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Radical change is being offered. Will it be bought? (See 1 below.)
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Can the Democrats and mass media get Americans to ignore the improved economy because they believe anything Trump accomplishes is a turn off and they have been effective in their virulent attacks?
Are cultural issues more important than job related matters? Is it more important to re-define who are humans than protect our nation's borders? (See 2 below.)
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What we are witnessing in Virginia with the Governor and Lt. Governor is an amazing attempt at hypocrisy.
First, the Governor is being thrown under the bus based on what he did over 30 years ago without any effort to engage in due process. What he did was dumb, at the very least, and truly morally reprehensible at worst but he is being judged contemporaneously about an event that was tragically acceptable at the time.
The Democrats are dumping him so they can continue playing their race cards against Republicans. However, he has taken an identity politics issue way from them and this is politically unpardonable.
As for the Lt. Governor, we have a Kavanaugh Episode all over again but he is being given a pass because he is a Democrat, black and they need someone to fill the Governor's seat when they run him out of town. The hypocrisy of the event is mounting day by day. Why isn't the woman accusing the Lt. Governor not being believed? The rush to judgement against Kavanaugh involved blocking a Trump Supreme Court nominee who was conservative and that makes a whole lot of difference - capiche?
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I am going to listen to Trump tonight and if I have any thoughts I will comment tomorrow. Meanwhile, Trump has a glorious opportunity to allow Pelosi to boil in her own obstinate juice. (See 3 below.)
Meanwhile, "Upchuck," who has not seen Trump's speech, said it is filled with lies. More Democrat leadership objectivity and co-operation?
I just finished watching and listening to his speech and I have nothing to add other than what he said was unifying and challenging. Democrats mostly sat on their hands and now we will see what they are about and are they willing to put nation first over partisanship and quest for power?
Stacey Abrams had the thankless job of giving the rebuttal. She did a credible job but left me depressed and wondering was she talking about contemporary America and did she even listen to Trump's address?
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Trump and his foreign policy initiatives. (See 4 below.)
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The WSJ Editorial Board discusses Trump's 2020 Election Prospects. (See 5 below.)
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Dick
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1)Remodeling America
The Jacobins of today take up the tools of France’s 18th-century radicals.
By mid 1793–4, the radical Jacobins had successfully completed their hijacking of the French Revolution.
Jacobinism
They openly enacted agendas that might have seemed impossible in the heady days of 1787. Long gone were the pretenses of the original idealism when the revolution abolished feudalism, issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and wrestled with turning the Ancien Régime of Louis XVI into some sort of constitutional or parliamentary monarchy analogous to what had emerged in Great Britain.
Soon executing the clerisy en masse was logically followed by Jacobins guillotining thousands of surviving aristocrats and fellow revolutionaries for supposed counterrevolutionary sympathies.
Most of the leaders of the Jacobins were themselves finally guillotined, largely because their ascendant revolutionary zeal could end only in a sort of cannibalism — given that no revolutionary could possibly meet their accelerating purist demands. Mao’s Cultural Revolution was similar, though he slaughtered millions, not thousands.
In less melodramatic terms, we are watching a rare revolutionary phase in American politics as leftists have devoured Democrats. Progressives ate liberals. And progressives are now being devoured by socialists, and soon no doubt socialists will be eaten by hard leftists, Communists, anarchists, and nihilists. In such revolutionary logic, perhaps only Antifa will emerge as pure.
The result is that the 2020 election will offer the starkest choices in the past 50 years, far eclipsing the radical contrasts of 1972. The current parade of would-be Democratic presidential hopefuls is already apologizing for their past sins of Democratic centrism, in fear of being politically guillotined.
Green Poverty
Senator Kamala Harris has pledged to follow the “New Green Deal” currently championed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In other words, if enacted, the Democrats, within ten years of passing the bill, would favor ending all “nonrenewable” sources of electrical generation (natural gas, oil, coal, and nuclear) — or 83 percent of all the current ways that we produce electrical energy. Would the government go after classic Corvettes, confiscate Priuses, and electrify NASCAR? Outlaw gas lawn mowers and chain saws? Confiscate leaf blowers? Would Nancy Pelosi board a private solar- or battery-powered jet? Would Silicon Valley yachts rely on wind and sail?
We get almost no information about the real costs, much less the effect on the now booming U.S. energy sector. America is currently the largest producer of gas and oil in the world. Energy production is a vital source of national wealth, central to millions of American workers, and perhaps the greatest subsidy of middle-class lifestyles, through inexpensive fuel. Would fracking and horizontal drilling become like corn-mash stills during Prohibition?
The New Green Deal would wipe out the economies of a broad swath of states including Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. Such legislation would make Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign blunder—“We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business”—seem in comparison not a major gaffe, but timid and counterrevolutionary.
The United States of Everyone
Open borders and the elimination of ICE will also be the stuff of 2019–20 Democratic debates. But they will be “debated” only in the sense that all contenders will either agree or go well beyond both positions in order to support blanket amnesty. In other words, the problem of illegal immigration would not be 20 million or so illegal aliens who have entered and resided in the country unlawfully, but no problem at all.
Millions more could arrive as they pleased. Caravans would become not the stuff of dramatic news accounts, but rather dreary daily events as thousands of the “other” exercised their global “rights” and “migrated” to the U.S. Or as Univision’s Jorge Ramos put it, the border is “nothing more than an invention.”
The subtext would be radical demographic change designed to finish flipping the southwestern United States to blue in the Electoral College. It would also fuel the growing narrative that America requires far more recalibration of constitutional “issues” if it is ever to achieve parity for the arriving impoverished and oppressed underprivileged, who have supposedly legitimate historical racial and class grievances against neocolonialist Yanqui culture.
What is unspoken about the current illegal-immigration issue is the assumption that open-borders activists and their supporters do not just believe that Spanish speakers have a right to enter the U.S. as they please, but also that they have a far greater right than anyone else from Asia, Africa, or Europe. This is the chauvinistic and ethnically exclusive position, not the inclusive, liberal, and pro-diversity stance.
Health Care — for the Healthy
Medicare for all will likewise become a 2020 rallying point. But aside from its multi-trillion-dollar costs, it would destroy the 55-year compact of Medicare and indeed the 85-year-old history of Social Security itself.
Namely, these programs were sold on a number of premises, but two especially. One: Younger and healthier Americans would subsidize the financial, career, and health challenges of an older generation that was no longer fully hale. Two (whether still valid or not): Americans from their preteen years “pay” into a system that keeps track of their chits, calibrated by both years and dollar amounts, to adjudicate their own eventual retirement benefits, the so-called grand bargain that one now pays for others so that still others to come will one day pay for him.
While the system is nearing insolvency, the tradition that Americans individually have already “paid” into their retirement benefits would be destroyed, once benefits were shared by millions who had not yet contributed much at all. The generational psychological bond would end, and the very logic of Social Security as a war between old and young would arise.
The elderly are not historically illiterate. They grasp that all universal “free” health-care scams eventually hinge on culling out the costly and bad investments, i.e., themselves. They know that “Medicare for all” translates into “Medicare for no one,” especially in an age of open borders. So they will not be paranoid to also assume that in an era of euthanasia and “managed” and “rationed” care, it makes more progressive social sense to “invest” in our youthful future than in “prolonging” already-spent lives — especially when we will be adding more ethnic and racial fuel to the generational inferno.
A society that approves of killing an infant shortly after it emerges from the birth canal might similarly have little compunction about pulling the plug on a 90-year-old who was deemed “unproductive” or suffering from “severe deformities” — albeit of course after a “conversation” with family and their “doctor.” To the Margaret Sanger mind, abortion and euthanasia are twins, and both are cost-effective means to free up dollars for more “moral” purposes.
The Criminal Rich
Another likely plank of the new Democratic party will be a “you didn’t build that” “wealth tax.” Many Democrats are talking seriously about an additional 2 percent or 3 percent tax on the accumulated wealth of particular large private fortunes, wealth that has already been taxed as income or capital gains.
Income over $10 million (or lower) would be taxed at 70 percent — or 90 percent as Democrats’ race to Venezuela accelerates. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and her adherents point to prior high rates of American taxation, without noting that they were accompanied by an array of tax loopholes and deductions, many of them eliminated in the 1980s Reagan tax revolution.
In our Balzac world of “behind every great fortune is an equally great crime,” assets of $10 million and up are proof enough of illegality.
Talk of new wealth taxes, higher income-tax rates, and soaring estate taxes will make good on Mayor Bill de Blasio’s taunt that “there’s plenty of money in this country, it’s just in the wrong hands.”
The Cult of Reason
One hallmark of the radical French revolutionaries was a poorly disguised but predictable dislike of religion. Today it’s an aversion in particular to Catholicism and Judaism — at least if one collates the various statements of Senators Dianne Feinstein, Kamala Harris, and Mazie Hirono, and Representatives Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Hank Johnson, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib. The mainstreaming of anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan, television commentary by the likes of Marc Lamont Hill, and the growing anti-Israeli foreign policy of the Democratic party only add to the anti-Jewish and anti-Christian hostility.
Revolutionary “scientific” socialism is historically agnostic if not atheist. Anywhere it has taken root in its multifarious forms — China, Cuba, North Korea, Russia, Venezuela — it seeks to destroy or corrupt religion. We have already seen attacks on Israel supporters within the Democratic party, attacks that are only thinly disguised anti-Semitic rants from the likes of Omar, Tlaib, and Linda Sarsour. One wonders how the anti-Catholicism of the Democratic Jacobins will connect with millions of new first- and second-generation Hispanic Catholic voters.
Perhaps one of our young Robespierres can slightly modify the new atheist religion to “The Cult of the Supreme Being” and enjoin us all to worship an anthropomorphic Logos.
Revolutionary Cannibalism
Once revolutionary movements accelerate, they must devour their own to ensure revolutionary purity, whether in fifth-century Greece, Republican Rome, revolutionary France, 1919 Russia, or Mao’s China.
We already are seeing some of this cannibalism, as the new socialists start consuming their aging progenitors. Liberal Tom Brokaw is under assault for suggesting the value of assimilation and that English should be reemphasized by the Latino immigrant community. During the Brett Kavanaugh nomination hearings, Corey Booker and Kamala Harris upstaged old-guard Democratic liberals with their televised histrionics and their revolutionary creed that if one in theory can do a crime, then he is equally guilty of in fact committing it. Male feminists are learning that “inappropriate” jokes, staring, or attitudes are grounds for #MeToo ostracism.
In truth, there are far more revolutionary agendas to come. The Jacobins will have to explain how they plan on abolishing $1.5 trillion in aggregate student debt, at a time of a likely $22 trillion national debt, and how from here on out they will make college “free for all” in the manner of health care. Will adults who have driven a semi-truck since they were18 pay for the debts of hipster Pajama Boys who dabbled in six-unit semesters ad infinitum?
Will Maxine Waters’s idea of racial “reparations” become a mandatory position for Democratic candidates? If so, will Jay-Z, Oprah, Eric Holder, Louis Farrakhan, or LeBron James qualify?
Abortion is already being reconceptualized as a new Jacobin issue, but new only in the sense of pushing back the limit when babies can be “terminated” — oddly (or not so oddly) at a time when science is itself lowering the age of fetal viability ever closer to the moment of conception. Will Dr. Gosnell be given post factum amnesty?
Gun control will likewise be de rigueur, but not just in the sense of more registration, book work, and petty annoyances for the gun owner. In truth, confiscation is the only way to “control” millions of guns hidden away, handed down generation to generation, and sold and traded in private transactions — or at least we’ll have to mandate gun registration as a method of eventual collection.
Finally, just as the 18th-century Jacobins transferred the wealth and power of the church to the state, so the new Jacobins will demand more transfers of riches and influence to the federal government.
We have already seen the weaponization — or rather liberation? — of the IRS, the NSC, the FBI, the CIA, and the NSC.
Leftists believe that Lois Lerner — retired with full multimillion-dollar benefits and no threat of a trial let alone jail time — got a raw deal.
They like the idea of surveilling, unmasking, and leaking of the names of “right-wing” Americans. For left-wingers, James Comey went from villain to hero once we learned that he had used the FBI to attempt to emasculate the Trump presidency. Ditto for the left-wing pundits James Clapper and John Brennan. Just as Jacobins worship billion-dollar Silicon Valley fortunes, so too they revere rogue bureaucrats who have warped their enormous powers of surveillance and prosecutorial abuse for correct leftist agendas.
By the time November 2020 arrives, the Clintons will be seen as reactionaries and the Obamas as old fogeys.
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2) How the Trump economic miracle shatters the left
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
The Trump economy is firing on all cylinders, which means only one thing: The left is petrified.
Last week brought economic news so good that it sent the Democrats and their fellow travelers in the Resistance Media into full bury-then-ignore mode. Their pathological hatred of the president blocks them from reporting the truth about the booming economy he is delivering, lest it make him look good (heaven forfend) and help him politically (a fate worse than death).
They also know that since it’s always “the economy, Stupid,” they’d be damaging his potential 2020 opponent, which must be avoided at all costs.
Given the dazzling December economic data, it’s no wonder the press gave it short shrift. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the economy added a whopping 312,000 jobs, far more than the expected 176,000. After revisions, job gains have averaged an impressive 254,000 per month over the past three months. Job growth in 2018 (an average of 220,000 per month) passed that of both 2016 (195,000) and 2017 (182,000). Payrolls increased by 2.6 million in 2018, the highest since 2015.
The sunny jobs picture encouraged 419,000 new workers to enter the workforce and sent the labor force participation rate up to 63.1 percent. Unemployment rates among blacks, Latinos and women are at or near historic lows.
Job growth has also meant significant wage growth. Wages are up a stunning 3.2 percent from last year and .4 percent from November. December was the third straight month that the yearlong growth in nominal average hourly earnings was above 3 percent in nearly a decade; the last time we saw that trend was April 2009. Wages are also being given an assist by inflation being kept in check.
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3) Donald Trump’s Dreamer
Hilario Yanez says he’s got a free spot on his calendar Tuesday night. If President Trump is looking for a way to break out of the shutdown stalemate and turn the debate to his advantage, he would invite Mr. Yanez to join the first lady in her box for the State of the Union.
“I’m a little disappointed with the Democrats, because they have not brought anything to the table,” he adds. “I think, honestly, at the end of the day they’re waiting on 2020, and that’s disappointing.”
3) Donald Trump’s Dreamer
The president should invite Hilario Yanez to be his guest at the State of the Union.
By
Hilario Yanez says he’s got a free spot on his calendar Tuesday night. If President Trump is looking for a way to break out of the shutdown stalemate and turn the debate to his advantage, he would invite Mr. Yanez to join the first lady in her box for the State of the Union.
In every way but one, Mr. Yanez is the prototypical Dreamer. He is 26; he was born in Mexico; and he was brought to America when he was only a year old.
He says his mother raised him to believe in God, family and hard work. The one way he differs from the Dreamers (or at least what we think we know about them)? Mr. Yanez is a proud Trump supporter.
“As someone who stands behind the president, I would like to see him address the issue of the Dreamers at the State of the Union and press Democrats to fix this issue once and for all,” he tells this columnist.
If Mr. Yanez is right, maybe the president should fill the first lady’s entire guest box with Dreamers. After all, that’s what Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi and their fellow Democrats did with the House gallery during last year’s State of the Union. A week earlier, Mr. Schumer had led a government shutdown over the plight of the Dreamers before defections from his own side forced him to run up the white flag.
But today the tables have turned. It’s now Mr. Trump making offers to help Dreamers while now-Speaker Pelosi refuses to take yes for an answer—even if the border funding the president wants would buy a Dreamer solution Democrats say they want.
Up to now President Trump has dealt with Dreamers mostly as a bargaining chip he’s willing to exchange for Democrats’ agreeing to fund his border wall. But wouldn’t it serve his long-term agenda better to move to end the Dreamers’ legal limbo on his own? Especially if he declares, as he appears ready to do, a national emergency to get access to funds he needs to build his border wall.
While Mr. Yanez doesn’t pretend his pro-Trump views are representative of all Dreamers, he does point out that Dreamers have no particular beef with strong borders. Their priority is their own predicament, and they will be grateful to whichever party will take the lead in solving it.
The president, moreover, is already halfway there. Not only has he made specific offers to help the Dreamers, he has also said they shouldn’t be worried because he has “a big heart” and intends “to take care of everybody.”
Yes, a Dreamer fix without wall funding from Mrs. Pelosi would lead to shouts of “Amnesty!” and “RINO!” from some Republican quarters. It would likely also require the president to stand up to some in his own White House.
But the polls suggest Mr. Trump has lots of room here. A poll last March from the GOP firm TargetPoint Consulting found 86% of Trump voters would approve of a deal that both increases border security and protects Dreamers. If the president is going to go ahead with his national emergency to increase security at the border, as he seems inclined to do, why take the other part of a popular package off the table just because Mrs. Pelosi refuses to trade?
Mr. Trump, after all, was not elected to keep Dreamers in a state of oblivion; he was elected to find solutions for a broken immigration system. In this context, he would do well to frame resolving the Dreamers’ legal status alongside the many other actions he’s taking to restore order and sanity to the U.S. immigration system.
Certainly some Republicans would be skittish, and Mrs. Pelosi’s instinct wouldn’t be to cooperate. But Mr. Trump would gain even if she doesn’t follow through, because her rejection would help Republicans make clear they are the party of solutions while Democrats are willing to keep Dreamers in limbo for political advantage. At the least, such a move threatens to divide Mrs. Pelosi’s side.
Meanwhile, Mr. Trump would change the debate by demonstrating it’s possible to strengthen the borders while dealing in a humane and practical way with people like Mr. Yanez, caught in a situation they didn’t create. This State of the Union is Mr. Trump’s moment to make his case to the entire American people.
“I’m standing behind the president,” says Mr. Yanez. “I know in his heart he cares for this country and the Dreamer community. There’s no one else who can do what he can to find a solution and bring us together.”
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4) Trump’s Foreign-Policy Critics Are Losing
Congress rebukes him. But the public is cool to the post-Cold War consensus.
Is President Trump losing control of the foreign-policy agenda? Last week the administration suffered a stinging political defeat as the Senate voted 68-23 to advance a bill that criticizes his plans to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria and Afghanistan. This comes on the heels of Congress’s refusal to accede to Mr. Trump’s demands for further funds to fortify the U.S.-Mexico border and the Senate’s December vote to end U.S. military support for Saudi Arabia’s operations in Yemen. It is now clear the president’s foreign-policy and national-security approach faces increasing and often bipartisan congressional opposition.
Yet the White House shows no sign of backtracking. Far from meeting his critics halfway, Mr. Trump and his foreign-policy team announced progress in Afghanistan negotiations that opponents call a surrender, doubled down on plans to withdraw troops from Syria, announced its impending withdrawal from an arms-control agreement many consider foundational to the post-Cold War security order in Europe, and attacked the judgment of his senior intelligence officials. The administration also advanced an aggressive hemispheric strategy aimed not only at Venezuela, but also at Cuba and Nicaragua—the other two regimes in what national security adviser John Bolton calls the “troika of tyranny.”
There is no sign Mr. Trump can or will be persuaded to reconsider his approach. He does not believe existing arms treaties serve American interests; his withdrawal from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty was motivated by the same considerations that drove his withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal. Meanwhile, he wants to reduce American commitments in the Middle East and sees close links with Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt as the best way for the U.S. to retrench militarily while containing Iran.
He holds international institutions and the bureaucrats who run them in low regard. He believes forums like the United Nations are stacked against the U.S. and American interests are better served by working directly with powerful leaders on a bilateral basis than by engaging in what he sees as the empty rituals of conventional multilateralism.
He thinks Europe is free-riding on American security commitments and exploiting the U.S. on trade, and that he can continue to reject the trans-Atlantic status quo until his complaints are addressed. He sees the European Union as a weak actor on the international stage.
He believes foolish American trade negotiators allowed China to become a great power through its abuses of the World Trade Organization, and he thinks a tough stand on trade with Beijing is good politics and policy. He believes the threat of tariffs gives him an important advantage and that U.S. trading partners need the U.S. more than it needs them.
He believes the U.S. faces a massive challenge from failing states and drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere and wants to move hemispheric policy from an afterthought to center stage. Diplomats impress him not at all; he sees the intelligence community as hostile; and after two years in the White House, he has lost much of his early respect for the Pentagon brass.
Some of these views are insightful, some are eccentric, and some are deeply misguided. But what seems clear is that the president remains largely in control. Mr. Trump’s critics will be hard put to wrest control of American foreign policy back from his grasp. He is driving a consequential shift even in the face of congressional rebukes.
This partly reflects constitutional realities. Presidents have wide latitude in conducting foreign policy. There is also the pressure of events; Congress is slow and the world moves quickly.
But Mr. Trump has another advantage: His congressional critics, while numerous, are deeply divided. Most of the Republicans who voted against Mr. Trump’s Afghanistan and Syria policies last week are hawks who want the U.S. to pursue a more active role in the Middle East and Europe.
Mr. Trump’s Democratic critics see things differently. Many oppose his approach to Latin America and Saudi Arabia while supporting troop withdrawals from Syria and Afghanistan. Significantly, none of the Democratic senators seeking the 2020 presidential nomination wanted to go on the record opposing an early withdrawal. The policy of endless war in Afghanistan and extended U.S. engagement in Syria does not appeal to people running for national office.
That points to a deeper truth. Mr. Trump has plenty of problems with the polls, but in neither party does the electoral base show much nostalgia for the mainstream foreign policies of the post-Cold War era. On the Democratic side, there is little appetite for the robust engagement of the Madeleine Albright years. Among Republicans, neither neoconservative democracy hawks nor hard-line free traders seem able to mount much of a challenge to the president. Whatever comes after Mr. Trump, it won’t be a simple return to the Republican or Democratic version of the post-Cold War consensus.
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5) Trump’s Re-Election Challenge
Down in the polls, he needs a strong economy to have any chance to win a second term.
The Editorial Board
The paradox of Donald Trump’s Presidency after two years is that his main successes are the result of traditional Republican policies. His main trouble has come from the Trumpian exceptions on trade, immigration and polarizing temperament that motivate many of his supporters. Whether he can overcome that seeming contradiction may determine whether he can win what on present trends looks like an uphill climb to re-election.
As Mr. Trump will no doubt tell Congress in his State of the Union address Tuesday evening, his main achievement has been re-energizing what had been a long but weak and fading economic expansion. As the nearby table shows, the economy nearly dipped into recession at the end of 2015 and early 2016 before recovering to its 2% Obama-era trend.
Growth accelerated in 2017 amid deregulation and especially the end to the Obama harassment of business. The GOP Congress and Mr. Trump repealed no fewer than 16 costly Obama-era rules. Growth accelerated again to more than 3% on an annual basis in 2018 after tax reform—and may end up as the first calendar year above 3% since 2005.
Tax reform was mediocre on the individual side, with tax credits that redistributed income but did nothing for growth. But the tax-rate cuts for corporations and pass-through businesses were aimed specifically at the biggest weakness of the Obama expansion: capital investment, which surged in 2018.
This has led to productivity gains that should spur large wage increases if they continue. The labor market is as healthy as it’s been since the mid-2000s and maybe the 1990s. Average hourly earnings in January were up 3.2% year over year, the workweek was up 0.5%, and overall employment rose 1.7%. With inflation heading below 2%, economist Ed Hyman calculates that real wage gains are already nearly 4%. So much for the claim that tax reform hasn’t helped workers.
This economic progress fulfills the main promise Mr. Trump made to his working-class supporters, and keeping it going has to be his priority. With the Federal Reserve now “patient” on raising interest rates, the biggest growth obstacle is Mr. Trump’s trade agenda.
Tariffs have hurt some companies and industries willy-nilly, but the biggest harm has been the uncertainty of what comes next. Mr. Trump thinks car tariffs are “leverage” in trade talks, but they are also a reason to delay investment until supply-chain and input costs become clear. Tariffs act like Obama regulation as an economic wet blanket, as numerous CEOs attest on their earnings calls.
Mr. Trump can help guard against an economic slump in the next two years by stepping back from his 2018 burst of protectionism. First, get as good a trade deal as he can with China, declare victory, and spend the next two years monitoring how well Beijing abides by its terms. Second, withdraw the threat of car tariffs on Europe as he negotiates a trade deal with the European Union. The U.S. economy can’t grow at 3% or higher if China and Europe aren’t growing.
Then there’s the revised Nafta deal awaiting a vote in Congress. Mr. Trump will no doubt urge Democrats to support it on Tuesday, but he can’t force Speaker Nancy Pelosi to do so. What he can control is whether to hurt himself and the U.S. economy by withdrawing from the original Nafta pact, which is in force until the new one is ratified. Mr. Trump’s threat to do so merely gives Mrs. Pelosi more reason to shelve the pact since she knows any economic harm will accrue to Mr. Trump as President.
With an enhanced GOP Senate majority of 53, Mr. Trump can keep adding to another achievement—judicial nominees who are remaking the federal bench in the image of the late Justice Antonin Scalia. We wish Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg well, but if illness forces her retirement Mr. Trump could cement what the last three GOP Presidents did not: an originalist majority on the U.S. Supreme Court for the first time in decades.
With Democrats running the House, Mr. Trump can’t expect much legislation worth doing. All the more given the sharp Democratic left turn on economics and the culture. Democrats will try to tempt him into a tax increase in return for infrastructure spending, or perhaps the Nafta deal, but this would undermine the economic growth essential to have any chance at re-election.
An immigration deal would be a signature achievement, if Democrats agreed. But to move them politically, Mr. Trump has to get off his Donald-one-note rhetoric of a “border crisis.” He has to frame the issue more broadly in a way that promises legalization for the Dreamers and others to put pressure on Democrats. He needs to offer an incentive for Hispanics to lobby Democrats to negotiate.
The Russia probe aside, a restrictionist-only immigration policy has done the most harm to Mr. Trump in the first two years. The early travel ban was a legal and political fiasco that cost him support; the family separation mess hurt Republicans in the midterms; and insisting on money for the border wall put him in a box canyon that led to his recent defeat over the government shutdown. Mr. Trump needs to make a bigger immigration offer to overcome that losing record.
President Trump faces a difficult re-election despite his economic success because he hasn’t expanded the coalition that elected him. The traditional suburban Republicans and independents who swung to his side in the final days of 2016 were willing to give him a chance rather than vote for Hillary Clinton. She won’t be on the ballot in 2020.
Democrats may give Mr. Trump a chance by running too far to the left, but voters may take even that risk unless Mr. Trump can point to prosperity and give more Americans more confidence in him personally. By now we’ve learned that last point is beyond our counsel
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