Donald Trump in 2016 did not only run against the planted rumors of the fake Steele dossier, 90 percent negative media coverage, his own boisterous past, and the “Access Hollywood” tape. He also was campaigning against Hillary Clinton—and the nation’s quarter-century weariness with the Clinton scandals, crimes, money-grubbing, and hypocrisies.
For a quarter of the country, independents especially, a vote for Trump was not a referendum on a Democrat or Republican, or even love or hate for Donald Trump, but rather reflected a “Never Hillary” desire to be done with the very name Clinton.
So, too, in 2020 Trump will not be running only on his own record, or even his person but also against a living and breathing alternative candidate, one that both offers a precise antithetical agenda and displays a concrete personage.
Considering all of that, during the last week, Trump has been given great gifts in a way no one might have imaged just a month ago.
True Lies
Trump in 2020 might have controversially slurred his future Democratic rival as a socialist, radical late-term abortion advocate, open borders chauvinist, a Medicare destroyer who wished to make it free for everyone, or wacko environmentalist intent on banning gas and diesel engines.Now he won’t have to smear anyone: the Democrats have largely done that to themselves. Policy-wise the 2020 choice will be between Trump’s mostly doctrinaire conservatism, spiced with populist trade and immigration agendas, and what is a now a new Democrat orthodoxy of Bernie Sanders’ adolescent socialism and incoherent Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Neverland something or other.
Trump legitimately will be able to say of a 2020 opponent, “Candidate X wants over the next 10 years to junk your present car, to scrap your combine, to stop your jet travel, to ban your cruise ship, to take away your lawn mower and snow blower, to outlaw your snowmobiles and jet skis, to shut down the fracking industry, the heavy equipment manufacturing sector (I doubt there will be a replacement battery-powered Cat D-11), the pipeline and rail business, and to make every homeowner an indebted remodeler, refitting his house while for all his green trouble and expense he still will be paying more for solar and wind-generated electricity.
Trump can legitimately also say to an independent or swing voter, “You may not like my tweets, but you will really won’t like infanticide, a 70 percent income tax, a diluted Medicare for everyone including those who have never paid a dime into the system, open borders, and guaranteed incomes for all.”
In other words, for the all the NeverTrump hysteria over Trump’s “nationalist-populist agenda,” his record so far is so far arguably more Reaganesque than either of the Bush presidencies or what was likely to come from a McCain or Romney Administration.
The Wild Bunch
In contrast, some of the Green New Deal Democrats are self-described socialists and embrace all sorts of positions antithetical to the Democratic traditional base: anti-Israel, anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, anti-firearms, even anti-infant. Or put another way, an independent voter is likely to have more in common policy-wise with a MAGA hat-wearing Trumper at a Midwest rally than with hooded Antifa street protestors or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s latest racialist rant about “Latinos” having some sort of ethnic entitlement to cross the U.S. border illegally.Trump will also run against real people with established records. For all practical purposes, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has revealed that she was a knave, not just a dunce. For years she has insisted that while she may have been informally self-identified (albeit falsely) as a Native American, she never actively did so for official purposes. Any preference she received was supposedly due to the inferences of institutions and agencies, but not through her own solicitation. Last week we discovered that was all an abject lie—given that her Texas state bar registration card reemerged, with her own handwritten description of her race as “American Indian” (not even the politically correct “Native American”).