Trump after Two Years

I thought  in 2016 that Donald Trump was a poor candidate to be president and that several of his opponents in the primaries were better choices.  However like many others I saw him as the lesser evil in the general election and  hoped he would defeat Hillary Clinton. I did not vote for him but would have if I had lived in a state where the outcome would have been close.  Being in a safely Republican state  made it easy for me to cast a protest vote for Gary Johnson  who would not have been a good president but had some good ideas and  seemed a  better human being than either Trump or Clinton.

Now that Trump has been president for almost two years,  I still think his winning was a far better outcome than getting Hillary Clinton as president.   His actions and policies on taxes, regulation, and lessening  the burden of government have been mainly good. He has appointed judges who are more likely to respect individual rights and the Constitution than those appointed by Clinton would have been.  While generally wrong about  international trade, he has been partially right about  the special case of China where something should be done about that government’s industrial espionage and  theft of intellectual property and where dependency on a hostile foreign power for supplying essential goods is a bad idea.  He deserves credit for  successes against ISIS in the Middle East, a possible success in disarming North Korea, and strengthening and focusing on the parts of the armed forces necessary for the defense and security of the United States.  He is right in saying that European governments should provide most of the manpower, equipment, and money  for the defense of Europe, that the Iranian government is not to be trusted, that some of our wars  in the Middle East were mistakes, and that the UN is wrong about Israel and other things. 

It is not a bad record for these days. It is better than I would have guessed at the time of the election.  But then there are his demeanor and personal behavior. He can be hard to take. He comes across as a  rude, arrogant, thin-skinned, blustering jerk. He may be thoughtful in private, but he surely manages to hide it in public.   His “communication” with the American people via Twitter is about typical of what goes on elsewhere on that platform and thus, for a president,  a national embarrassment.  His lies and whoppers may not be more frequent or outrageous than those of other politicians, including his predecessor, but his style and delivery make them seem cruder and more obvious. His petty feuds with and threats to reporters and TV comedians are demeaning and grossly undignified for a man holding the office once occupied by George Washington.  All of this matters politically. If he does not change some of it, he may need the Democrats to nominate a really unacceptable candidate (which they may) in 2020 to be reelected. He could even be in the same position as Lyndon Johnson was in 1968 and have to decide not to run for reelection.  People, especially the so-called swing voters, like to vote for someone they see as likable.  Trump needs to wise up fast. He lucked out in 2016 in having an opponent less likable than he was. He cannot count of that next time.

George H. W. Bush

George H. W. Bush served honorably  in World War II, had plenty of physical courage, stayed married to the same women for his entire adult life, raised a family with her, and did well in business.  Based on what is publicly known, he seems to have led a decent, respectable,  and successful private life in which there was much to admire.

He also had a career of over a quarter of a century as a politician and bureaucrat.  He came from a wealthy and influential New England family and was a typical example of what was once called a Rockefeller Republican.   There are reasons one of his obituaries used the term “patrician”.  (As with most politicians he tried to put on a man-of-the-people act, but his seemed especially  weak, pork rinds or no.)

He ran for the senate from Texas in 1964 and lost but was elected to the house in 1966.  After leaving the house and losing another race for the senate in 1970,  he had several appointed jobs in government including director of the CIA. Ronald Reagan selected him as his running mate in 1980 – perhaps to placate the Republican establishment - despite their many disagreements and a rough campaign for the nomination in which Bush called Reagan’s economic ideas voodoo.  After eight years as vice president, Bush was elected president in 1988, mainly on the basis of Reagan’s successes and as someone under whom the government would continue in the same  direction.  Some called it an election for Reagan’s third term. It turned out to be nothing of the sort.  Bush double-crossed his benefactor, announcing that his would be a kinder, gentler government than that of his presumably unkind and ungentle predecessor, ended  the Reagan revolution, and governed  as a big government Republican. Reagan had made a serious mistake in  failing to endorse as his successor someone who shared his ideas and would continue his work.   Bush  double-crossed his voters by reneging  on his emphatic promise to oppose increases in taxes.  He frittered away both the political capital he inherited from Reagan and his own from a successful war over Kuwait and lost the presidency in 1992 in a three way race where enough usually Republican voters abandoned him for a strange but seemingly sincere amateur to give the presidency  to a little known southern Democrat with a shady background.   

Bush had a well known disdain for ideology and what he contemptuously called the vision thing. This was his worst failing.  An ideology is just  a set of political principles. ( When he made obligatory statements about principles, his insincerity and discomfort struck people as obvious. He seems to have been a person to whom such things are not seriously or operationally important.)  Without one  it is hard for a politician to have moral courage,  steadfastness, or reasoned convictions or to do much good.  That showed with him. He was the wrong person for the job in 1988, and the country suffered for it.