Posted on August 28,
2019
The Red And The Orange
Commies have got Trump's number
by
Daniel
Clark
President Trump will be the first to tell you that
socialism is bad, and that the Democratic Party is wrong to embrace it, but
does he have any idea why? Is he able to
define socialism, and explain what's so wrong about it, or has he simply
observed that condemning it is a reliable applause line?
Before you answer, remember that in 1999, Trump
himself proposed a "wealth tax" of 14.25 percent on all individuals with more
than $10 million. In 2015, he described his health care plan by telling 60 Minutes, "I'm going to take care of
everybody," later clarifying that this meant, "The government is going to pay
for it." During the next year's
primaries, he accused opponents of government-run medicine of wanting to let
people "die in the streets." In each of
the past two years, he has used taxpayers' money to subsidize farmers in an
attempt to mitigate the damage inflicted by the "easy to win" trade war.
Trump
has never adhered to a consistent political philosophy, and has never spelled
out any guiding principle beyond the slogan on the red hat. The impression this leaves is that he's never
really thought about it. He's never bothered
to understand how an economic philosophy that vilifies the human individual consistently
leads to the creation of prison-states that murder huge numbers of their own
citizens, while subjecting those who remain to lives of oppression, deprivation,
dispiritedness and squalor.
How else can someone be so oblivious as to praise China
for the atrocity it committed at Tiananmen Square, as Trump did in a 1990 Playboy interview? "That shows you the power of strength," he
said. "Our country is right now
perceived as weak." Really? A free country whose citizens have rights to
freely assemble and petition their government is weak, but a totalitarian state
that is too insecure to tolerate dissent is strong? He can only have arrived at that conclusion
by viewing the conflict as a simple physical competition, with the government
as a monster truck, and the dissenters as broken-down station wagons used as
fodder.
It is with this same blindness toward the immorality
of socialism, and the brutality that is required of Communist states to enforce
it, that Trump praised North Korean goon Kim Jong-un as somebody who only wants
the best for his people. "I may be
wrong," he tweeted, "but I believe that Chairman Kim has a great and beautiful
vision for his country, and only the United States, with me as president, can
make that vision come true." No need to
keep him in suspense. He's wrong.
A
Communist dictator has a "beautiful vision for his country?" He sounds like one of those people who calls
John Lennon's ghastly rant Imagine a beautiful
song, without bothering to notice what the words actually mean. What's the beautiful thing about Kim's vision
that American socialists like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are
lacking? An even more disturbing question
is what Trump intends to do to help Kim realize this vision.
It should go without saying that there are consequences
to having a president who fails to grasp the nature of Communism. The trade war with China is but one
example. Trump assumes he has the
upperhand because the standoff is harming the Chinese people worse than the
American people. In reality, there's no
reason for China to give in until the Chinese government is being harmed worse than the American people. If Trump is gullible enough to believe a Communist
government will be moved by concerns for the well-being of its people, we ought
to be very worried about every negotiation he enters on our behalf.
He's only being consistent, though. The Norks sent American hostage Otto Warmbier home to die of having been tortured, and Trump could
not conceive that Kim's government was responsible. Vladimir Putin is openly nostalgic for the
USSR, and Trump joked with him about tampering with American elections. When Jimmy Carter, as ex-president, became
this pliant toward Communist thugs, conservatives were rightly and
profusely outraged. When sitting
president Donald Trump does it, we're just supposed to assume he has his
reasons.
The Trumpies will never
concede that he is doing anything other than executing a brilliant, if
counterintuitive, strategy. To them, he'll
always be General Patton, Pop Warner and Deep Blue all rolled into one. The very tiniest concession to reality they
should be willing to make, however, is to at least have the decency to stop
likening their man to Ronald Reagan.
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Frontier of the Free Press