Posted on May 23,
2019
Where’s The Winning?
Trump record is a dearth of W’s
by
Daniel
Clark
Presidential candidate Donald Trump promised that
Americans will do nothing but win throughout his administration. Your days of playing the patsy for the rest
of the world are over. You’re going to
win so decisively and so consistently that it will become monotonous. You’ll get so sick of winning, you’ll PYOOOOK! One day, you’ll come crawling back to him,
begging, “Ohhh, noooo, Mr.
Trump. I don’t want to win anymore. Please, make it stop!”
Okay, so when does it start? We’re already well beyond the midway point of
President Trump’s first and possibly only term.
Up until now, his boasts of “winning” have shown themselves to be as
empty as Charlie Sheen’s.
Fourteen
months ago, the president tweeted, “trade wars are good, and easy to win.” Believe it or not, he thinks he’s proven it
by now. “Tariffs will bring in FAR MORE
wealth to our Country than even a phenomenal deal of the traditional kind,” he
claims. But of course, tariffs bring no
wealth into the country at all.
The Chinese do not pay a U.S. tariff on Chinese
goods. It is those who import the goods
who pay the tariffs, and pass the cost along to the American consumers. So, what the Trump tariffs really do is take
money from the American people and use it to enrich the government, just like
tax increases of any other kind. Yet he
boasts about how much revenue the federal government is taking in from these
new taxes on its people. Is that how Republicans
define victory now?
Trump’s supporters argue that a trade war is necessary
to curtail serial transgressions by the Chinese government. Sounds reasonable enough, but then why would
he have also embarked upon trade wars with Canada, Mexico and the European
Union? Recently, for what reasons we can
only guess, Trump lifted the tariffs he had imposed on steel and aluminum
imports. A welcome development, but just
what did we gain from the whole episode?
If the president had gotten any kind of concession from anyone, he’d
surely have told us so.
Contrary to popular dingbattery,
George W. Bush did not declare America’s mission in Iraq to be over when he
spoke on board the USS Abraham Lincoln. Trump and his acolytes, on the other hand,
have taken every opportunity to prematurely declare victory, based on the
slenderest and murkiest of pretexts. Our
trade war with the Chinese would never have escalated to where it is today, for
example, had the routinely recycled “China blinked” story line ever panned out.
After an extremely preliminary meeting with North
Korean strongman Kim Jong-un last July, Trump tweeted, “Wow, we haven’t given
up anything & they have agreed to denuclearization.” Not only did the Norks not agree to
denuclearize, but they have since resumed testing their ballistic
missiles. Nor was it true that “we
haven’t given up anything,” in light of Trump’s agreement to cease joint
military exercises between the U.S. and South Korea.
Perhaps most disturbingly, North Korea would obviously
love to persuade Trump to pull all American forces from the Korean peninsula,
which is something he’s repeatedly said he wants to do anyway. The idea that he’ll have paved the way
through a successful negotiation may be too good for him to pass up. With the U.S. out of the way, North Korea
would finally accomplish the conquest of the South at which it failed in the
middle of last century. Where is there
even a potential for America to win as a result of continued talks between
Trump and Kim?
While
dealing with North Korea, Trump did secure the release of hostage Otto Warmbier, an American student who had been jailed under
dubious circumstances, to put it mildly.
The tortured Warmbier was in a coma, however,
when he was sent home to Cincinnati, where he died six days later of a severe
brain injury. According to Trump
administration diplomat Joseph Yun, the president had approved payment of a $2
million ransom for Warmbier, and Trump himself denies
only that the payment was made, not that it had been agreed to. This February, Trump declared that Kim and
the North Korean government were not to blame for Warmbier’s
condition. Following a rebuke from the
victim’s family, the president did an about-face, and said, “Of course I hold
North Korea responsible for Otto’s mistreatment and death.” How’s he doing that, exactly? By not paying off?
As if that weren’t bad enough, the Trump
administration has held unilateral talks with the Taliban, in circumvention of
the sitting Afghan government, to negotiate a withdrawal timeline for the U.S.
military from Afghanistan. In exchange,
the party that had harbored al-Qaeda even after 9-11 is expected to agree that
it will no longer engage in naughtiness.
So what has “America’s longest war” been all about, anyway? Not long ago, Trump made the jaw-dropping
statement that the Soviet Union had been in the right when it invaded
Afghanistan. He doesn’t seem quite so
sure about us, though.
If Trump thinks dealing with the Taliban is going to
end the War on Terror, he’s mistaken.
Our Islamist enemies have repeatedly gloated that America lacks the
stomach for a long fight, and if they simply wait us out, they will prevail. Proving them right will not buy us any
peace. We know from experience that
Islamic terrorists are encouraged by demonstrations of American weakness, and
handing Afghanistan back over to al-Qaeda’s keepers would be such a gutless
retreat that it would make Mogadishu look like The Alamo. Trump couldn’t more obviously invite another
attack if he printed millions of red hats that said, “Make America The Great
Satan Again.”
Now that tensions with Iran are heightening, Trump
tweets, “If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran. Never threaten the United States again!” Wouldn’t it be refreshing if the Mullahs had
reason to fear that? They’re surely
aware that he’d threatened North Korea with “fire and fury like the world has
never seen” almost 21 months ago, but despite that nation’s subsequent
provocations, he now talks as if he’d serve as a character witness if Kim ever
went before a tribunal. That’s the way
things are in the unreal world of the Wrestlemania
President, who to this day probably believes he actually beat up Vince McMahon
in real life.
We were supposed to have won most “bigly” on our
Southern border, where Trump had promised to build something akin to the Great
Wall of China, and to make Mexico pay for it.
To the surprise of nobody sane, the Mexicans said no. By the time Trump got serious about seeking
funds for the wall from Congress, the Democrats had won control of the
House. They said no, also.
Mister
Shrewd preemptively declared himself responsible for the government shutdown
that would result from the impasse.
After 35 days of swearing he’d never give in until he got the $5.7
billion he demanded, the man who never gives in gave in, and ended the
shutdown. He justified it by declaring a
national emergency, which freed up about one-fourth of the funds he was looking
for, and which is being challenged in court anyway. Even so, he’s only diverting those funds from
our military budget. Is that winning?
Trump reputedly would never let the media intimidate
him like other Republicans do, but when he was maligned with a series of
misleading stories about “tearing families apart” at the border, he tried to
placate the press with an executive order that reinstated the catch-and-release
policy he’d fought so hard to end. Most
of the president’s bluster has turned out this same way. He threatened to shut down the border to
punish Mexico for its complicity in the illegal alien caravans, but immediately
backed off, and instead issued a “one-year warning,” which will be totally
forgotten by the time it expires.
The cornerstone of Trump’s populist campaign was his
portrayal of NAFTA as the source of America’s economic ills, which led him to
initially promise to “tear up” the trade agreement. Before long, he backpedaled, saying he wanted
to renegotiate the deal and not simply end it.
He did succeed in getting Canadian and Mexican diplomats to approve a
revised agreement, but how those among his supporters who were animated by this
issue could consider this a victory is inexplicable.
The president’s negotiators made two efforts to
eviscerate NAFTA – one by introducing a sunset clause, and the other by
removing its enforcement mechanism.
Neither measure made its way into the final draft. Trump settled for a modestly tweaked version
of the original agreement, the big concession to him being amended nation-of-origin
rules that would result in increased tariffs on some automobiles. This reworked deal, wittily entitled the
U.S., Mexico and Canada Agreement, is nowhere near being ratified by any of the
three parties. Thus, the original NAFTA
remains in force for the foreseeable future.
Trump has no more succeeded in ending it than he has in explaining which
parts of it were so bad in the first place.
All of this amounts to a pretty ignominious record for
the world’s greatest negotiator, the Art
of the Deal author, the nineteen-dimensional chess grand master, who by his
own account has the highest IQ in the galaxy.
Unfortunately for us, Trump’s success rate, or lack thereof, has serious
ramifications that mustn’t be ignored.
He can’t simply declare victory every day, and have nobody know the
difference. This isn’t golf.
The Shinbone: The Frontier of the Free Press