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by JAMES P. PINKERTON9 May 20161,396
Only rarely does water flow uphill, do clocks run backwards, or does hell freeze over. And it’s even more rare when an MSM-er doesn’t trash Donald Trump.
Michael Hirsh is a certifiably blue-chip establishment journalist: His resume includes stints at Newsweek and National Journal, and he is now the national editor atPolitico.
And yet, on May 5, even as most of the MSM was busy flailing away, as usual, at Trump, Hirsh raised eyebrows when he published a provocative article headlined, “Why George Washington Would Have Agreed With Donald Trump/ Watch Out, Hillary: The Founding Fathers would have loved ‘America First,’ and they might have been right.”
Hirsh’s story was mostly a discussion of Trump’s foreign policy, and it must be said that he was, shall we say, judicious in his actual personal praise for Trump. Yet at the same time, Hirsh afforded Trump — and, as we shall see, Trump advisers — plenty of pixels to make their argument. And the result was a piece that ended up displaying more than a little sympathy for the Trumpian worldview.
Deploying a broad-gauge historical perspective, Hirsh put Trump’s campaign — notably, his April 27 speech to the Center for the National Interest in DC — into useful context:
Trump is also correct in suggesting that the current global system is an aberration in American history, that it may not be sustainable forever under current conditions, and that America should focus more on fixing our own economic house for a long time to come (a view shared, incidentally, by Barack Obama, who loves to say “it’s time to focus on nation-building at home”). The U.S. share of global defense spending has soared to more than a third of the total, while the American economy has dropped in size to one-quarter of global GDP; America spends more in total than the next seven largest countries combined: China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Britain, India, France and Japan. And to what end exactly? No one can quite say.
Yes, that is a good question to ask about our far-flung commitments: To what end exactly? And since it’s the American taxpayers — as well as their sons and daughters in uniform — who are bearing the burden of internationalism, maybe we, the people, should start demanding some better answers. (As an aside, we can add that the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, another high-ranking MSM-er, asked some of the same probing questions in his latest column, even if he seemed more sure than Hirsh that Hillary Clinton has all the answers.)
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In his concluding paragraph, Hirsh observed that, through it all, Trump is undeniably connecting with his audience:
At a time when many Americans are angry and feel dispossessed, and when they blame the rest of the world for their ills — egged on by Trump’s rhetoric about getting “raped,” for example by China — it may be that voters do want another choice. Trump appears to be offering one, and a lot of people are listening.
Interestingly, it wasn’t too long ago that Trump’s views on foreign policy and national security were seen by many as crippling to his candidacy. After Trump attacked George W. Bush’s handling of 9/11 and the Iraq War in the February 13 debate in Greenville, SC, an unnamed Republican “strategist” chortled to Katie Glueck, another Politico reporter, “Trump’s attack on President George W. Bush was galactic-level stupid in South Carolina.” Well, not so fast there, Mr. Insider-Expert; Trump, of course, triumphed in the Palmetto State primary a week later.
Looking back on that moment, we might today observe that Bush 43 is popular in much of the Republican Party, and yet at the same time, there’s considerable disgruntlement about the way that the “Great War on Terror” has been fought over the last 15 years — especially by those who actually did the fighting and the bleeding.
Indeed, when one thinks about Republican politics in this young century, we can see that at times, the GOP platform has seemed to consist mostly of foreign wars, open borders, and cuts to earned entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare. By that reckoning, maybe it’s hard to believe that Republicans have done indeed as well, politically, as they have done. (Thank God for Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi!)
Still, the landslide defeats that the Republicans suffered in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections speak to a deep weakness in the party’s national agenda — what might be called, uncharitably, the Bush-McCain-Romney agenda. And that’s what Trump obviously seeks to change.
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But does Trump really mean it? Or, to put it another way, can he really do it? In view of his track record, in life and, more recently, in politics, it would be a mistake to underestimate him. Yet, at the same time, whether one loves him or loathes him, it must be observed that he will not be governing alone — the Constitution guarantees that.
As veteran anti-tax activist Grover Norquisttold the Washington Post, if the New Yorker wins in November, his “art-of-the-dealing” will be put to the test. Speaking of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan, Norquist said, “The three of them have to agree.” And so, Norquist — who is regarded as more libertarian than Trump — added, thinking of a President Donald, “I sleep well at night.” That is, our constitutional system guarantees a carefully modulated outcome.
This stipulation, about the stubborn power of the separation of powers, brings up another point: Politics is a team effort. And speaking to the importance of team-building, former Reagan education secretary Bill Bennett said of Trump, in the same Post article, that this is not the time to criticize Trump for his alleged faults, but rather, “Now is the time to surround him with good people and work with him at the convention.”
Norquist and Bennett are correct. As our possible 45th president, Trump would still have to negotiate with the Congressional leadership — maybe even Democratic leadership. Yes, the White House is the bully pulpit, but politics is always, and only, the art of the possible. Or, as Washington wits say, “The President proposes, and the Congress disposes.”
So we should pay close attention to the team that Trump pulls together. For starters, there’s the question of his running mate. As an astute analyst here at Breitbart observed the other day, the most important decision that Trump will make between now and the election is his vice-presidential pick.
Yet the rest of the Trump team is important, too. As they also say inside the Beltway, “personnel is policy.” And so, already, people are starting to flyspeck the Trump campaign for portents of things to come.
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And so far at least, fans of American jobs and domestic manufacturing — which is to say, almost all Americans — should be heartened by what there is to see. As bespeaks his background as a builder, Trump has always been a champion of the “tangible economy” — that is, of the America that actually makes things, as opposed to just moving around zeroes on a spreadsheet. And certainly, Trump’s proposed tax and trade policies signal his strong commitment to factories and blue collars.
Yet, in our continuing examination of the campaign tea leaves, we might wish to pause over this intriguing quote from that Michael Hirsh article in Politico; a senior adviser told Hirsh that at the base of Trump’s foreign-policy vision was a “Hamiltonian emphasis on having financial independence through manufacturing.”
So, there are the eight words that mean so much. There are the eight words — Hamiltonian emphasis on having financial independence through manufacturing — that mean so much to our economy, offering us a way out of the zero-sum financialism of recent decades and also the solid prospect that we will continue to preserve our political sovereignty in the next century.
So let’s think about those words and parse them out.
First, “Hamiltonian” refers, of course, to Alexander Hamilton. Having dropped out of college to join the fight, Hamilton served as George Washington’s aide-de-camp through most of the American Revolution, although toward the end of the war, in 1781, he took command of a combat battalion and led it to victory at the Battle of Yorktown.
After the war was won, later in the decade, he co-authored The Federalist Papers — a body of work that helped persuade the states to ratify the Constitution. Then, in 1789, President Washington appointed him to be our first Secretary of the Treasury. And oh yes, he’s the guy who’s also remembered for having been killed in an 1804 duel. Even great soldiers can get outgunned.
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Hamilton has always been prominent; his image has graced the $10 bill since 1929 —and with no end in sight, even as other dead white males find themselves on the outs.
However, Hamilton has gone from big to bigger, having enjoyed a huge revival in recent decades. In 1997, the prominent American historian Michael Lind publishedHamilton’s Republic: Readings in the American Democratic Nationalist Tradition; that work, as well as other of Lind’s writings, inspired scholars to rethink, and revise upward, their assessment of Hamilton’s role as a key nation-builder. Then, in 2005, another historian,Ron Chernow, wrote a highly regarded biography of Hamilton, further raising his standing.
Of course, the most startling breakthrough came in 2015, when Lin-Manuel Miranda debuted Hamilton, the musical, on Broadway. Who knew that a man who had been dead for more than two centuries could be such a sensation? Miranda’s opus managed to combine rousing entertainment with solid scholarship — Chernow was closely involved in its production. In fact, the show has been honored with a record 16 Tony nominations.
Yet amidst all the hoopla, it’s important not to lose sight of exactly what Hamilton, the man, actually stood for in his life and why he is important today — and important to Trump.
First and foremost, as we have seen, he was a staunch American patriot.
Second, he was both a visionary and a policy wonk. He could see a Greater America, but he also had the patience to navigate his way through the mass of detail that is actual governance.
http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/05/09/hamiltonian-8-words-tell-donald-trump-serious/
Illustration: Jim Cooke
