? I sometimes wonder.

Luce does not look back at the prior Trump administration. He imagines a future presidency, assuming that it will follow a roadmap laid out by the Heritage Foundation last April in a book called Mandate for Leadership. The book outlines a four part agenda.

I am a little late to reading Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise which was published last April. The 920-page document is a serious blueprint for a Trump administration. 

Luce suggests that Ronald Reagan, a man who apparently had little interest in policy, surrounded himself with people who could do policy. Reagan let them do it and had a largely successful presidency. So says Luce.

He sees a parallel with Trump’s advisors.

The fact that Trump is, in the most fundamental ways, a deeply bad person should not blind us to the intelligence of the policy thinkers behind him. Reagan was a somnolent fellow who did not sacrifice a day of his life in contemplation of policy. His administration, however, was one of the most active and effective in modern US history. It is precisely Trump’s laziness and incompetence that makes such blueprints so indicative.

Not exactly a vote of confidence. The Mandate for Leadership offers four proposals:

Its four key tenets are to restore the family and protection of children — a war on the “Great Awokening”; dismantling the federal administrative state; protecting US borders and sovereignty against global threats, whether they be illegal immigrants or China; and restoring constitutional powers to the individual.

Fair enough. There’s very little with which one would reflexively disagree. A president who could achieve those goals would be highly effective. 

Responding to Luce, Rana Foroohar has a slightly different take on the situation. So she offers a summary of the Heritage Foundation analysis:

Look at America under the ruling and cultural elite today: inflation is ravaging family budgets, drug overdose deaths continue to escalate, and children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries.”

She takes serious issue with the emphasis on culture wars:

Indeed, the places where this executive summary goes off into la la land are mainly around hysteria over culture wars and nostalgia for 1950s American family structures. I strongly agree that fathers are important, and the fact that the fact that so many children are raised without one largely present in their lives is a big issue. But let’s not pretend that forcing people to get married and banning abortion is going to miraculously fix this problem. 

One suspects that the report has some other ideas, beyond banning abortion. 

She does not, of course, offer anything resembling a solution to the problem. At the least, she suggests that it is a problem. The problem, dare we say, without having read the Heritage Foundation text, must have something to do with the feminist war against patriarchy, and especially its war against marriage.

As for whether or not the Heritage Foundation has lost its mind in its attack on America’s elites, the great majority of which are largely liberal and progressive, we turn to a Powerline’s report, by John Hinderaker.

In order to define the elites, Hinderaker quotes from a Rasmussen survey:

The Elites are defined as those having a postgraduate degree, a household income of more than $150,000 annually, and living in a zip code with more than 10,000 people per square mile. Approximately 1% of the total U.S. population meets these criteria.

As for the attitudes that these elites manifest, no one should be too surprised to discover that they are living in lala land, as Foroohar calls it:

Forty-seven percent say that America suffers from too much freedom, compared with only 21% who think we have too much government control. Among the Ivy League elite, 55% say America is too free, with only 15% saying we have too much government.

If you suspected that an Ivy League education would rot your mind, you can find confirming evidence here:

A shocking 77% say they favor the “strict rationing of gas, meat and electricity.” That basically means living in a poor, totalitarian state like the USSR. And by 89% to 10%, the Ivy League elites want to see “strict rationing” of these most basic commodities.

These “elites” are fascists. Large majorities want to ban gas stoves (69%), gasoline powered cars (72%), non-essential air travel (55%), SUVs (58%) and air conditioning (53%). The Ivy League elites are even worse: the corresponding numbers are 80% for gas stoves, 81% for gasoline powered cars, 70% for non-essential air travel, 66% for SUVs, and 68% want to ban air conditioning. There is no polite way to put it: they are fascists.

There is more at the link. The people whom Rasmussen has identified are obviously dangerous to our democracy. If they take over, we are finished. More study needs to be done to figure out who, exactly, they are, so we can root them out and negate their influence. In the meantime, some moderate measures probably need to be taken. Like abolishing the Ivy League.

These Ivy Leaguers are so completely gulled by climate change hysteria that they are willing to shut down the nation, even the nation’s economy in order to save the planet. Evidently, they are not serious people. And yet, they are America’s elite class. 

Of course, once we finish abolishing the Ivy League, we ought also to abolish teachers’ unions.

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