Still Winning : Our Last Hope to Be Great Again (9781546085287) Read online

  So, sure, Donald Trump earned the undying enmity of the political establishment for cranking up such a loud campaign in 2011 questioning Obama’s birth certificate. But outside Washington, Trump simply proved he was willing to talk about things and ask questions about things that the entire political establishment had deemed unmentionable—even racist.

  Having already demonstrated his unflinching willingness to go crashing wildly into the choppy waters of political incorrectness, Donald Trump was ready to announce his campaign for the presidency. From the first words, it was clear this would be a different kind of candidate running a different kind of campaign.

  “Wow. Whoa,” he said, admiring the crowd cheering him from all sides and the balcony above.

  “That is some group of people. Thousands,” he said.

  That line still gets me. Literally, within the first ten words of Trump’s campaign—even before he actually announced his intentions—Trump was focused on crowd size. Much more on that later. But suffice it to say that in the years since Trump uttered those words, he has talked a great deal about crowd sizes, and it has driven his enemies absolutely out of their minds. Which, in turn, brings wild, lusty cheers from audiences who pack monster truck arenas to see their president perform.

  After admiring the assembled crowd, he thanked them. He called it “an honor” to have them in “Trump Tower.”

  Never. Stop. Selling.

  I think it was along about that moment in his speech that I said to myself, This guy could be our next president.

  His message was simple. Clear. Pro-American. He was selling something. He was telling a story. After seven years of bitter disappointment and the wasted opportunities of Barack Obama’s nerdy, professorial, lecture-some presidency, this guy could be just what America needs, I thought.

  Quickly, Trump got back to the size of his crowd.

  “This is beyond anybody’s expectations,” he beamed. “There’s been no crowd like this.”

  Then he attacked. Ferociously.

  Some of the Republicans who had already announced for president botched their kickoffs. The air conditioner didn’t work, or something. “They sweated like dogs,” Trump sneered.

  Worse, their crowds were too small for the rooms they hired.

  And then the kill shot: “How are they going to beat ISIS?” he asked.

  “I don’t think it’s gonna happen. Our country is in serious trouble.”

  It’s a fair point. If you cannot pull off a simple announcement speech on television, then how on earth can you possibly be expected to destroy the most diabolical and determined jihad of our time?

  There is a larger point here as well. It has to do with language.

  In the very first moments of his announcement speech, Donald Trump was declaring a pact with American voters. Earlier, he had proved his willingness to go wildly off script from establishment officialdom when he brazenly questioned Obama’s birth certificate.

  Now he was promising to use the same scalding rhetoric and blunt honesty to expose and fix a whole host of grievous maladies facing regular Americans across the country. Maladies that had crept into American society over the decades under the blind—or, often, encouraging—eye of political leaders in both parties.

  Terrorism, globalism, “free” trade, illegal immigration, legal immigration. Trump was willing to be as belligerent as he needed to be in order to finally stand up to ISIS, China, Japan, Mexico, and the entire global world order.

  Trump shrewdly understood in that moment that if political candidates were incapable of speaking bluntly about thorny issues, or if they shied away from harshly identifying America’s enemies, then there would be no hope for anything ever getting better.

  Standing there in my office, watching this amazing spectacle unfold, it was that different way of talking that most gripped my attention. A wildly fresh vocabulary with sharp notes of brazenly impolitic honesty.

  “The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problem,” Trump said, just a few lines into the speech.

  My goodness, I thought. Nobody in Washington talks like this. But it sounds like exactly what you hear just about anywhere if you leave Washington, D.C., or New York City.

  “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you,” he said, karate chopping the air.

  “They’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems to us. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists, and some, I assume, are good people.”

  On its face, this statement is technically true. Illegals from Mexico (and other places south of the border) come into the United States. They smuggle drugs into the country. They certainly commit crimes (including illegally crossing our border). And some of them are indeed rapists.

  Trump was highlighting a real, destructive and expensive problem that a lot of American voters care deeply about. Yet almost nobody in Washington cares about fixing it.

  Democrats are desperate to change the voting electorate. So, they want every warm body they can get into the country to hustle to the voting booth. Republicans, being more business friendly, are delighted to turn a blind eye on a process that floods our country with cheap labor.

  The only group without a voice in this debate were millions of regular American voters. Until Trump announced his campaign.

  Donald Trump’s furious assault on the political establishment brought condemnations from every corner of it. Sure, those people were perfectly content letting political sleeping dogs lie. China ripping off America was no big deal for them. Free trade was going gangbusters for the stock market and Wall Street. Everybody who was anybody was making a killing off illegal immigration. Cheap nannies for all!

  But the seething rebukes of Trump and his announcement speech were about so much more than just those issues. They were about Trump’s language, his rough-and-tumble demeanor, and his willingness to court such political upheaval.

  In her memoir, former first lady Michelle Obama eviscerated the man who followed her husband into the White House for just this. Trump’s questioning of Obama’s birth certificate, she wrote, “was crazy and mean-spirited, of course, its underlying bigotry and xenophobia hardly concealed.”

  Again, any hint of questioning Obama’s American loyalty was deemed racist. Such a questioner was not just called out as dishonest or stupid or uninformed. They were flat-out racist for questioning Obama’s alliances.

  That was not all Michele Obama had to say about Trump and his style of politics. Trump’s birth certificate inquiry “was also dangerous, deliberately meant to stir up the wingnuts and kooks,” she wrote. “What if someone with an unstable mind loaded a gun and drove to Washington? What if that person went looking for our girls? Donald Trump, with his loud and reckless innuendos, was putting my family’s safety at risk. And for this I’d never forgive him.”

  Wow. Perhaps Michelle Obama spoke too soon when she said that she was finally proud of her country once her husband got elected.

  But I have to ask: What is more incendiary? Asking questions about where a political opponent was born? Or accusing a political opponent of deliberately and willfully trying to inspire “wingnuts and kooks” to assassinate the daughters of a president?

  While we’re at it, what about a president who wades into local police issues around the country and his only contribution is to inject race into them? What about a president who goes around the world apologizing for America and giving long lectures about how America is exceptional, you know, like every other country on the planet is exceptional in its own way. In other words, nothing exceptional whatsoever about America. What about a president who belittles Americans for their “guns” and their “religion”?

  After eight years of insufferable academia out of the White House, it should have been little surprise that American voters would be in the mood for something very different. They would be looking for a guy who sp
eaks bluntly and paints vivid pictures. A guy who spent years savoring his time talking to the workers and tradesmen who built his buildings, and learned to talk like them. Above all, he was listening and listening and taking to heart what he was hearing.

  Every now and then, some reporter churns a Trump speech through some word program on the Internet that calculates the grade level the speech was written at. As in sixth-grade level, meaning a sixth grader could understand it. And these simpering, obnoxious, arrogant asses somehow think that speaking so plainly is an insult, when Trump—along with American voters—knows it is actually the highest, most honest achievement there is.

  INDEPENDENT AUTHENTICITY VOTER

  Strangely, this was a counterintuitive gambit for some of the very same voters who wound up stunning the political establishment by voting for Trump—after having voted for Barack Obama. Twice! I call them the independent authenticity voters. They don’t much care about parties and don’t particularly like Washington politics. But every four years they generally turn out and vote. And when the noise of the campaign gets as loud as it does every four years, they are reminded of how much they despise politics and most politicians. But they mostly turn out and vote.

  Overwhelmingly, they choose the lesser bastard. The least dishonest one. The one they think comes closest to being genuine and authentic. In 2008, that was obviously Barack Obama. His hopeful campaign about neither red America nor blue America but one red, white, and blue America resonated with these voters. Funnily enough, the late senator John McCain would have appealed to these very voters eight years earlier when he was still a true political “maverick” and before he got co-opted by Democrats and the media (I repeat myself) to kneecap Republicans at every turn. As bad as things were in 2012, President Obama still had enough authenticity left in the tank to beat the hopelessly repackaged Mitt Romney.

  These voters yearned for someone authentic to be president. Most horrifying to mainstream political observers is the number of voters who voted for President Barack Obama—twice!—because they thought he was that authentic nonpolitician. Oh, how they were betrayed!

  The accepted language of politics is defended by those who practice it as merely polite and responsible. And this is often true. I know many decent politicians and staffers and journalists who embrace polite language. And they are disgusted by anything else in the political arena.

  If the 2016 election proved anything, it proved that Donald Trump was exactly right. There was, after all, a tremendous thirst out there for something different. Something new. Above all, something authentic.

  So, from the very first lines of his announcement speech that day at the foot of his glass escalator, Mr. Trump proved to be impolitic. Unpolished. Dripping with authenticity. That guy you know who talks rough, who doesn’t own a set of church clothes but would be the first person you would call if you found yourself in a life-threatening situation and needed some really dirty work handled.

  Trump knew at that moment that he had to break through all the soft, white noise of modern American politics. All the fake niceties of acceptable political speech. After all, it was a lie and had been for a very long time. Behind all those fake niceties were the raw, brutal realities of vicious politics played by the nastiest of operatives going back decades. They peddled in the most dishonest, soul-crushing, character-destroying sewage that you could imagine—but then wore nice seersucker suits at garden parties, talking all sorts of high-minded pleasantries.

  Yuck!

  Donald Trump saw all of this for exactly what it was. It was a fraud. Whether it was trade, immigration, wars, spending, or taxes—it was all a fraud. The American people were getting taken to the cleaner’s financially, and the American people were getting sold out as losers.

  And Trump wasn’t even president yet! He was still just one of sixteen people vying for the Republican nomination. If you polled the media that day, every single reporter in all of politics would have given Trump a zero percent chance of winning the nomination, let alone the presidency.

  After the speech was over, I called my office at the Washington Times and told my editor to scrap the column I had filed—that a new one was on the way. I endorsed Donald Trump, something I had never done before in a newspaper column. Because, after all, who gives a crap what I think about anything? But this was clearly something different. The speech was brilliant. It was daring, to be sure, but it also reflected an enormous amount of intentional thought. Trump had been listening very closely to voters. He had also been talking to some very smart people who clearly follow politics closely and understood the political landscape far better than any of the self-anointed geniuses inside the Beltway.

  So I picked up the phone and called Steve Bannon, a friend who I knew liked to dabble in the more contrarian world of counterpolitics. We agreed the speech was great and, of course, Bannon told me he had been talking to Trump. A speech had been written. Bannon had seen it as late as the night before, he said. But the speech Trump delivered on live television to the country was entirely different than the one that had been prepared.

  “Yeah, he didn’t read the speech,” Bannon marveled. “He got up there and just decided to wing it!”

  Even at that point, Trump was not to be handled or scripted or managed or staffed. He was going on nothing but his own raw political instincts. And in the end, voters trusted Donald J. Trump to remain in character more than they trusted any politician to keep his campaign promises.

  That turned out to be a pretty smart bet.

  CHAPTER TWO

  President Trump looks on as First Lady Melania Trump addresses military personnel and their families on September 15, 2017. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)

  STORMING THE GATES

  During Donald Trump’s short career as an official politician, his most appealing qualification may have been that he was not one of the lifetime pols who’ve been lying around Washington for decades, eating fancy food and spinning out miles of federal regulations, racking up oceans of national debt, and entangling us in costly, devastating foreign wars with no strategic agenda and no end in sight.

  Clearly, Trump has used his outsider status to masterfully storm the gates of Washington and topple Republican Party leadership. But there is so much more for him to do. Draining the sleaze-ridden swamp of its hydra-headed monsters is an even greater challenge.

  Consider the lobby industry that prides itself on influencing and controlling important legislation as it moves through Congress. That control is based on the tentacles of money-laden special interests that celebrate their grip on the national government by laying out the big bucks wherever needed to keep the wheels spinning, to keep the right people in the right places. In doing so, these unelected powerhouses create an ever-greater divide between the government and the citizens it is supposed to serve.

  The lobby industry attracts some of the most morally bankrupt politicians from both the House and the Senate. These former members of Congress, having sated themselves at the public trough, now sit like bloated toads on the swamp’s lily pads, flicking their tongues out for the sweetest of delicacies. Having sold their souls and cashed in whatever credibility they possessed, they ply the corridors of Congress, schmoozing former colleagues and staffers to influence legislation that governs the lives of millions of Americans.

  And then we have the career “public servants” who work in high staff positions in Congress and stay just long enough to make their career move to K Street, where they can make the big bucks serving whatever masters give them the most money to use their skills and influence in any given area.

  So, if you want a treasure chest of easy money and big steaks, Washington is the place for you. It is America’s insulated cocoon of opulence where the pay scale is high and the housing prices are stable—all at the expense of the ordinary people across the land who are paying the bills and suffering the idiocy that pours from the place. And no idiocy is greater than the brutal national debt of more than
$20,000,000,000,000 that these irresponsible bureaucrats have charged against the futures of our generations to come.

  All of this is a formula for disaster that, finally, Americans seem to be waking up to. That, of course, is a chief reason why so many see Donald Trump as their only hope.

  But even with so much wrong in Washington that should have been fixed decades ago, Trump brings to his job considerable political savvy of his own. His gut political instincts are the very best of any politician I have ever been around.

  “People like to say I am new to politics,” he told me once. “In a lot of ways, I have been in politics all my life. I was like the mayor—the king!—of City Hall in New York City! Can you imagine how much time I had to spend down there to get my buildings built?”

  Part of Trump’s political genius is his ability to scare the hell out of everyone in the room. He says things that are plainly true—but things nobody in a position of authority is willing to say. He lists objectives everyone agrees should be the goal—yet nobody says them because no one believes they can actually be achieved, or those in power pay lip service to them with no intention of doing anything about them.

  A strong and simple example of this is Trump’s decision to move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to that nation’s capital at Jerusalem. Not that it was unusual for Trump to make that promise while a candidate for president. Presidents of both parties going back at least to Bill Clinton had made the same promise as candidates.

  The only shocker is that Donald Trump actually meant it. And made good on it. It didn’t matter to him that it might offend some people in the Middle East, where they have frittered away decades hopelessly negotiating peace. Or offend others in the Middle East who have been cynically harpooning peace there for decades. In fact, maybe offending some people might do the trick. At least it would be trying something different from all the failed efforts of the past. Most of all, he believed it was the right thing to do so, he did it—a refreshingly different way to govern.