Good Thursday to you. Wednesday felt as if it might be a watershed moment to us. The passing of the tax bill may have been President Trump’s first legislative victory -- arguably a modest achievement for an administration whose party also controls Congress -- but across the conservative press it heralded a new acceptance of the president. The age of embarrassment in Trump took a breather. Not only were some former Never Trumpers singing his praises, but his remaining critics in the conservative media found themselves sharply rebuked. The message all around seemed to be to “get in line or get out.” In short, party officials and media commentators felt the power of owning both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue and most liked it. As Trump’s support strengthens, we suspect, it will be ever more difficult to prosecute him for any sins.
But before we go too far, we should note there is still dissonance on the ground. The tax bill was polling poorly and Democrats led Republicans by a stunning 18 percent margin when registered voters were asked which party they would favor representing their congressional district, according to a CNN poll released yesterday. And even in the bright red state of Louisiana, one poll put Trump’s approval rating at 48 percent. So we shall see. As always, if you have comments or questions, please feel free to write us at contact@redfortheblue.com.
What a difference one legislative win makes. The timing of the passage of the sweeping tax bill could not have been better for Trump. It comes at the end of the calendar year when journalists are in the mood for reassessing. Suddenly, many conservatives, including some former Never Trumpers, are feeling that the president has a series of pretty impressive accomplishments. Some go even further and suggest that those few Republicans who still dispute these accomplishments are being as petty and as biased against Trump as the liberal Mainstream Media.
Cut corporate and individual taxes.
Repeal the Obamacare individual mandate.
Appoint a highly-respected conservative to the Supreme Court.
Appoint a one-year record number of judges to the circuit courts.
Get rid of reams of unnecessary regulations.
Approve pipeline projects and new oil drilling.
-- then a lot of Republicans would probably have cheered. Loudly.
To get the full scope of the main talking points for Trump, we would add in recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and pulling the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Agreement.
As the year ends, President Trump is compiling a solid record of accomplishment. Much of it is unilateral, dependent on extensive executive actions rolling back President Barack Obama’s regulations, impressive judicial appointments and the successful fight against ISIS overseas. The tax bill is the significant legislative achievement that heretofore has been missing.
For much of the year, Trump’s presidency had seemed to be sound and fury signifying not much besides the welcome ascension of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Now it’s sound and fury signifying a discernible shift of American government to the right.
It’s hard to see how a conventional Republican president would have done much better, except if he had managed to repeal ObamaCare, which was always going to be a dicey proposition given the narrow GOP majority in the Senate.
The damage done by Trump’s big mouth is not limited to Twitter. His habit of giving aid and comfort to the worst elements of American society is contributing to the odor about the GOP. Trump made Steve Bannon, the proprietor of a blog Bannon dubbed “the platform for the alt right,” his chief strategist. He preemptively pardoned Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who faced penalties for defying court orders. Trump endorsed Roy Moore in Alabama, who was also guilty of contempt for the law and bigotry. He spent a week publicly wrestling over just how forcefully to condemn the white supremacists who took to the streets in Virginia in August, one of whom killed a young woman.
These actions undermine the GOP’s brand on race, which Republicans have spent years trying to repair. They render Republican legislative initiatives, like the reformation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and ending positive racial discrimination on college campuses, racially suspect and close persuadable minds to the GOP’s case.
The Alabama special election demonstrated that Trump is no longer in control of his brand. His voters know Trumpism when they see it; prickly, provocative, and offensive to all the right people. This has made the GOP’s primary process a runaway train in the wrong direction. Meanwhile, Democrats are wildly over performing in both special and general elections. The GOP House majority is in serious jeopardy. The Senate may now be, too.
We don't know if Rothman got any negative feedback from his fellow conservatives. But we can say that being a conservative and a Trump critic is increasingly likely to make you a subject of attack.
Donald Trump may not be the leader of American conservatism, but he is its most spectacular and vulnerable asset. The project of defending him against his coming political travails—or at least of assailing those who doubt and oppose him—is already changing what it means to be a conservative. The word conservative will of course continue in use. But its meaning is being rewritten each day by the actions of those who lay claim to the word. It is their commitment to Trump that etches Trumpism into them. And while Trump may indeed pass, that self-etching will not soon be effaced.
It is hard to overstate the jubilation on the conservative side of the aisle over the passage of the tax bill. If you can imagine it as equal to the Democratic despair, you get the idea. However, if one thing still irks conservative pundits, it is that so far the the liberals have managed to control the public narrative of the bill as a tax break to millionaires and billionaires at the expense of the middle class. Much ink was spilled this week to blame the Mainstream Media and the Democrats for the unfairness of that impression.
Democrats are purposefully ignoring the actual tax cuts in the bill, and is relying on estimates about what will happen a decade from now, never mind that Washington is particularly bad at seeing 10 years down the road. This, Democrats say without explanation or blushing, is why the bill will raise taxes on "86 million middle-class families."
Polls commonly oversample Democrats. Quinnipiac surveyed only 26 percent Republican in a poll that found disapproval of the tax cut legislation. Monmouth University found 47 percent disapproval of the bill by surveying only 28 percent Republicans, compared to 41 percent independents, and 31 percent Democrats.
3. ‘1984’ Redux? Not So Fast.
In other words, what happened regarding these other terms (“transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based,” and “science-based”) was not that retrograde Republicans ordered career CDC officials not to use these terms but that career CDC officials assumed retrograde Republicans would be triggered by such words and, in an effort to avoid having such Republicans cut their budgets, reasoned they might be best avoided.
So this became yet another example of the conservative press calling out the Mainstream Media for overplaying a threat to democracy.
Conservative journals also downplayed a story with similarly totalitarian overtones at the Environmental Protection Agency.
On Monday, The New York Times reported that E.P.A. employees who had complained about Trump were the target of record searches by a firm specializing in digging up dirt on GOP opponents. To make things uglier, this firm is affiliated with another firm actually employed by the agency to follow coverage in the media.
There is no scandal here. The lawfully appointed head of an agency has every right to find out if employees are actively undercutting his mission and getting paid to do so. Pruitt is loathed by the environmental militants inside the EPA (to understand why, read Fred Barnes’s feature story in the December 25 WEEKLY STANDARD).
The use of FOIA requests is an open and lawful way to deal with those who aren’t simply voicing legitimate policy differences but actually impairing the agency’s director. Definers only used public information to file its requests, not internal documents (an important point ignored by the Times in both the original story and a follow-up).
That Pruitt’s team dealt with the problem of internal opposition not by secret purges but by use of open-records requests shows a reverence for transparency and the rule of law. If an “authoritarian” regime wanted to “hunt down ideological subversives,” it wouldn’t use FOIA requests. It would just fire them.
On Monday, Politico’s Josh Meyer broke a story about how a decade-long Drug Enforcement Administration campaign targeting Hezbollah’s billion-dollar cocaine trafficking and other criminal activities collided with the Obama administration’s desire to smooth the way for a nuclear deal with Iran, the group’s ally. As a result, according to the report, the campaign, which was called Project Cassandra, was thrown an increasingly insurmountable series of roadblocks by the Obama administration.
The article details how the Obama administration declined to apply serious pressure on the Czech government to extradite Ali Fayed, a Lebanese arms dealer and suspected top Hezbollah operative, or go after another top Hezbollah operative and cocaine trafficker nicknamed the “Ghost.” Additionally, when Project Cassandra agents and other investigators sought repeatedly to investigate and prosecute Abdallah Safieddine, Hezbollah’s longtime envoy to Iran, the Justice Department refused.
Lebanese arms dealer, Ali Fayed, tried to kill Americans. We got him in the Czech Republic. Instead of bringing him back, Putin said, no, no, no, keep him in the Czech Republic. And Obama said alright, we aren’t going to lift a finger. The guy is now out and selling Russian artillery to the Syrian government. So, basically, Putin’s favorite arms dealer… Obama let him go. Imagine if Trump had done that?
Then you have this other guy, the ghost. Huge cocaine trafficker… also tried to kill Americans. Obama let him off the hook too. Now what’s he doing? Selling chemical weapons to Basher-Assad that he used to kill his own people.
"The report alleging the Obama Administration turned a blind eye and allowed Hezbollah to pump drugs into the United States to fund its terror campaigns in the Middle East is not surprising," Roskam said. "Hampering the DEA's investigation of Hezbollah would be emblematic of the previous administration's fixation to strike a nuclear accord with Iran at any costs."
Like the Uranium One Deal, expect to hear more of this story and see it used as evidence that the Obama administration -- not the Trump administration -- was in cahoots with Russia.
Speaking of the future, 4,000 young conservatives age 15 to 25 gathered on Tuesday for the third annual Student Action Summit, a four-day gathering in West Palm Beach. The organizer was Turning Point USA, a self-described non-profit “Student Movement for Free Markets and Limited Government.” It was founded by Charlie Kirke when he was just 18 years old. Turning Point USA has close ties to Breitbart and is also known for its “Professor Watchlist,” which names college professors it believes are on a mission to discriminate against conservative students.
The speaker line-up is a Who’s Who of Conservatives, including Ben Shapiro, Dennis Prager, Donald Trump Jr., Anthony Scaramucci, Charlie Kirk, Jesse Watters, Judge Jeanine Pirro, the documentarian and author DiNesh D’Souza, and Breitbart’s editor-in-chief, Steve Bannon. In its excited coverage, Liberty Conservative, a D.C.-based libertarian political news website, even hinted Bannon might be upstaged by President Trump (due to arrive at the nearby Mar-a-Lago on the 22d for the holidays).
Imagine what would happen if we rolled back the clock to 2008 -- and a conservative director of the FBI... wrote an email about an insurance policy, the dossier, in the unlikely event that Barack Obama was elected president. What do you think would happen? Do you think the media would cover that? Do you think it would be brushed under the rug? There would be revolution in the streets… there is and there are people at the highest levels of the government that don’t want to let America be America.