If you only watched cable news, read
the New York Times and listened to leaders
in the House of Representatives, you’d think America was in crisis.
And well, maybe it is in crisis — for them. By working to “drain the swamp,”
President Trump has threatened the wealth and power of an establishment invested
in ever-bigger government. The efforts of this establishment to tank Trump’s
presidency seem to be unraveling, and so the establishment is panicking.
But if you ignore the Washington
hysterics for a second and look at the situation with clear eyes, more than
halfway through President Trump’s first term it looks like “morning in America.”
The economy has boomed.
There are more jobs than people to fill
them.
Wages are up.
Taxes are down.
Crushing regulatory burdens have been lifted.
American workers are poised to benefit
from better trade deals.
Allies and partners are no longer
freeriding on the backs of U.S. taxpayers, but paying their fair share for
global security.
Our adversaries are no longer marching.
They’re on their heels. Some of our foes, like ISIS, have been defeated.
Trump has kept his promises. Where he
hasn’t yet fully succeeded, on complex issues like immigration, or a trade deal with China,
he’s fighting tooth and nail to seal the deal.
To summarize, the president has done a
remarkable job of unleashing our economy, achieving peace through strength and every
day putting America first.
He’s done it all in the face of: A
Congress and even his own executive branch employees who often try to hinder him;
a media and popular culture that hates his guts; a “Resistance” that demands
his impeachment and removal; and a small but influential group of “Never Trump”
Republicans who refuse to accept him.
It is this last group that really bothers
me.
The intellectual elites in the GOP who refuse
to come around on Trump are being childish. By not rallying behind the
president, they are hurting the cause many of them have been devoted to for
their whole lives.
These folks have supported most of Trump’s
policies for years. I’m willing to bet if they saw the list of his first-term
accomplishments and didn’t know he was the president behind them, they’d all be
cheering on the president like he was Ronald Reagan.
So their real beef must be with Trump’s
style.
They don’t like his tough talk, nor the
way he delivers his message. They think he’s undiplomatic. They get queasy over
his rocking of the boat.
I think they’re wrong to dismiss Trump
on these grounds.
They should want Trump to be Trump – bold,
brash and unafraid. That is what the times, and the level of opposition to the
Republican agenda, demand.
Sometimes the president needs to use
hot rhetoric, communicated like a builder, not a professor. Sometimes he needs
to brawl. Sometimes he needs to demolish things that have failed, and build
anew.
It is exactly because of who Trump is
that for whatever his flaws, he is the right man for this time – maybe the only
man who can stand up to the tenacious resistance he faces at home and abroad to
achieve the agenda the American people elected him on, whether in reorienting
trade, commerce and foreign policy in our favor, or draining the swamp. Trump
isn’t beholden to special interests, and he doesn’t care that when he leaves
Pennsylvania Avenue he won’t be invited to fancy cocktail parties, or
celebrated on magazine covers. His focus is the national interest. That is what
should really matter.
This country wanted a disruptor, and I
believe it made the right choice. Electing another status quo politician
would’ve meant that our country would continue muddling along, while our
enemies and competitors gained. The elites might do alright, but the millions
of forgotten men and women that make up our great middle class would suffer.
The proof of Trump’s effectiveness in
turning things around is in the pudding of his record.
I believed and continue to believe that
America needs President Trump to break things for eight years. We need him to
challenge conventional wisdom. We need him to take on entrenched bureaucracies.
We need him to bring balance to a world order that we’ve foolishly allowed to
be tilted against us.
For too long as a country it’s been
like we’ve been playing a sport blindfolded, with one arm tied behind our back.
To my friends in the Republican Party,
I would simply ask this question: What president has achieved your stated
agenda better than this one?
We need to let Trump be Trump – unafraid, uncompromising and relentless in pursuit of the America First agenda, for the benefit of all Americans.
