The Pre-2020 Election Zeitgeist

The Lion or The Lamb?

A Stark Choice for President

This appeared during the last week of October 2020 in various publications and websites.

President Donald J. Trump is annoying, abrasive, irritating and somewhat of a jerk, in other words he’s a typical brash, loud and pushy New Yorker of the kind that was prevalent through much of the 20^th Century, the kind of person who gave New York a bad name. The kind who made most Americans hate New York the way they do Frenchmen in Paris.

New York City was once rife with hungry “take no prisoners” shtarkers (big shots). They were endemic to the garment center, to finance (many are the wolves on Wall Street), to media, entertainment, fine dining, advertising, fashion, sports and real estate. New York didn’t become the biggest and richest city in the nation and one of the most important in the world because of milquetoast middle managers and bureaucrats. Skyscrapers soared in tandem with edifice complexes and outsized egos. You could see the hustle, bustle and jockeying 24/7 in real time. “The city that never sleeps” as Sinatra put it. And Donald Trump is the embodiment of that ethos, of that culture, of that milieu, it suffuses every cell of his DNA.

He has been grating as President these past three and a half years. He’s probably been grating his whole adult life. That’s the nature of entrepreneurs and most particularly of billionaires. They didn’t get to the top of the heap by playing patty-cake or being Mother Theresa. Business in New York and especially real estate development is a gritty, no holds barred hourly slugfest that doesn’t pity the weak, the meek or the failed. There are no trophies for coming in fifth place. It’s Darwinian to the extreme where only the strongest thrive and rise to ethereal heights. You either get stuff done or you’re road kill and it can happen in a New York minute.

Trump doesn’t know from niceties when he has a job to do or a deadline to meet. It’s all nonstop bare fisted brawl where often you get battered as badly as the guy you’re pummeling. Most Americans born after 1985 have no recollection of these guys but when I was a kid, teenager and young adult they were ubiquitous and if you went to work for some of them you needed to get tough fast and have a thick skin. Work was a four-letter word; you were expected to give 110 percent and fools were not suffered gladly if at all.

For all his gruff manner and bull in the china shop ethos, Trump has gotten a lot of stuff done:

The Economy

On the economic front Trump ignited the biggest boom in decades by lowering personal income taxes for most Americans, slashing corporate taxes and cutting reams of government red tape that impeded business from creating jobs, leading to the lowest unemployment rate since 1969, or, in other words, in most Americans’ lifetimes. More Blacks and Hispanics and women were employed than ever. The percentage of Americans in the workforce was at a big high and believe it or not, the wealth and income gap between rich and poor shrank significantly as those in the lower income brackets saw real wages and the value of their investments rise by several multiples while those at the top experienced little to no growth from 2016-2019. Manufacturing of real things returned to U.S. shores as factories reopened and capital investment grew. Under Trump, America has become energy independent for the first time in 50 years. The stock market hit all-time highs which has a direct impact on nearly all Americans through their pension funds, 401k’s or IRA’s. Residential real estate values had exponential growth. And he was the first President to stand-up to China’s unfair trade relationship with the US which included their wanton theft of American intellectual property. He also renegotiated NAFTA and signed a new trade deal with Canada and Mexico that protects American jobs.

Covid

Regarding the Covid Pandemic, despite some initial fumbling the Trump Administration solved the mask shortage, solved the PPE shortage, solved the ventilator shortage, opened military field hospitals in critically hit cities and states in record time. He also got “Operation Warp Speed” going which has fast-tracked both a vaccine for Covid and needed therapeutic treatments. By barring travel from China on January 31^st (much to the consternation of his critics) and then closing off Europe a few weeks later he probably saved hundreds of thousands if not nearly two million American lives. Original projections were for 2.2 million dead. The roughly 200,000 fatalities are a huge tragedy but without the steps taken by the Administration through May, the numbers would have certainly been far worse. Europe’s fatalities are comparable to those of the US and does anyone really believe only 3,300 people died from Covid in China? The CARES Act pumped $3 Trillion into the economy to keep America afloat. Because of the lockdown some 22 million jobs were lost almost overnight but nearly 12 million have come back in the past two months. Job growth will plateau until there is a vaccine or the disease withers away. The leisure, travel, entertainment, event and dining industries all have taken a horrible blow from lost jobs and these won’t return for a while. But the existential question is “who is best qualified to return us to prosperity and a booming economy?”

The Courts

On the judicial front, Trump has appointed nearly 200 Originalist/Constitutionalist federal judges along with two Supreme Court justices with a third likely on the way. Originalist judges interpret the constitution as the original framers of the constitution intended and do not create new laws and legislate from the bench, thereby upholding the legal traditions that bind our country and government together.

Foreign Policy

The Trump Administration has achieved historic breakthroughs in peace between Israel and other Arab nations for which he’s been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. He also made good on his promise to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem and recognize the city as Israel’s capital. He also recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights from which Syria used to bombard and terrorize Israeli civilians. He wiped out the ISIS “Caliphate,” and has put enormous pressure on the radical Iranian Ayatollahs to stem their nuclear and global terrorist ambitions. He has forced our NATO allies to pay their fair share of defense spending and he’s been disentangling us from never-ending intractable foreign wars, bringing our troops home. He managed to build or strengthen hundreds of miles of border walls and barriers and most significantly, convinced Mexico to post their own troops on the US-Mexican border to stop waves of illegal immigrants from flooding into our country. In a way, Mexico is paying for a human wall.

Veterans and Military Affairs

Trump managed to finally straighten out the disgracefully poor Veterans Administration (VA) hospitals and permit the VA to fire incompetent employees along with allowing veterans to access private healthcare so they don’t have to wait weeks or months for treatment. The military has been fully refunded and is being rebuilt to Reagan-era levels. Our soldiers have received successive pay raises. There are hundreds more accomplishments but space inhibits the ability to list them all.

Joe Biden

Joe Biden is a wonderfully avuncular and pleasant grandfatherly figure who would be soothing to the psyche for the year or two he’d probably last in office. Are you ready for President Kamala Harris? Biden is a lot easier on the ears than Trump but are we voting for “favorite grandpa,” a Homecoming King or student council president or for someone who will get the job done? Biden has promised to raise income taxes, business taxes, estate taxes, capital gains taxes and even create wealth taxes. He has adopted the Bernie Sanders “Green New Deal” which seeks to eliminate fossil fuels in 10 to 15 years and your cars along with it. He’s signed-on to the notion of effectively eliminating private health insurance and private health care for the 180 million Americans who now have it. He’s for defunding the military and he’d roll back Trump policies in the Middle East and China.

In a Biden Administration you’ll have a lot of members from the far left wing of the Democratic Party – people who have been pro-indefinite draconian lockdowns and who have been permitting and abetting the last six months of rioting in Democrat-run cities along with supporting the “defund the police” and other soft on crime policies that have been in vogue in certain trendy circles as of late. They are also for racial preferences, quotas and set-asides as opposed to equality of opportunity, equality before the law and advancement based on merit.

This is an existential choice between two dramatically different visions for our country. We have the lion on one hand and the lamb on the other. For a stronger and more prosperous America we need the lion, even though he roars.

The Zeitgeist

 

The late Communist Chinese leader Mao Zedong (left) and the late Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-Shek (right) The fight goes on?

A “One Taiwan” Policy? Let’s Take Out the Chinese?

Note: This appeared originally on The Huffington Post on December 5, 2016

Much brouhaha has been made over the weekend phone call between President-Elect Donald Trump and Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen. On the surface you’d think that calling out for Chinese would be no big deal, but this conversation wasn’t about Moo Goo Gai Pan and by merely having any conversation at all, a lot of mainland Chinese bile has hit the wok.

Taiwanese Presidents have been untouchable by top US leaders for nearly four decades owing to the “One China Policy” created back in the 70s by former President Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. This policy in a nutshell says that the US and most of the West recognize that China is one integral, indivisible country and that the Communists in Beijing by dint of controlling over 90 percent of it are the legitimate government of this one country.

Conventional thinking is that partition is ok for Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, for Palestinians and Israelis, Indians and Pakistanis but not for China. This is a big burr under the posteriors of the Beijing Politburo because any deviation from this position implies the Communist regime perhaps isn’t as legitimate as they’d like the world and their own people to believe and that the Chinese civil war hasn’t been resolved. It infuriates the Communists that any remnant of non-Communist China exists because that existence means there must be another political point of view and in monolithic mainland China, that’s an anathema because the people of China aren’t meant to have any say as to who their leaders are and how their country is run.

For nearly four decades, the US and the West have been cravenly kowtowing to the Communists by dint of their strategic (and now economic) importance in the world. Nuclear missiles, millions of soldiers and really cheap consumer goods speak louder than the principles of freedom, democracy and human rights.

The Chinese Nationalists on Taiwan are the heirs to the popular revolution more than a century ago to overthrow the millennia-old Chinese monarchy and create a republic. Seeing an opportunity to further international Communism owing to the instability within China as a result of that revolution, the Soviets poured money and materiél into the fledgling Communist guerilla insurgency led by Mao Zedong. Mao made life miserable for Chiang Kai-Shek and the Nationalists who were concurrently battling breakaway warlords, the Communists and then by the late 1930s, the Japanese who were trying to conquer the country.

During World War II the Soviets instructed Mao to take a break from beating on the Nationalists to fight the Japanese, but after 1945 the civil war resumed in full earnest. From the late 1920s until the Communists conquered the entire mainland in 1949, Mao slaughtered and starved hundreds of thousands of opponents and after 1949 the Communists killed millions more of their own citizens through their Stalin-esque Gulag system, endless purges and forced collectivization.

Chiang’s troops, driven from the mainland, fled to the island of Taiwan along with a couple of million mainlanders and declared that the Republic of China was now situated there and they hoped to use that island to eventually invade the mainland, resume the civil war and overthrow the Communists. For about 30 years the US backed the Nationalists on Taiwan as the legitimate government of all China. In the 70s former President Nixon “opened up” Communist China as a way to create a strategic wedge between and the Soviet Union and China thereby weakening global Communist forces. In this Nixon succeeded. While switching recognition from the Nationalists to the Communists, the US also ambiguously pledged to ensure that Taiwan wasn’t forcibly integrated into the mainland and could defend itself and maintain its de-facto independence.

Over the last few decades the government in Taiwan has evolved from an essentially pro-West fascist dictatorship led by the Kuomintang (KMT, or Chinese Nationalist Party, founded by Sun Yat-sen in 1912) to a multi-party pluralistic free democracy where there have been peaceful transfers of power between the KMT and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Taiwan’s current President is from the DPP. Taiwan today is a free-enterprise economic powerhouse with the rule of law, freedoms of speech, press, assembly, religion, travel, livelihood, etc.

Meanwhile, on the mainland, the Communists still have an iron grip on any political expression. Basic freedoms are still repressed. The people are made quiescent by a potent mixture of intimidation through force and the injection of state-sponsored capitalism which allows folks to make money and buy creature comforts. Ironically, the Communist Party has transmogrified into a fascist dictatorship themselves which enables them to stay in power. But the people are given no other options. It’s kind of like both Saudi Arabia where silence is also bought with money and ancient Rome where the masses were quelled with bread and circuses.

There are many on Taiwan who would like to put a formal end to the Chinese civil war, give up any claims to the mainland and rejoin the family of nations – essentially get on with their lives and have their own freedom and self-determination on Taiwan for Taiwan and leave the mainland to its own devices. The problem is that the Communists won’t hear of it. It’s an all or nothing, my way or the highway deal with them – no Chinese (except maybe in New York’s Chinatown) can be under their own umbrella – it has the be the Beijing parasol or you’re flat out of luck.

So, back to Mr. Trump and Ms. Tsai. By even implicitly or by slight inference recognizing that Taiwan has a President and that this President might possibly be legitimate, it opens the specter of a brave new world vis-à-vis China that could have geo-strategic and economic implications of a potentially frightening nature.

Should the 23.5 million people of Taiwan have the right to self-determination free from threats of coercion and annihilation? Should the US stand firm for human rights and for what’s right around the world irrespective of existing political orthodoxies? A lot of folks didn’t think the Iron Curtain in Europe could ever be shattered, but it was. What about Asia’s “bamboo curtain?” (China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and North Korea). Donald Trump could certainly make it an interesting ride to say the least if resetting China policy is on his mind.

The Zeitgeist

Donald and Melania Trump voting in New York on November 8, 2016

Trump Win Proves the Election and System isn’t “Rigged”

Note: This appeared originally on The Huffington Post on November 9, 2016

The election wasn’t rigged.

Confounding the pollsters, the pundits, the media and conventional wisdom, Donald J. Trump, entertainer, entrepreneur and real estate developer was elected as the next President of the United States.

Improbably, a billionaire became the voice of the common man having run a populist campaign pledging to give voice to the ignored, the dispossessed and disenfranchised – those left behind in the high tech revolution, those passed over in the massive cultural changes of the past dozen years, those who felt palpable insecurity with the evaporation of much manufacturing, the explosion in health care costs and those who tired of accommodation and appeasement of violent Islamic extremists.

Trump put together a victory without the benefit of carrying the Northeast or the West Coast – the Trump win was a win for the “Flyover States,” as the middle of the country is sometimes derisively dismissed by the coastal elites. It was also a win for Texas and Dixie – the South rose up to repudiate an increasingly liberal and progressive vision of America as embodied by eight years of President Obama. Even Florida narrowly slipped out of the Democrats’ grasp. This is the first presidential election in perhaps a century that was accomplished without winning New York, Illinois or California.

The Trump win can be compared in to Richard Nixon’s in 1969 when Spiro Agnew’s “Silent Majority,” the everyday folks ignored by the media ushered in GOP rule as a reset to America’s “cultural revolution” of the 1960s. Trump’s victory also has echoes of Andrew Jackson – a sometimes vulgar and coarse blunt-speaking, hard-charging guy who eventually also overcame the disgust of the entrenched elites of his day and the dynastic entitlements of the Adams (John and John Quincey) family.

A majority of American voters were just not that into Hillary. Never an especially likeable figure and never an especially good retail politician, Hillary oozed aristocratic entitlement and fixed, smoke-filled room inevitability, which is why Obama was able to beat her in 2008 and why Bernie Sanders came awfully close in this primary season. That it was “her time” and “her turn” didn’t resonate with most folks.

In a sense it really was FBI Director James Comey who put Trump over the top. With his campaign swooning in the polls just two weeks ago, Comey’s letter to Congress about Huma Abedin’s laptop and more Clinton emails was the tipping point for many Americans. No matter that just before balloting Mr. Comey cleared Hillary yet again, the sense of many people was that Hillary was slippery, untrustworthy and dishonest. That Trump was able to maintain two weeks of self-discipline, stay on message and not go off the cliff on irrational Twitterized tangents made a big difference for many undecided voters.

Finally, the Trump victory also shows that the path for Republican majorities is in part paved with stifling discourse about people’s bodies and people’s bedrooms. Trump was heavily reticent on abortion and highly tolerant of the LBGT community, two areas of often strident posturing by GOP candidates in the past. People just want more tolerance and want candidates focused on big picture issues, not what goes on in their boudoirs.

Mr. Trump gets a solid GOP majority in the House and a secure one in the Senate along with winning The White House. A big mandate to roll-back much of the past eight years. Now all the kids have to play well together to get things done for the American people and we all have to hope and pray that Trump is capable of rising to the august office of the presidency so his late parents, his family, the GOP and the American people will be proud to have elected him.