A Trumpist case for voting out Trump

Give the Trump administration its due as the last of us prepare to vote Tuesday, Nov. 3.

Its most compelling slogan is “Promises made. Promises kept.” One can argue that the administration has kept many of its promises, and even bestowed blessings, some intended, others not.

For that very reason, this column will make a Trumpist argument for Trump’s own defeat and stipulate why it is time to declare victory from loss and take a two-year timeout to regroup.

True-believer Trumpism is a big tent containing its own variations, from small business owners who want to make payroll with less red tape to conservatives who live by the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Fox Business Channel. These are the folks we are addressing today, rather than Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Boogaloos, Neo Confederates, Klan members, and Neo Nazis, who, it must be said, occupy a wing of today’s Party of Lincoln.

In that spirit, we’ll agree with, and expand upon, the October 30 WSJ column “Trump’s Already Won: A Consequential Presidency Has Enabled Peace and Prosperity,” by Maria Bartiromo and James Freeman. While I do not buy all or most of their arguments, I will stipulate them as a point of departure.

Let’s grant that American pre-COVID economy slightly outpaced the G7 median, that Trump neither got us into foreign misadventures nor apologized for America, that his successful deregulation and broader policies encouraged rather than impeded business investment, that he and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell left an ideological stamp on the judiciary that will last a generation, that the administration has smashed an anti-Israel Middle East coalition with a peace agreement with the Gulf Emirates, albeit to the detriment of Palestinians, that Trump has called out China in abusing trade and NATO allies for not paying their agreed-upon share. Let’s argue, too, that this administration has lowered high corporate tax rates, and presided over record-low unemployment, more job openings, and rising wages, and that U.S. GDP grew by an historic annualized rate of 33.1 percent in the third quarter after a severe COVID depression..

Now for the pivot. It is time for Trump to go and for Trumpism to regroup if not disappear. To borrow from William F. Buckley, Jr., when he founded The National Review 65 years ago: It’s time to stand athwart history and yell Stop.

Why? Because Trump’s arguable accomplishments have come atop a long-decaying foundation of constitutional, moral, political, and social rot – the type that does not make for easy soundbites, memes, or tweets. It is time to arrest that rot and bolster our foundations.

For our Republic’s foundations are collapsing, from independent courts, to a polarized electorate, to searing racial wounds, political gridlock, and gerrymandered and frozen state governments. With no platform other than owning the libs and perpetuating its own power, the Trumpified Republican Party is unable or unwilling to articulate a plan, other than a continuation of four years of more of the same, flying straight into ceiling zero.

Really? Aren’t you tired already?

So let’s see what that means. Governmental agencies from the Environmental Protection Agency to the State Department to the Center for Disease Control to the U.S. Postal Service have been gutted. If Trump wins, expect an accelerating exodus of human expertise. This already hurts people, even kills them. In addition to 230,000-plus COVID deaths and counting, since Trump’s inauguration, 2.3 million fewer people had medical insurance pre-COVID; 5 million fewer have it today. Yet the Republicans have no plan to replace the Affordable Care Act and have gone to the Supreme Court to gut it. Trump’s stated policies place Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare under grave threat, pointing our society further into a Hobbesian direction making life more solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Our reactive immigration policies make brutal mockery of Emma Lazarus’s inscription on the Statue of Liberty.

More to the point, Trump is not competent or up to the job. He runs a chaotic shop that cannot keep people, who quickly write memoirs warning us not to re-elect him. This administration is a Festivus of scandal. The A and B teams were driven off long ago, and the team at home and around the world is filled with littlespittles, cranks, and grifters. Lobbyists run the agencies overseeing industries they have represented at four times the rate of Obama’s turn. Trump’s pre-election Schedule F order making firing of federal workers easier for perceived disloyalty threatens to destroy the independence of the civil service as we know it. His firings of inspectors general have smashed independent oversight. How can four more years of this help?

Trumpism is smashing the international order, offering the law of the jungle as the only alternative. Our global reputation has been smashed to bits and has likely already suffered permanent damage. In grave jeopardy: already-weakened institutions from the World Health Organization to the World Trade Organization to NATO. Nationalism has its place, but is supremely destructive in meeting a climate crisis, global pandemic, or transnational humanitarian disaster. Some decisions are inexplicable. Why did Trump withdraw from the Trans Pacific Trade partnership of 12 nations designed as a counterweight to China? If we are in a trade fight with China, what good does it do to ditch your allies and try to go it alone with a costly no-win tariff war that hurts farmers, businesses, consumers, and taxpayers?

As for the economy -- to cite one of Trump's favorite songs made famous by Peggy Lee: Is that all there is? And is the Dow the economy? Hitler got Germany out of the Depression by restoring full employment after just three years, thanks largely to rearmament, conscription, and infrastructure spending. Under Roosevelt, the United States took nearly nine years, until after Pearl Harbor, when unemployment was dropping below 10 percent for the first time since 1930. Does that make Hitler right?

Here are the real questions: Would the world be better off had Hitler quit while he was ahead, in, say, 1937? Would the world be better off if Trump left the stage now?

The answer can only be a resounding yes. A Biden presidency may be an interregnum, but it offers a chance to pick up and restore the pieces of a government, restore professionalism, competence, and morale, and function with integrity and a uniform code of ethical conduct from the top down.

Will that be a Trojan Horse for “socialism”? It is hard to see how, as a Democratic Senate majority of 51 or 52 does not a revolution make. Restoring reasonable executive function and passing now-bottlenecked legislation like the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, a thoughtful infrastructure program, and small business incentives are good starts. That leaves the real fulcrum for results for 2021-22 not with The Squad, but with two dozen problem-solvers from both parties near the center who can hammer out solutions. These are your representatives from swing districts and may lower the temperature before the 2022 midterms.

As Lincoln might say, it is altogether fitting and proper to bring up the $900 million Trump owes that comes due in the next four years, a good chunk of it to Deutsche Bank and foreign entities. How is this not a national security red light and why should it be the taxpayers’ business?

In conclusion, the best thing for Trumpism is to step back and regroup. Wall Street Journal “Wonder Land” columnist Daniel Henninger on Oct. 28, in “Vote For Joe Biden? Seriously?” presented the choice as one between the devil and the deep blue sea, clearly opting for the devil we know as better than the deep “blue” sea of a radical Democratic agenda.

The Trumpist devil, shorn of the Cuisinart of WSJ editorial page/Murdoch/Hoover Institution cosmetics, has already signaled an agenda powered by grievance, vengeance, racism, xenophobia and a need to win at all costs. We brought this on by voting this in. The Devil We Know has signaled it is ready to take us into new territory, which looks dark indeed. For a Trump supporter who resists racism, violence, and xenophobia, haven’t we all had enough?

Trump is, or should be, a spent force. He is tired and bereft of ideas, but will not go away as long as he is alive. So honor and thank him if you must. But it is time to get him out, declare victory, make way for the interregnum, step back from this new abnormal, and join together to promote a more competent, civil, and just society.

That means voting for Biden -- furtively, if you like. Otherwise, one can only ask if such a Republic is worth keeping.