Irwin M. Stelzer

The Weekly Standard

July 9, 2017

Why Do the Europeans Hate Trump?

America, the New York Times groans (chortles?), was "ostracized" by the other G20 countries at the recently concluded meeting in Hamburg. And with Angela Merkel leading the band of ostracizers. And on not one but three issues: immigration, climate change, and trade. These are all worth examining in turn.

Let's start with immigration. Led by Chancellor Merkel (and contrary to the wishes of many members of the European Union) Germany welcomed 1 million largely Muslim immigrants—many with no identification, some with forged passports, most in need of all the welfare state could provide.

The resulting clash of civilizations has made it unsafe in major German cities for women to enjoy an unmolested evening stroll, or a street celebration on holidays. It seems that the immigrants' attitude towards women, or at least the attitude of enough of them, is not quite consistent with the values Ms. Merkel preaches. And the unity of the European Union is fractured by the fact that, having rolled out the welcome mat, its partners-in-union have left Italy to bear most of the costs.

Compare that with President Trump's efforts to bring illegal immigration into the United States to an end, and to prevent terrorists from entering. Better to be ostracized for that than to follow Merkel's policy of putting her citizens at risk.

Being ostracized for having withdrawn from the Paris climate deal seems a price worth paying: The deal is unenforceable. The signatories can change the plans to which they have agreed at any time. And even if they all keep to their promises—something Germany and most other NATO countries have refused to do when it comes to funding their obligations—the effect on emissions and temperatures will be insufficient to prevent the predicted disasters.

All of this while China continues to increase its emissions and fund coal plants all over the world, some 700 of them, Germany's emissions rise, and Merkel's fatherland relies increasingly on lignite to keep the lights on. America, on the other hand, has decided on an energy policy that is allowing the market to do what regulation could not, or at least not as efficiently. Thanks to investor and consumer groups, and to the federal system established by our Founding Fathers, thousands of private sector players and local and state government are finding ways to reduce emissions, efficiently.

Finally, Trump has caused us to be ostracized by Merkel & Co. by adopting a protectionist trade policy. That policy consists of calling for renegotiation of antiquated trade agreements, and perhaps imposing penalties on imported steel, which the European Union also alleges is being dumped. Meanwhile, Germany continues to run large trade surpluses, in part because for it the euro is an undervalued currency that is immiserating the south of Europe and allowing its manufacturers to steal a march on competing countries.

To be ostracized by a group that has forfeited civil peace so that its well-protected elites can bask in the glow of its kindness to immigrants, and, of course, have access to cheap labor; that extols the virtues of the Paris accord while increasing emissions; that has a leading member that makes China's currency manipulation look like small-time trade distortion? It's more of an honor than an embarrassment.

The G20 that wants nothing to do with us, that finds our president so offensive, that finds its values so superior to ours, might want to replace the emergency auto-dial White House number with some other number the next time Vladimir Putin gets stroppy. After all, the European Union has three presidents of its very own—in Italy, Poland and Luxembourg. Surely they'll be able to take the call.

Lawrence Meyers

Townhall

July 5, 2017

Why They Hate Trump So Much

One of the reasons the Leftists are so angry at President Trump isn’t so much because he won, even though Leftists are incapable of being gracious losers. It’s that they were told that the Second Coming of Typhoid Mary would occur, and like all children, are mad that Papa CNN and Mama MSNBC were wrong.

See what I did there? They aren’t angry that CNN and MSNBC and the entire Democrat Media Complex lied to them, but that they were wrong. Which is, of course, how they are still able to hold their Parental Media Betters in high regard, even as CNN implodes.

Every day since the election, then, Leftists have tried everything under the sun to de-legitimize a duly-elected president. He didn’t win the popular vote! “Not My President”! Find faithless electors! Impeach him! More than 50 classless Democrats boycotted the inauguration. And, of course, the “Russian hacking” claims.

(Which reminds me, what exactly are those claims? That the Russians somehow interfered with the election? You mean the way Barack Obama did in Israel, or some other way? It’s also a bit odd because I should think Putin would have been on Team I’m With Her, because her failures as Secretary of State would make her a pushover compared to a dealmaker like Trump.)

Thus, we witnessed the first stage of the Kübler-Ross grief cycle, hallmarked by avoidance of the truth (he won), confusion (that he won), fear (that he was Hitler and would club baby seals), numbness (the faces on network anchors were gold), and blame (those stupid Americans, like 83,000 unemployed coal workers, who voted for him).

The hate being blasted at Trump is partially the result of stage two: anger. Oh, the frustration, anxiety, and irritation are non-stop. Leftists and the media are calling him every name in the book. They focus on every single thing he says or does, in a way they never did with George W. Bush, and certainly never did with Dear Leader.

Yet it’s more than just the stages of grief that Leftists are exhibiting. Another major reason they hate him is because he fights back. Not only that, he is skilled at media jiu-jitsu, and fights back in an effective manner. And when he does so, all they can do is call him even more names, and that his tweets are “un-presidential”

What did they expect? Trump is a New Yorker, who didn’t build an empire by wearing a pink pussy hat to every real estate closing. Trump has always been a pugilist. He’s always been crass. Why would anyone expect him to suddenly change? This is the behavior that got him into the White House, and will keep him there, for better or for worse.

Remember that scene in “The Untouchables”, where Sean Connery is educating Kevin Costner on how to get Al Capone? “He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. They put one of yours in the hospital, you put one of theirs in the morgue”. That’s Trump, and Leftists are mad that they keep ending up in the morgue.

Look at the brilliant CNN-WWE tweet. CNN was caught red-handed in yet another hilariously embarrassing bust by James O’Keefe. CNN isn’t even pretending to not be the ultimate Fake News Network anymore. And Trump crushed them. It was a knockout punch, judging by the hysteria (the foam-at-the-mouth-why-so-serious-hysteria), especially at CNN.

They scream and yell, “how can a president say such a thing?”

Well, because you’ve called him Hitler, fascist, racist, homophobic, Islamophobic, man-child – and there are a lot more. However, Trump is so hated that when I tried to Google “nasty things said about Trump”, I get scores of results about the worst things Trump has said. Nice to see that Google isn’t manipulating results. That fine. Here’s what “comedian” Samantha Bee has said. Oh, and here’s a delightful list from the Mad-Pussy-Hatters at Jezebel. May as well throw these in for good measure.

Leftists call his wife a “whore”, and run around with signs saying “rape Melania”. They hold up his bloody and severed head as a “joke”, call for his assassination as a “joke”, call his 10-year-old son a rapist and autistic and a homeschool shooter, and they are suddenly claiming the moral high ground?

This is why they hate him so much. Because despite doing everything they can think of, Trump is still standing. Then he punches back. His blows are surgical and hilarious. They take next to no effort, while the Left is literally expending all its energy and having no impact. He’s using the media’s own tools against it. He’s using social media – the Great Equalizer – against them. He’s using Alinsky against them. He’s kicking them when they’re down.

And the more he fights back, the more the Left rages…and the more the media exposes themselves as being utterly corrupt, and how truly hateful the Left has become. Nor is this a fringe element. This is the Left. They are putting on a show for all to see, and are too stupid to realize that everyday Americans are paying attention. You think Democrat losses in 2016 were bad? Just wait.

I can only hope that stage three – depression and detachment -- will never arrive. It will be much less entertaining if the Leftist all just shut up.

Some thoughts not often heard or expressed

The Conservative ‘Resistance’ Is Futile

The right has never made one significant move against the liberal culture machine.

By David Gelernter

Wall Street Journal

July 5, 2017

Democrats, in their role as opponents of President Trump, have taken to calling themselves “the resistance.” But I was startled a few days ago when a thoughtful, much-admired conservative commentator used the same term on TV—casually, as if “the resistance” was just the obvious term. Everyone is saying it. It’s no accident that the left runs American culture. The right is too obsessed with mere mechanics—poll numbers and vote counts—to look up.

“Resistance” is unacceptable in referring to the Trump opposition because, obviously, it suggests the Resistance—against the Nazis in occupied France. Many young people are too ignorant to recognize the term, but that hardly matters. The press uses it constantly. So when a young innocent finally does encounter the genuine French Resistance, he will think, “Aha, just like the resistance to Trump!” And that’s all the left wants: a mild but continuous cultural breeze murmuring in every American ear that opposing Trump is noble and glorious. Vive la Résistance!

This abuse of “the resistance” happens everywhere. Many Republicans hate Mr. Trump and love to denounce him—which lets them show their integrity and, sometimes, a less-praiseworthy attribute too.

Many intellectuals think Mr. Trump is vulgar. That includes conservatives. They think he’s a peasant and talks like one. Every time he opens his mouth, all they hear is a small-time Queens operator who struck it big but has never had a proper education, and embarrasses the country wherever he goes, whatever he says. It never dawns on them that the president can’t stand them any more than they can stand him. Yet they expect him to treat them with respectful courtesy if he ever runs into them—as he should, and on the whole does. Conceivably they should treat him the same way.

Conservatives regret the collapse of authority, dignity and a certain due formality in the way Americans treat each other. They are right to complain when any president diminishes his office. Mr. Trump ought to think more seriously about what he owes the great men among his predecessors, and the office itself. But it’s not clear that commentators make things any better when they treat the president himself like a third-rate clown.

I’d love for him to be a more eloquent, elegant speaker. But if I had to choose between deeds and delivery, it wouldn’t be hard. Many conservative intellectuals insist that Mr. Trump’s wrong policies are what they dislike. So what if he has restarted the large pipeline projects, scrapped many statist regulations, appointed a fine cabinet and a first-rate Supreme Court justice, asked NATO countries to pay what they owe, re-established solid relations with Israel and Saudi Arabia, signaled an inclination to use troops in Afghanistan to win and not merely cover our retreat, led us out of the Paris climate accord, plans to increase military spending (granted, not enough), is trying to get rid of ObamaCare to the extent possible, proposed to lower taxes significantly and revamp immigration policy and enforcement? What has he done lately?

Conservative thinkers should recall that they helped create President Trump. They never blasted President Obama as he deserved. Mr. Obama’s policies punished the economy and made the country and its international standing worse year by year; his patronizing arrogance drove people crazy. He was the perfect embodiment of a one-term president. The tea-party outbreak of 2009-10 made it clear where he was headed. History will record that the press saved him. Naturally the mainstream press loved him, but too many conservative commentators never felt equal to taking him on. They had every reason to point out repeatedly that Mr. Obama was the worst president since Jimmy Carter, surrounded by a left-wing cabinet and advisers, hostile to Israel, crazed regarding Iran, and even less competent to deal with the issues than Mr. Carter was—which is saying plenty.

But they didn’t say plenty. They didn’t say much at all. The rank and file noticed and got mad. Even their supposed champions didn’t grasp what life under Mr. Obama was like—a man who was wrecking the economy while preaching little sermons, whose subtext was always how smart he was, how dumb they were, and how America was full of racist clods, dangerous cops and infantile nuts who would go crazy if they even heard the words “Islamic terrorism.” So the rank and file was deeply angry and elected Mr. Trump.

Some conservatives have the impression that, by showing off their anti-Trump hostility, they will get the networks and the New York Times to like them. It doesn’t work like that. Although the right reads the left, the left rarely reads the right. Why should it, when the left owns American culture? Nearly every university, newspaper, TV network, Hollywood studio, publisher, education school and museum in the nation. The left wrapped up the culture war two generations ago. Throughout my own adult lifetime, the right has never made one significant move against the liberal culture machine.

So go ahead, proclaim it from the rooftops: the anti-Trump opposition is a virtual French Resistance! If we’re not going to fight anyway, let’s surrender and get it over with.

Mr. Gelernter invented Lifestreams, the first social network.

The Battle Continues

Trump Is Winning His War on Washington

Conrad Black

The National Interest

June 14, 2017

It is easy to forget that the credibility battle between President Trump and James Comey is just the latest round in Donald Trump’s long struggle to overwhelm, single-handedly at first, the entire national political power structure. No one who followed closely really believed that the war was over on election night. The Democrats contested some local results, very unsuccessfully, and then, in their stark disbelief, took out television advertisements reaching tens of millions of people to ask some of the 538 people elevated to the electoral college to break their pledges and vote for Hillary Clinton instead of Donald Trump. It was an absurd fiasco. Democratic Senate leaders Chuck Schumer and Richard Durbin made prodigious efforts to block virtually every nominee of the incoming administration to high office. Apart from knocking down Trump’s first candidate for labor secretary, their only achievement was delay and harassment.

From the day after the election, Clinton fabricated the contention that, first among all those responsible for her defeat (among whom she never counted herself) were the Russians. This wild allegation was first advanced by John Podesta, the Democratic campaign chairman. It was then amplified by former Senate leader Harry Reid, and then Clinton got the bit in her teeth. Alleging collusion between the Russian government and the Trump campaign quickly became the favorite theme of Democratic leaders in Congress and the vast gallery of Never Trump fanatics in the national media, their ranks swollen and made more raucous by the self-exiled snobs of the intellectual conservative movement.

Since Trump had gone to war against all factions of both parties—Hollywood, Wall Street, the national media, academia, the lobbyists and the bureaucracy—there could not be a honeymoon, merely a few pleasantries on Inauguration Day, like a Christmas truce on the Western Front in World War I, followed by the resumption of hostilities. The outgoing Obama administration helpfully conducted surveillance of Trump Tower, and unmasked and leaked to the press the names of prominent Republicans that had arisen in these dubious practices, but no evidence was found.

The Russians jubilantly exploited the near anarchy among Washington’s political and media elites through an imaginative campaign of disinformation. Meanwhile, the upper reaches of the Washington civil service became spigots of malicious and almost certainly criminal leakage to the Trumpophobic press.

Every charge, no matter how fantastic, against the incoming president was given immense play by the morally bankrupt, unrelievedly partisan mainstream media, led by the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and NBC. All of these outlets had gagged on election night, and all of them refused to accept the legitimacy of the new administration.

There had never been an argument to reelect the Democrats on the merits of the largely failed Obama administration, so their entire campaign was a smear job on Trump. This continued with the Russian collusion scam and as soon as the administration was in place, with the nonsense about racism over the partial travel ban. (The Supreme Court will almost certainly take immigration back from the district and circuit courts and restore it to the president.) Donald Trump hardly made his task easier by some of the bumptious and tasteless comments that he made as this war unfolded. He has generally held the support of his followers, who understood that his assault upon the political establishment was so comprehensive that it would require a full term to implement. Those well acquainted with the key Democratic personalities in Washington confirm that they realize they have absolutely nothing to work with for an impeachment, but are aiming at the immobilization of the regime until the midterm elections of 2018, when the Democrats will try to retake at least part of the Congress against a do-nothing, blustering government.

Trump has fought like a fearless but calculating fighting bull. His greatest problem is not spurious charges or media hostility, which is not uniform and provokes a heavy backlash, but the cowardice of congressional Republicans. Most of them are in the Washington sleaze factory Trump initially attacked, but they owe their majority and the House’s repeal of Obamacare to the president. Speaker Paul Ryan was unable, as the appointment of a special counsel was announced, even to allow the president a presumption of innocence, and confined himself to declining “to prejudge” the outcome. Soon, they will have to realize that the anti-Trump campaign is just a mudslide, and that their only chance of retaining control of the Congress is to pull together and put through the president’s radically sensible program.

The firing of FBI director James Comey (apparently for needlessly dragging out the Russian collusion business), his appearance before the Senate intelligence committee last week and Trump’s press conference the following day have all torqued up the war to new heights of acrimony. But Trump is finally winning: even relatively unbiased commentators have failed to note how one-sided the exchange has been, though the comparisons with Richard Nixon’s firing of Archibald Cox—like the collusion charge itself, the complaints of an attempted back channel between the Russians and the president’s son-in-law, and the charge of misuse of Israeli intelligence (denied by Israeli prime minister Netanyahu)—have vanished, almost forgotten.

Comey conceded that he did not object when former attorney general Loretta Lynch told him to refer to the Clinton investigation as the Clinton “matter.” He admitted—as Trump had claimed, Comey had not previously acknowledged and the press failed to publish—that even after many months of investigation, Trump was not suspected of collusion with the Russians. He acknowledged that while Russia had tried to interfere with the election, there was no evidence that their efforts had changed any votes. He admitted that he had leaked his hotly contested version of a conversation with the president, about the investigation of former national security advisor Gen. Michael Flynn, in order to prompt the appointment of a special counsel. He did attack the media, and generated a retraction at CNN and extreme evasions by the New York Times.

No one is satisfied with Comey’s explanation of why he took it upon himself as a police chief to recite Clinton’s likely offenses with her emails, and then declare that she should not be prosecuted, which was not his decision to make; nor why he reopened and then quickly closed the “Clinton matter” in the last week of the campaign.

In all of these areas, there is little argument that Comey exceeded the powers of his position, and compromised the political impartiality and integrity of the bureau.

The chief takeaways are that the Russian collusion argument against Trump is dead, and that the obstruction argument is reduced to trying to claim, as no sane prosecutor would, that the president’s unwise and inconsequential expression of a hope that Flynn would not be prosecuted constituted an obstruction of justice. The chances of getting any traction on this issue are also zero. Even the endless brayings of Schumer, and Adam Schiff and Mark Warner, (the sanctimonious congressman from Hollywood and the vice chairman of the Senate intelligence committee), may have to be modulated—to the acoustical relief of the nation. There is little chance that Special Counsel Robert Mueller will find anything that significantly embarrasses the president.

Donald Trump has won this round, but the war will continue for a while longer.