But:Trump Flirts With a Less-Aggressive Coronavirus Response
And:
A very prescient op ed. Advice on the road to greatness. Can Trump follow the path?
Trump’s Leadership
Rallying the United States through the coronavirus crisis is this president’s path to greatness.
By
The costs of how the U.S. has conducted its politics the past three years are now obvious. Beset by a crisis akin to wartime, the country’s leadership is engulfed in political rancor.
Since Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017, the national Democratic Party has tried to stop his presidency from functioning. That irrefutably was the goal of the Russia collusion narrative, its attendant Mueller investigation and then the impeachment
Say what you want in defense of these projects, but the reality is they inflamed the normal workings of our politics. The president’s opponents attacked relentlessly, and he without letup counterattacked personally.
Through this period, people often noted that the polarization of American political life had become corrosive and unhealthy. Everyone in Washington knew this, but no matter; it became an addiction. Every issue now defaults to the same petty level.
The greatest damage has been to the Democratic Party. Here a distinction is in order. By and large, the states are being capably led in their response to the coronavirus crisis by both Democratic and Republican governors. Apparently working below the radar of the national media is the antidote to political insanity.
But the national Democratic Party, run by people who live in a hothouse of their own making, looks to be in a state of meltdown. While everything in America is changing, they just won’t.
This is the party that produced a president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who led the nation through the crucible of depression and world war. Faced today with a similar crucible in the coronavirus, with much of the country in isolation and shutdown, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, backed by Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and virtually all their Democratic Senate colleagues, demanded that the national rescue package include—this is still hard to believe—airline emission standards.
The response by Joe Biden, the presumptive presidential nominee, is even more dispiriting. He has been parroting Mrs. Pelosi’s talking points, calling the rescue package a “slush fund” and writing: “We can’t let Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell hold small businesses, workers, and communities hostage until they get their no-strings corporate bailout.”
A central selling point of Mr. Biden’s has been that he’s the adult in the room who, unlike Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, still understands the necessity of a functioning private sector. But if leading from behind is what Biden presidential leadership would look like, we should skip it and let Speaker Pelosi run the country from Capitol Hill.
Who’s left?
Who’s left is the president we’ve got, the one elected in 2016. With Democrats bailing out on bipartisanship in a unique circumstance, the responsibility of national leadership—a historic opportunity—defaults to Mr. Trump.
Let us understand the stakes. There are national problems and there are national crises. In the latter, as in world wars, the task of national leadership is to protect a nation’s confidence in itself so that it can emerge intact as a society.
We’re accustomed in difficult times to saying Americans can do anything, and that’s largely true. But let’s not delude ourselves that this just happens, like sunshine. American success isn’t a random effect. It requires leadership.
No national leader plans to be in a position like this—not Roosevelt, Lincoln or Churchill. Mr. Trump will emerge from this crisis either as just another president or a president who led his entire country through a great battle. If Democrats choose to be the opposition in this battle, voters will judge that choice.
Some will say, from experience, that asking Mr. Trump to rise to presidential greatness is quixotic. He’ll never adjust no matter the circumstance. And yes, on Tuesday he was in a cat fight over ventilators with New York’s Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo.
Ironically, Mr. Trump’s path to presidential greatness may begin by doing something small but desired by virtually all Americans: Separate himself from the pettiness of our politics.
Mr. Cuomo is a governor with a job to do. Help him. If he wants to kvetch, let him.
Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer have self-isolated from what the American people want from Washington now. With the rescue package finished, if they choose to stay small, let them.Praise everyone else—from factory workers to supermarket employees risking disease to keep the rest of us fed.
It diminishes a wartime president to spend valuable time tussling with the barely relevant nonquestions of NBC reporters. It diminishes the president’s most impressive accomplishment: delegating and distributing operational authority for the details of the coronavirus battle to Vice President Mike Pence and the task force’s scientific and administrative experts.
Churchill had his war rooms. The White House press scrum is no war room. The public will keep faith with the president if it believes policy decisions are being made in the Situation Room.
If by September Mr. Trump and his team are bringing the U.S. through the threat from this pandemic, he will be re-elected. Without a single rally. Rallying a nation is what gets presidents remembered.
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The memo I sent before this one began with my own commentary and I consider it perhaps one of my more controversial but also rational. I always invite/welcome comments.https://pjmedia.com/news-and-p
And:
Wealthy Carl Icahn's generosity might/would have been prevented by Bernie :?https://www.dailywire.com/
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Does Trump not already have this kind of advice available among his current advisors?
Trump Needs a Bioethics Commission to Guide the Coronavirus Response
An administration that values life should prioritize efforts to protect the elderly.
President Trump’s daily press conferences for his coronavirus task force have become one of the centerpieces of commentary on the crisis. Critics have bashed his optimistic riffs on potential cures or when normal life can resume. But as crowded as the stage has been, and as much as the administration’s response has become a source of partisan division, there is someone crucially absent in the public effort to deal with the pandemic: a bioethicist. The lack of someone who is qualified to speak specifically to the moral and ethical issues raised by the pandemic in terms of dealing with shortages and the treatment of the elderly — who remain the group considered the most vulnerable to the disease — is potentially leaving the president without the sort of advice he desperately needs as the crisis becomes more acute.
Absent from the debate about the administration’s response to the crisis has been a discussion of the key ethical questions whose answers must inform decisions about the shutdown of normal life and how to cope with the growing numbers of coronavirus victims. While Trump’s top coronavirus advisers are well qualified to deal with questions relating to immunology and infectious diseases, the lack of a leading figure on the response team who can speak to bioethical dilemmas not only is unfortunate, but also may be setting up the administration for more problems.
The nation’s focus has been largely on the mechanics of the spread of the virus and how to ensure that medical facilities are not overwhelmed by a surge of patients as the contagion spreads. But the core issue that influences decision-making when shortages of equipment such as respirators arise is more ethical than medical.
The example of Italy illustrates this problem.
About 23 percent of the Italian population is over the age of 65, making it the second-oldest country in the world after Japan. Thus, Italy has been particularly vulnerable to the coronavirus outbreak. While cases are not restricted the elderly, to date, 85.6 percent of those who have died from the illness there have been over 70. Numerous reports show that Italian medical facilities are overwhelmed. Doctors can’t care for everyone seeking treatment. There is also a critical shortage of ventilators needed to help those in the greatest danger. As the number of those afflicted rose in recent weeks, that shortage has worsened. Published guidelines of the Italian College of Anesthesia, Analgesia, Resuscitation and Intensive Care for nurses and doctors to follow provide a shocking preview of what awaits those most vulnerable to the disease: the elderly.
Their prescription for coping with the crisis is strictly utilitarian: “It may become necessary to establish an age limit for access to intensive care.” Those who are too old to have a good chance of recovery, or who (probably) have a few years left to live, will be allowed to die.
It isn’t yet clear how many Italian coronavirus deaths are due to inadequate care. But as the number of victims rises, the shortage of respirators — whose manufacture is being accelerated, but not in time to help those currently suffering — may soon present U.S. hospitals with the same impossible moral choices amid battlefield triage faced in Italy. Health-care providers may allocate respirators by criteria we already accept with organ transplants, which have always considered age and likelihood of recovery.
If so, then it becomes necessary to ask whether Americans — and in particular, an administration that has prided itself on its pro-life stance — will be willing to ignore Judeo-Christian traditions about the sanctity of life, including that of the elderly, to manage this crisis.
The debates about how to administer government-funded health care, conducted when the nation was not threatened by a pandemic, have already prepared us to ration care to the elderly. Rationing was integral to the debate about Obamacare. One of its architects was Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, who is now also the most prominent member of a committee formed to advise former vice president Joe Biden, the likely Democratic Party presidential nominee, about the coronavirus crisis.
Emanuel has been a prominent advocate not merely of rationing, but of more generally utilitarian attitudes about health care for the elderly. In 2014, the then-57 year-old bioethicist wrote in The Atlantic about how he only wished to live to the age of 75, which he saw as the optimal life span for Americans. While in no way explicitly advocating eugenics or denying care to the elderly, Emanuel argued that people are living too long and becoming burdens not only to themselves but also to their children and society.
Chillingly in light of today’s crisis, he recommended that those over 75 should not have flu shots, especially in the event of a pandemic where shortages might occur. He quoted approvingly a classic medical text that spoke of pneumonia as “the friend of the aged” since it allows the elderly to escape distressing years of “decay.”
That such attitudes may be informing the 77-year-old Biden about health care is alarming as well as ironic. Yet while Republicans have long embraced critiques of health-care rationing as part of their opposition to government health-care programs, the Trump administration has yet to put forward any coherent response to questions about how the elderly will be treated if the coronavirus crisis should overwhelm American health-care facilities. Republicans argued against Obamacare in part because of the prospect of “death panels” deciding who should be given life-saving treatment. Yet as the crisis worsens, arguments framed very much along the same lines as those articulated by Emanuel will win out on Trump’s watch in the absence of an opposing and coherent bioethical vision.
Yet there’s no evidence that the task force led by vice president Mike Pence is any more prepared to make informed ethical proposals about rationing than were their counterparts in Rome. Part of the problem is that the Trump administration has no standing commission ready to supply such guidance. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush had bodies that formally advised them on bioethics, while Barack Obama chose to have a Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. But Trump chose not to have any group working on the topic.
The White House has understandably focused on mobilizing resources to deal with the pandemic. But there has been relatively little said by the president or those in charge that spoke about the need for a compassionate response to victims and how medical facilities should cope with the possibility of shortages of resources should the number of those seriously ill start to soar to Italian levels.
That makes it all the more vital that Trump appoints his own national bioethics commission. That body should advise Pence — a man whose public devotion to faith has made him a target for the Left — and help craft a response to the crisis that will be informed by moral and ethical considerations that will ensure that the needs of elderly victims are not sacrificed to expediency.
Treating the lives of older citizens as a precious and loved resource rather than as the property of a group that has lived too long to be of any use is an imperative for an ethical society, especially one that values faith as much as the United States. As the Trump administration copes with the pandemic, it must reaffirm religious and ethical values that ensure that respect for life also applies to the elderly.
The pressure mounts to make the transition and pray it works.
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The pressure mounts to make the transition and pray it works.
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More maneuvering and delay.
ISRAEL
Delay, Delay, Delay
Israel’s parliamentary speaker resigned Wednesday after refusing to comply with a Supreme Court order to hold a vote that could possibly replace him, further deepening the political turmoil in the country, Bloomberg reported.
The decision by speaker Yuli Edelstein, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, could further stall Netanyahu’s chief rival, Benny Gantz, from forming a governing coalition following the March 2 elections.
The High Court, in response, ruled early Thursday that Amir Peretz, chairman of the Labor Party, will be assigned as interim speaker, Haaretz reported.
The new verdict will allow Gantz, who has the support of a slim majority, to install a new speaker and implement new legislation, including a bill that would prohibit lawmakers facing criminal charges from serving as prime minister.
Netanyahu has been indicted in three corruption cases and his trial was postponed last week due to the outbreak of the novel coronavirus.
Following three back-to-back elections within a year, Israel remains stuck in a political deadlock.
Netanyahu has previously called for the formation of an emergency unity government with Gantz’s Blue and White party, but Gantz has rejected the offer.
And and essential must:
https://www.americanthinker.
Finally:
And and essential must:
https://www.americanthinker.
Finally:
This article is an interview with the smallpox doctor.
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How often must the same historical matter keep coming around? Probably as long as men of supposed good faith turn out to be weak and liars.
Securing the Peace in Israel
Israel must be as united as possible to prepare and implement a peace that generally resolves the problem created when the British with the Balfour Declaration of 1917 sold the same real estate to two different parties.
The third Israeli general election in a year has produced a clearer advantage for the principal party, but has been ambiguous in the more important issue of which party will lead the government.
The ostensible leader of the opposition, General Benjamin (Benny) Gantz, head of the Blue and White Party—an amalgam of centrist and moderate left parties and groups, roughly continuing in the path of Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, and Ehud Barak of the old Mapai (Labor) Party—has aligned the support of a majority of the Knesset (parliament). But that support is dependent on the adherence of the Arab Joint List, the third-largest party, which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismisses in incendiary terms as a terrorist front.
Israel is a complete slate system: the parties nominate up to 120 people (the total number of members of the Knesset) in their order of seniority or merit within each party. There are no constituencies or districts. In theory, every member of the Knesset could live in the same neighborhood or even the same large building. Votes are cast for the party of choice.
Netanyahu’s Likud (formerly led by Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, and with a schism, Ariel Sharon) had just under 30 percent of the vote and so 36 MKs; Gantz and his followers 27 percent and 33 MKs, and the Arab Joint List (three parties combined), got 12.7 percent of the votes and 15 MKs, the orthodox religious Shas received 8 percent of the votes and nine MKs; the remaining four parties to make the threshold of 5 percent required to sit in the Knesset all received between 5 and 6 percent and have six or seven MKs. These include two smaller parties, led by the notable faction-heads Avigdor Lieberman and Naftali Bennett.
The Jews’ history of being persecuted required that when they finally regained their homeland, it be governed in a way that made it almost impossible to ignore even small blocs of Jewish opinion. The status of the Arabs, naturally, has been more complicated.
Israel has been much criticized for the unequal treatment of its Arabs, but given that most of them don’t believe in the existence of Israel as a Jewish state, that is not entirely surprising. Moreover, the condition of Israeli Arabs is generally freer and more prosperous than that of neighboring Arab populations, apart from—in straight terms of per capita wealth—the petro-states.
Netanyahu is currently under indictment for corrupt dealings with media owners—not an unusual circumstance in Israel where a prime minister (Ehud Olmert) and a president (Moshe Katsav) were convicted of crimes. He claims the prosecution is political, something for which there is also some precedent in Israel. The Old Testament attribution to God of the opinion expressed to Moses that the Jews are a “stiff-necked people” (also translated as “argumentative” and “obstinate”) is largely vindicated in Israel’s politics. As there is no territorial aspect to parliamentary representation, parties are constantly fusing and splintering and coalitions of four or five parties are required over a constantly-shifting range of ever-evolving policy opinions and perceptions.
The composition of the Israeli population: an in-gathering of Jews from all over Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and Ethiopia makes it an unusually polyglot patchwork of groups and interests, and the nature of the system as much as that of the Jewish people assures a constantly seething political culture. Gantz apparently is able to form a government because he is less objectionable to the Arab population than the more intransigent Netanyahu. But Gantz promised in the late campaign that he would not sit in a government with Netanyahu and would not govern by relying on Arab support.
Inevitably, a government of Israel propped up by Arabs would severely divide the country.
It is obvious that Israel’s political system is excessively complex, but it has been one of the most successful countries in the world and has grown from its status at independence in 1948 of a string of scrabble-hard kibbutzniks surrounded by Arab enemies in a poor and unremitting country to its present prosperity—an (off-shore) oil-producing, highly educated state with a European standard of living (93 percent of the per capita income of Canada, a vast treasure house).
In all the world, the only equivalent development story has been South Korea, with China in a special category as the first Great Power to cease to be a Great Power and then regenerate itself to that status after centuries of decline and economic stagnation. Israel’s strategic condition has also benefited from the disintegration of two of its most virulent enemies, Syria and Iraq, immense humanitarian tragedies though there have been in those countries; and from the encroachments of the Arabs’ ancient foes the Iranians and Turks. This last development has caused the principal Arab powers to discard most of their official hostility to Israel—which is a natural ally in any rebuff to Iran, the chief supplier of the anti-Israeli terrorist activities of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.
Gantz is popular as a distinguished, apparently disinterested retired general, and Netanyahu, having surpassed David Ben Gurion as the longest-serving Israeli prime minister (now 15 years) carries a good deal of baggage. Normally, the voters would conclude that it was, indeed time for a change. Ben Gurion was the chief founder of the country and the undisputed head of the then Ashkenazi majority of Israelis and was the natural leader to elect and retain.
Netanyahu has at times been far down the well in opposition and has achieved and maintained his position preeminently by a mastery of the free enterprise right and as the chief opponent of the previous land-for-peace formula, engaged in even by the fierce Begin, and certainly Rabin, Peres, Barak, and Sharon. In practice, it consisted of Israel ceding land it had won in wars the Arabs had initiated and lost, in exchange for a ceasefire which the Palestine Liberation Organization did not observe for more than a few weeks before it started all over again.
The Palestinians (the PLO and Hamas) overplayed their hand. They did not realize that the sponsorship of the Arab powers would evaporate when the Arab world was challenged by a real adversary (Iran and to some degree Turkey). The Palestinian leaders never wanted peace, because if it was achieved, they would only be the leaders of a tiny, poor, dusty little state carved out of the old Palestine Mandate following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in 1918. The PLO leader would cease to be the world figure the egregious Yasser Arafat was for 35 years and would have no more prominence than the president of Lebanon or Tunisia.
The Palestinians have fumbled their main chance, and in the next few years, they will have to accept something fairly close to the Trump peace plan. Both Netanyahu and Gantz support that plan and at this critical point, Israel cannot have a government that depends for retention of office on Arab legislators who oppose the entire concept of the Jewish state.
A fourth election in a year is not the answer to the impasse; a grand coalition of Likud and Blue and White is; if Gantz doesn’t feel he can break his promise not to serve with Netanyahu, he should refrain from government but remain as his party’s leader, with Netanyahu as prime minister for one or two more years, then Netanyahu can retire and Gantz can replace him.
Israel needs a strong government to try to bring the pursuit of some sort of substantial and durable peace to a satisfactory conclusion. Alternatively, he could declare that conditions have changed and he can serve with Netanyahu after all, as associate prime minister. In coalition governments, pre-electoral promises are always subject to post-electoral review.
President Trump has effectively discarded the requirement of Israeli-Palestinian agreement and partially replaced it with an element of an imposed peace, as Richard Nixon contemplated prior to the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Israel must be as united as possible to prepare and implement a peace that generally resolves the problem created when the British with the Balfour Declaration of 1917 sold the same real estate to two different parties. For more than a century, a partition between the Jews and the Palestinian Arabs was the only solution, and Israel has grown strong enough, and the Arabs divided enough, that the time to secure the Jewish homeland is almost at hand.
This is no time for sadistic attachment to outworn tactical election promises and factional dogma. History will not wait.
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When we return to a semblance of normalcy it is only logical for successive purchases of various items, to fill overblown demands of those who have been staying home, to subside and this will impact those stocks that have benefited from the over stocking of "necessities."
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More legislation commentary:
Congress rarely does anything that isn’t messy, so let’s stipulate that a $2 trillion bill written on the fly in a week will be loaded with waste and a lifetime supply of unintended consequences. Americans will pay for this for decades. The consolation is that the Senate bill that was moving to a vote by our deadline Wednesday includes money to keep workers and businesses afloat during this national economic shutdown and perhaps avoid a depression.
The bill spends $150 billion to pad the mismanaged budgets of state and local governments in Albany, Sacramento and elsewhere—no strings or oversight attached. Oh, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi managed to earmark $25 million for, er, virus relief for Washington’s Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
When we return to a semblance of normalcy it is only logical for successive purchases of various items, to fill overblown demands of those who have been staying home, to subside and this will impact those stocks that have benefited from the over stocking of "necessities."
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More legislation commentary:
The High Price of Coronavirus Relief
The Fed gets money to save the economy, but Pelosi’s price is steep.
The Editorial Board
The virus rescue shouldn’t cost this much. The bill includes $250 billion for $1,200 payments to Americans whether or not they’re affected by the virus. The cash will do little or nothing to help an economy closed by government fiat. The bill also pluses up unemployment insurance beyond 100% of wages—an incentive not to return to work if you’re laid off. Republicans were scrambling to fix that provision on Wednesday, and we hope they do.
Congress did what it always does and used a crisis to pack the bill with spending the Members couldn’t get through a normal budget. Journalists will need weeks to cull through the pages and figure out what it all really means.
The good news is the bill provides urgent money for emergency medical supplies to hospitals, to make ventilators for virus patients and protection equipment for doctors and nurses, and to support researchers looking for new therapies and perhaps a vaccine. This is a proper role for government given the extraordinary health emergency.
As important, the bill provides crucial liquidity to businesses that have had their revenue reduced or eliminated by the national lockdown. This is not a problem caused by business or reckless CEOs. This is a liquidity crisis caused by the government strategy to reduce the spread of the virus and loss of life.
The risk that markets have been reflecting in the past two weeks is that this liquidity crisis would lead to mass layoffs and a credit panic that led to defaults, bankruptcies and a deflationary spiral. In a word, depression.
The bill thus provides $454 billion for Treasury’s Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF) to backstop Federal Reserve facilities to support credit markets and individual companies. The Fed under Section 13(3) will set up special-purpose vehicles, which it knows how to do, and use the Treasury capital to leverage trillions of dollars if borrowers need it. These will be loans, not grants, and they will have to be paid back. Treasury will take any losses.
Democrats and the media call these a “bailout” and “slush fund,” but a month ago the economy was strong and these companies were in good health. The government shut down American commerce. Now government needs to lend its balance sheet to prevent the liquidity crisis from becoming a solvency crisis and then a banking crisis. It took the Fed and Treasury a long time to recognize the problem and solution, but give them credit for getting there.
Special credit as well to Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey, who steered the ESF money through a field of Democratic traps that would have defeated the purpose. One weakness of the current GOP Congress is that it has too few Members who understand economics and financial markets. Mr. Toomey does.
The Senate bill does include some of Chuck Schumer’s last-minute demands for “oversight” and “transparency,” as if Congress doesn’t already have the power to guarantee both. A new Inspector General will examine Treasury lending through a separate $79 billion fund that can offer direct loans to stressed companies, including $46 billion for airlines and companies deemed crucial to national security. A new Congressional “commission” will also be established to oversee all of this.
These are best understood as political harassment operations designed to offer election-year fodder for Democrats to complain about loans to specific companies. Koch Brothers! At least they won’t have enforcement power as Democrats originally wanted. And they shouldn’t interfere during the virus crisis with the Fed’s lending. They do speak loudly about Democratic priorities in a crisis.
All of this should at least reduce the chances of an immediate economic collapse, but no one should think it guarantees a swift recovery. The shutdown has already done enormous harm; layoffs will multiply into the millions and many businesses will close, never to reopen. A recovery will require governors and President Trump to begin to pivot to a sustainable phase-two anti-virus strategy that doesn’t include ruining the economy.
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The Coronavirus May Make Trump Stronger
Gallup finds 60% of voters approve of his handling of the crisis. As usual, the establishment is clueless.
By Walter Russell Mead
This is not what his critics expected. At 49% overall job approval in the latest Gallup poll, and with 60% approval of the way he is handling the coronavirus epidemic, President Trump’s standing with voters has improved even as the country closed down and the stock market underwent a historic meltdown. That may change as this unpredictable crisis develops, but bitter and often justified criticism of Mr. Trump’s decision making in the early months of the pandemic has so far failed to break the bond between the 45th president and his political base.
One reason Mr. Trump’s opponents have had such a hard time damaging his connection with voters is that they still don’t understand why so many Americans want a wrecking-ball presidency. Beyond attributing Mr. Trump’s support to a mix of racism, religious fundamentalism and profound ignorance, the president’s establishment opponents in both parties have yet to grasp the depth and intensity of the populist energy that animates his base and the Bernie Sanders movement.The sheer number of voters in open political rebellion against centrist politics is remarkable. Adding the Sanders base (36% of the Democratic vote in the latest Real Clear Politics poll average, or roughly 13% of the national vote considering that about 45% of voters lean Democratic) to the core Trump base of roughly 42%, and around 55% of U.S. voters now support politicians who openly despise the central assumptions of the political establishment.
That a majority of the electorate is this deeply alienated from the establishment can’t be dismissed as bigotry and ignorance. There are solid and serious grounds for doubting the competence and wisdom of America’s self-proclaimed expert class. What is so intelligent and enlightened, populists ask, about a foreign-policy establishment that failed to perceive that U.S. trade policies were promoting the rise of a hostile Communist superpower with the ability to disrupt supplies of essential goods in a national emergency? What competence have the military and political establishments shown in almost two decades of tactical success and strategic impotence in Afghanistan? What came of that intervention in Libya? What was the net result of all the fine talk in the Bush and Obama administrations about building democracy in the Middle East?
On domestic policy, the criticism is equally trenchant and deeply felt. Many voters believe that the U.S. establishment has produced a health-care system that is neither affordable nor universal. Higher education saddles students with increasing debt while leaving many graduates woefully unprepared for good jobs in the real world. The centrist establishment has amassed unprecedented deficits without keeping roads, bridges and pipes in good repair. It has weighed down cities and states with unmanageable levels of pension debt.
The culture of social promotion and participation trophies is not, populists feel, confined to U.S. kindergartens and elementary schools. Judging by performance, they conclude that people rise in the American establishment by relentless virtue-signaling; by going along with conventional wisdom, however foolish; and by forgiving the failures of others and having their own overlooked in return.
The blame game playing out over how the president has handled the coronavirus epidemic reflects the dynamics of this struggle. Mr. Trump’s establishment critics want a narrow fight over the dismal trail of bluster, evasions, missed opportunities and failed predictions that marked the president’s approach to the virus earlier in the year. Like many criticisms of Mr. Trump, these arguments against him are by and large correct and significant and it is part of the proper job of a free press to make them.
However, Mr. Trump’s supporters are not comparing him with an omniscient leader who always does the right thing, but with the establishment—including the bulk of the mainstream media—that largely backed a policy of engagement with China long after its pitfalls became clear. For Americans who lost their jobs to Chinese competition or who fear the possibility of a new cold war against an economically potent and technologically advanced power, Mr. Trump’s errors pale before those of the bipartisan American foreign-policy consensus.The establishment’s massive, decadeslong failure to think through the consequences of empowering Communist China and creating a trading relationship that, among other things, left the U.S. dependent on Beijing for pharmaceuticals is a much less excusable and more consequential error than anything Donald Trump has done in 2020—and it has a direct bearing on the mess we are in.
Attacks on the establishment aren’t always rational or fair. They can be one-sided and fail to do justice to the accomplishments the U.S. has made in the recent past. Populism on both the left and the right always attracts its share of snake-oil salesmen, and America’s current antiestablishment surge is no exception. But the U.S. establishment won’t prosper again until it comes to grip with a central political fact: Populism rises when establishment leadership fails. If conventional U.S. political leaders had been properly doing their jobs, Donald Trump would still be hosting a television show.
Unless the president’s opponents take the full measure of this public discontent, they will be continually surprised by his resilience against media attacks. And until the establishment undertakes a searching and honest inventory of the tangled legacy of American foreign and domestic policy since the end of the Cold War, expect populism to remain a potent part of the political scene.
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