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Trump Faces Senate Test in Second Term
PoliticsTrump Faces Senate Test in Second Term
The post-Trump Republican Party will be defined by Cabinet confirmations.
Whatever you think of President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet picks, he has learned one thing from his first term: few Beltway truisms are truer than personnel is policy.
Trump wants to make a sharp break with the status quo. While he may still be overvaluing television stardom as a criterion for who should wield power in the executive branch and the old Republican establishment will have its place at the table, most of his early nominees definitely fit the bill. This is the no-guardrails Trump team that Vice President Kamala Harris warned you about.
Of course, the idea that the unelected members of the administration and White House staff should call the shots rather than the elected president, who this time around won a plurality of the national popular vote, is incompatible with the democracy uber-alles push Democrats have been making throughout the Trump era. It is not really the job of these appointees, like President Biden’s subordinates before them, to try to thwart Trump.
The Senate is part of a separate branch of government and has its own constitutional prerogatives. This includes the advise and consent powers, which gives senators a say in the makeup of the Trump administration and the federal judiciary.
Just because they have the power to do so, however, doesn’t mean it would necessarily be a good idea for the Republican Senate majority to eagerly veto Trump’s choices. Past disputes aside, Republicans have a lot riding on the success of Trump’s second term. They are all in this together now.
Yet that is not necessarily the way they will see it. People like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard may have been important to show Trump won nationally. The Trump coalition will likely be decisive for Vice President-elect J.D. Vance or whomever Republicans nominate for president in 2028. But they are not particularly important to how you get elected to a Senate seat in Tennessee, Alabama, or South Dakota.
The realignment isn’t as much of a thing yet in the red states, outside of the Hispanic vote share in Florida and Texas, even if Trump did quite well in the GOP strongholds. You can still get elected as a Republican in most of those places saying and doing the same things that would have worked 20 years ago, the last time the party had — and largely blew — the opportunity ahead of it now.
Trump swept the battleground states, but didn’t drag many Republican Senate candidates across the finish line with him. Yes, the fact of his candidacy made the West Virginia and Montana Senate races unwinnable for the Democrats. Trump’s margins aided Republican pickups in Ohio and Pennsylvania. But Democrats still held onto seats in Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, and Nevada.
That means two things: fewer senators beholden to Trump directly and a smaller Senate majority overall. Fifty-three Senate seats is still respectable. But Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) can easily be the Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema of the next session. And while he remains a Republican institutionalist, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) stepped down from leadership in order to make trouble. He wants to be the next Congress’s Mitt Romney.
None of these three can exactly be considered rubber stamps for Trump. Lose one more on any nominee and Vance’s tie-breaking vote can’t save you.
Many of the biggest successes of Trump’s first term came when he and McConnell played nice, such as on the rightward shift of the judiciary and the building of a durable conservative majority on the Supreme Court. But many of the biggest missed opportunities came because Trump was essentially in a coalition government with McConnell and then-House Speaker Paul Ryan, a trio not always in alignment on what the Republican agenda should be.
In 2017, there was at least a theoretical possibility that they could all get reelected. As it turned out, Republicans lost the House, White House, and Senate, in that order, over the next three years. This time Trump is term-limited and will hit lame-duck status around the midterms.
A protracted fight over Cabinet nominations and the recess appointment power would probably not be the wisest use of the GOP-run government’s limited time. Yet surveying the likes of Kennedy, Gabbard, and Matt Gaetz, it does feel a bit inevitable.
The first test for Trump and incoming Senate Majority Leader John Thune could come early. It is the post-Trump Republican Party that will be most defined by whether they pass.
The post Trump Faces Senate Test in Second Term appeared first on The American Conservative.
Date: November 20, 2024, 5:05 am
The Promise of Trump’s Realist China Grand Strategy
Foreign AffairsThe Promise of Trump’s Realist China Grand Strategy
Trump’s focus should be on Beijing before all else.
President-elect Donald Trump’s decisive election victory gives him a once-in-a-generation mandate to finally implement an America First grand strategy and thus replace the outdated globalist post-World War II framework. Trump’s vision is a hard-nosed realist strategy very well suited to the current era of intense strategic competition and geopolitical peril. The new grand strategy includes securing the border and economic nationalism, core elements of Trump’s agenda, but its most important component is prioritizing the containment of China as the driving principle of U.S. foreign policy in the new Cold War against the Chinese Communist Party.
After three decades of being the only unquestioned regional hegemon and global superpower, and hence benefiting from the geopolitical and financial advantages conferred by this privileged status, a peer rival is now on the horizon. And while conflicts in the Middle East or Russia’s war in Ukraine dominate the daily headlines, there should be no higher priority for America’s grand strategy in coming years other than containing China’s quest for regional hegemony and global superpower status.
The rhetorical commitment to contain China on the part of both Democrats and Republicans in Washington is worthless, and even dangerous, unless it is accompanied by an overarching offensive realist grand strategy shaping specific U.S. strategies and policies across military, economic, diplomatic, energy, and technological lines. Unlike the establishment internationalist grand strategy, America First prioritizes great power rivalry over other strategic goals, and China as the biggest threat to achieve peer rival status and thus threaten America’s unique position in the international system. This ruthless prioritization is needed because the United States now operates in a multipolar world, and while it is still the only superpower by virtue of being the only regional hegemon with global power projection capabilities, it can no longer afford to finance the undisciplined post-Cold War global-ordering internationalist grand strategy.
The $30+ trillion national debt (growing every year) necessarily means that hard trade-offs are here for defense and foreign policy budgets. The era when the U.S. military assumed it could prepare to win two simultaneous major wars or that it can conduct long-term counterinsurgency campaigns to defeat terrorist groups is over. The Pentagon must urgently refocus the bulk of its force posture and defense strategy, as well as its training and doctrine, on the challenge of denying the PLA the ability to establish regional hegemony in East Asia through a conquest of Taiwan or through military aggression in the South China Sea. Modernizing and expanding the U.S. Navy should take precedence over the more land-oriented services, and investing in cyber, space, and AI should take precedence over vulnerable legacy platforms. Lastly, America’s nuclear deterrent is also in need of a long-delayed modernization in light of China’s massive recent nuclear buildup and Russia’s continuing reliance on nuclear threats and upgrades to its own nuclear arsenal.
In the realms of geopolitics and international diplomacy, Washington similarly needs to reorient its foreign policy towards a diplomatic containment of Chinese influence. The overarching goal of U.S. alliances, bilateral diplomacy, and of its participation in international institutions should be to counter Beijing’s attempts to coopt or coerce other countries into its strategic orbit, particularly in the Asia Pacific region, in Latin America, and in the Middle East. During the Cold War, America’s global alliance posture revolved around NATO and Europe as the primary focus to a large extent, given the threat from the USSR, with the Middle East and the Asia Pacific as secondary but occasionally important theaters. The post-Cold War era saw inertia rather than strategic calculus shaping the focus of U.S. foreign policy, until the global war on terror eventually focused its orientation towards the Middle East. Therefore, the alliances in the Asia Pacific should take priority over Europe and the Middle East, while Latin America should also reclaim a top-tier place, given that Washington must solidify its endangered regional hegemony in the Western Hemisphere at the same as it seeks to deny China’s quest for regional hegemony in Asia.
The geopolitical competition against the CCP is as much about geoeconomics as it is about traditional diplomacy and military alliances. Beijing often prefers economic diplomacy and leveraging their investments to obtain geopolitical and strategic benefits from resource-rich countries in the Global South, as well as to integrate themselves into the supply chain of Western companies and thus constrain the actions of U.S. policymakers.
Only an America First realist approach to industrial policy and international trade, energy production, and technological superiority offers the best chance for developing the sinews of power needed to outcompete Beijing in the long run. The U.S. can no longer afford to keep its grand strategy hostage to partisan political priorities, whether in the area of limiting domestic energy production or catering to the business community asking for more market access to China. Only by implementing a clear set of policies aimed at reversing the strategically dangerous integration of the US and Chinese economies that occurred over the 2000s could a decoupling be achieved. Such policies include not just tariffs and subsidies to domestic manufacturing, but also the “friend-shoring” of key industries to other countries.
The energy global market is another area of intense competition where the U.S. is currently faltering by self-sabotaging its own energy industry with onerous and misguided limits on oil and gas production, while China is capturing the global market for rare earth minerals and other key components of alternative energy supply-chains through government-directed strategic investments. The U.S. must adopt an “all of the above” energy policy that doesn’t discriminate against fossil fuels, one of America’s comparative advantages given its resource endowment in oil and natural gas.
The right grand strategy principles are useless without a vigorous implementation effort, and this is the biggest risk faced by the America First approach. Despite valiant efforts by some outside organizations like the Heritage Foundation to provide the new administration with staffing options, the Washington foreign policy bureaucracy ideologically opposed to Trump will certainly attempt to frustrate his realist agenda. The American people made their choice clear and voted for a much-needed correction to U.S. grand strategy, now it’s up to the new administration to follow through on their promises and bring it about.
The post The Promise of Trump’s Realist China Grand Strategy appeared first on The American Conservative.
Date: November 20, 2024, 5:03 am
The Counterintuitive Reason Legacy Media Leans Left
CultureThe Counterintuitive Reason Legacy Media Leans Left
Economics rather than ideology drives the bias of the press.
The left-wing bias of the mainstream media may have been more evident in the recent election than ever before, but its existence has long been recognized, even admitted by the media’s own journalists. As far back as December of 2013, the New York Times’ Peter Baker and Mark Leibovich, NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell, and CNN’s Jake Tapper all responded with an emphatic “yes” when asked by the POLITICO Playbook Breakfast panel host Mike Allen whether they and their colleagues tend to be liberal.
What has yet to be satisfactorily explained is the cause of this progressive bias. Some argue, as Leibovich did during the POLITICO panel, that today’s reporters lean left because they tend to live in places where there are few conservatives. “I live in northwest Washington,” he explained. “None of my neighbors are evangelical Christians. I don’t know a lot of people in my kid’s preschool who are pro-life.”
Others, like former New York Times correspondent and Free Press co-founder Nellie Bowles, put the blame for media bias on senior editors and broadcast news producers. In her recent book, Morning After the Revolution, she describes how young journalists are systematically pressured by their bosses to slant stories—framing outbreaks of progressive violence as “peaceful protesting,” for example, while simultaneously dismissing any critics of such activism as “right-wing extremists.”
And then there are media analysts like the Idea Grove blogger Scott Baradell who try to explain the liberal bias of modern reporters as a result of a psychological need to improve the world. “Journalists generally don’t enter the profession to make a boatload of money,” Baradell says, but “because they want to make a difference.” And since “change is inherently anti-conservative,” most reporters “are relatively progressive in their politics.”
There is undoubtedly some truth in all three of these explanations for today’s media bias, but also good reasons to doubt their adequacy, even in combination. If, for example, we are to believe that many journalists are liberal just because of who they regularly associate with—what many conservatives disparagingly refer to as “the mainstream media bubble”—then what kind of reporters are they? Isn’t it a journalist’s job to explore unfamiliar places and tell the rest of us what is really going on?
Or, if we are going to accept the Nellie Bowles theory that reporters lean left because their editors or producers do, then why are these newsroom bosses not equally influenced by the interests of their own corporate superiors? Senior executives, even if they were progressive, want to keep major advertisers from being too closely associated with a particular political viewpoint. And how do we account for the fact that Bowles’s own colleague and partner Bari Weiss was forced to quit the New York Times, not by her bosses, but by younger employees who disagreed with her editorial judgements?
And if we say that reporters are liberal because they want to make the world a better place, then how do we account for the mainstream media’s largely negative coverage of one of the most promising social movements of our time, school choice? If any cause should satisfy a journalist’s desire to improve society, is it not helping kids, especially those in poor and minority communities, to get a better education?
The big failing in all three of these explanations for leftwing media bias is their narrow focus on some personal factor—where a reporter lives, how much he or she needs to please superiors, or the desire to see oneself advancing a noble cause. For, while everyone is influenced by lifestyle and emotional circumstances, history suggests that the tendency for an entire institution to underperform or even betray its intended purpose is almost always connected to some larger economic dysfunction.
Consider the half-century-long decline in the quality of America’s public education system, from world-admired in the 1950s to a laggard in today’s international comparisons. It is not a coincidence that this falloff began shortly after President John F. Kennedy signed an executive order allowing the country’s public employees to unionize. Once school personnel had representatives powerful enough bypass local school boards and negotiate directly with state legislators—even finance their election campaigns—the statutory climate increasingly prioritized the pay and benefits of teachers and administrators over the needs of their students.
Nor is it an accident that the crime and disorder that have come to be associated with America’s largest cities dramatically increased after the passage of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society legislation which, among other things, subsidized the creation of community action groups in major urban areas. As Stanford University public policy professor John F. Cogan documents in his 2017 book, The High Cost of Good Intentions, this federal funding of competing power centers made it much more difficult for mayors and their elected councils to effectively address local problems.
Even the decline of organized religion, with only 60 percent of U.S. citizens now professing a faith tradition, can be attributed to socioeconomic factors. While houses of worship were once the primary providers of healthcare, family counseling, welfare, education, and venues for public assembly and debate, today only preschool programs survive. As a result, believers of all persuasions have less practical reason to affiliate with a neighborhood church, synagogue, or mosque.
If the dysfunctions we see in so many contemporary institutions stem from some kind of underlying economic change, then why should the increasingly progressive bias we see in modern journalism be any different? Especially when the probable cause is so easy to identify.
Unlike times past when there were only three broadcast networks, when most major newspapers made enough money to print both morning and afternoon editions, and when weekly magazines like Look and Life were widely read, the financial viability of today’s news organizations is far more precarious.
Indeed, the most recent edition of Cision’s annual State of the Media Report identifies “downsizing and reduced resources” as the single biggest challenge to modern journalism. One need only look at the Washington Post, formerly both a great newspaper and regional television broadcaster, which now barely survives on the charity of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
What this financial pressure has done to news providers, and especially the legacy media, is give them a clear incentive to help the modern left engineer the kind of hierarchical, top-heavy political system where all the important decisions are confined to a few areas. Then, instead of having to cover far-flung cities and states—what Supreme Court Justice Brandeis famously dubbed America’s “laboratories of democracy”—they can concentrate their limited resources on just Washington, D.C., lower Manhattan, and possibly Hollywood or Silicon Valley.
Washington itself has already become a convenient supermarket of think tanks, which gives locally based reporters easy access to expertise on a wide variety of topics for little more than the cost of a Metro card top-up or an Uber ride. Realizing the progressive dream of a bigger, more comprehensive government would only further reduce the cost of delivering what passes for news.
Of course, not all reporters and their media colleagues are ideologically biased by their profession’s economic circumstances, any more than all public-school teachers are intellectually persuaded by the woke arguments their unions make to increase member benefits and reduce accountability for student achievement. But, so long as the price of adequately covering a country like the U.S. remains steep, the more news-gatherers are going to be tempted, both consciously and unconsciously, by the budgetary advantages of plying their trade in a more centralized society.
Solving this problem will not be easy, as even the recent Trump landslide does not appear to have triggered any serious media soul-searching beyond the already obvious recognition that today’s reporters are out-of-touch with a majority of voters. Only when the press begins to acknowledge—and consciously compensate for—the strong economic interest it has in a consolidated administrative state will the public once again be able to have more trust in the Fourth Estate.
The post The Counterintuitive Reason Legacy Media Leans Left appeared first on The American Conservative.
Date: November 20, 2024, 5:01 am
Trump Nominates Lutnick for Commerce
President-elect Donald Trump announced Tuesday that he has nominated Howard Lutnick to serve as secretary of commerce in the incoming administration.
Lutnick, who is currently the CEO of the financial services company Cantor Fitzgerald and the co-chair of Trump’s presidential transition committee, was competing for the post with his fellow transition co-chair Lind McMahon, who was head of the Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term, and with the former U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer.
Lutnick, a strong proponent of rebalancing American trade through the use of tariffs, will provide important support for Trump’s broadly protectionist economic platform. The nomination provides important insight into the chaotic debate within the Trump camp and the Republican Party broadly over economic policy. Pre-Trump Republicans generally supported free trade, and many politicians elected on free trade platforms remain in government. Within the Trump camp, there are also divisions over whether tariffs should be leveraged to obtain more favorable trade terms or used for the protection of American domestic industry. Trump himself has gestured favorably towards both approaches.
Lutnick, who takes the latter position, was also a potential candidate for secretary of the Treasury and the favorite pick of Elon Musk, who endorsed him in a post on X Monday. The future Treasury Secretary remains a prize for whatever camp ends up with the spot. One possible pick is Scott Bessent, a major Trump donor and economic advisor who argues for using the threat of tariffs as a negotiating tactic, but who is seen by more protectionist players as a “business-as-usual choice.”
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Date: November 19, 2024, 10:30 pm
Ukraine Strikes Russia With US Long-Range Missiles
After authorization from the Biden administration, Ukraine on Tuesday executed its first long-range strikes inside Russian territory using U.S.-supplied ATACMS weaponry. Six missiles were launched by Ukraine at military targets in the Bryansk region of Russia and a munitions depot was destroyed, the Russian Ministry of Defense confirmed. The strikes occurred on the thousandth day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The event marks a notable escalation in the conflict; previously, the U.S. had only permitted the use of ATCMS weapon systems it supplied to the Ukrainian armed forces to be used for operations within Ukrainian territory. These systems require the use of American targeting and navigation systems, involving U.S. personnel directly in attacks on Russian territory. The Russian government has said this is a redline.
The same day, the Russian president Vladimir Putin approved a revised nuclear doctrine, which states that an attack upon Russia by a non-nuclear nation with the support of a nuclear nation shall be considered a joint attack. The new nuclear doctrine is a direct response to American and European support for the Ukrainian government, and expands Russian nuclear options to include nations not directly at war with Russia but abetting hostilities against it.
The confrontation comes only months before the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump, who has promised to bring the war in Ukraine to a quick end, most probably by a negotiated settlement.
The post Ukraine Strikes Russia With US Long-Range Missiles appeared first on The American Conservative.
Date: November 19, 2024, 4:00 pm
Trump and the Storm of the Century
Foreign AffairsTrump and the Storm of the Century
The U.S. is sleepwalking into disaster in the Middle East.
The fear in many nations’ capitals is that President Donald Trump’s return to Washington might make Israel feel more confident in attacking Iran. According to Mike Evans, founder of the Friends of Zion Museum in Jerusalem, “There is no world leader Trump respects more than Netanyahu.”
The evangelical leader also confides that President Trump would support an Israeli attack before his inauguration on the assumption that the destruction of Iran’s oil production facilities would devastate Iran’s economy, inducing Iran to end the war with Israel before President Trump assumes his office. This thinking by no means excludes an Israeli decision to strike Iran’s nuclear development sites as well.
What Trump will or will not do is unknown. When the illusive stillness in the standoff between Tehran and Jerusalem will end is also unknown.
One thing is certain: If America joins Israel in its war against Iran, the outcome will be a geopolitical showdown that could dramatically alter the world as we know it. It is the storm of the 21st century and, for the moment, the American ship of state is sailing right into it. At a minimum, Trump should demand answers from his civilian and military advisors to four important questions.
Question 1. What is the American purpose in waging war against Iran? Is Washington’s purpose to destroy the Iranian state? To destroy its capability to wage war against Israel? To eliminate Iran’s developing nuclear capability? Or to decapitate the Iranian state in the hope that the Iranian people will overthrow their national government?
All these goals demand serious study and analysis. In some cases, they overlap; in others they do not. The answers require identifying resources, manpower, capabilities, and the time needed to achieve these goals.
It is obvious that America’s air and naval forces will have to deliver powerful disabling strikes through dense Iranian air and missile defenses while potentially defending themselves and American military bases against attacks by Iranian and allied forces in the region. How long can these forces operate before their stocks of munitions are exhausted and their human and materiel losses are replaced?
Based on these answers, the stated objectives may or may not be attainable. National political and military leaders habitually plan and organize to achieve short, decisive outcomes, but wars always last longer than anticipated.
Question 2. How will U.S. military power achieve the objectives?
What is the right mix of weapon systems and munitions? What targets promise effects that profoundly shape Iran’s ability to fight? In the aftermath of the Second World War, studies of bombing effectiveness revealed that the most important contribution air power made to Germany’s defeat was the destruction of Germany’s fuel production and the transportation network to move it. Its second-most important contribution was to cause German air forces to defend Germany’s cities and industries, thus stripping the German army of its close air support. But thousands of tons of bombs were still dropped on thousands of targets with minimal impact on the German war machine.
Can air and missile power alone compel the Iranian State to submit to Israeli and American demands? To date, no amount of precision-strike forces linked to space-based and terrestrial, persistent intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities has delivered victory in war. The Kosovo air campaign inflicted enormous damage on the Serbian economy, but its impact on Serbian ground forces was minimal. Yet once Moscow withdrew its promise of energy and food support to the Serbian people, the destruction of power plants and civilian and commercial infrastructure did induce the Serbian leadership to remove its forces from Kosovo.
Nevertheless, Serbian air defenses, despite their obsolete technology, were never degraded below 80 percent effectiveness. Precision strike has advanced in lethality and capability, but so has the military technology of the Iranian state. How far is unknown. In addition, it may turn out that air and missile attacks may prove incapable of halting the launch of tens of thousands of missiles, rockets and unmanned systems against Israel, as has been the case with Hezbollah.
Question 3. What is the desired end state? What does the President want Iran and the region that surrounds it to look like when the fighting ends?
This question is potentially the most difficult to answer. Unlike Iraq in 1991 and 2003 or Serbia in 1999 or Libya in 2011, Iran is not isolated. Iran has allies and supporters. By failing to define the end state in 1991, American operational strategic military planners were unprepared for the war’s outcome. The resulting peace was unsatisfactory to the long-term interests of the United States.
The Russian Foreign Ministry recently announced that “negotiations on the strategic security partnership between Russia and Iran are ongoing… with a particular focus on military cooperation.” China’s President Xi Jinping has assured Iran of China’s support in the defense of Iranian national sovereignty and security.
Even Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) advises against attacking Iran. During a recent summit of Arab and Muslim leaders, MBS stated, “The international community should oblige Israel to respect the sovereignty of the sisterly Islamic Republic of Iran and not to violate its lands.”
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are also making strategic financial moves. Saudi Arabia’s holdings of U.S. Treasury bonds have fluctuated significantly, falling to approximately $108.1 billion as of June 2023, a decline of over 41 percent since early 2020. If a conflict with Iran breaks out, the Saudis and Emirates will likely repatriate their wealth to the Arabian Peninsula and launch a “fire sale” of their U.S. treasuries, causing a financial crisis in the U.S. and the West on the scale of the Great Depression.
Less conspicuous, but no less important, is Turkey’s decision to break relations with Israel. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has also signaled that Turkish Forces are ready to launch operations in Northern Syria to destroy U.S.- and Israeli-backed Kurdish forces that threaten Turkish and Syrian security. Turkish forces could easily be committed to the defense of Lebanon or Egypt.
Question 4. What is the strategic cost to the American people if Washington declines to participate in a regional war begun by Israel?
Since October 7, 2023, Israel’s political and military goals have extended far beyond the defense of Israeli national territory. Netanyahu seems confident that, with American financial aid and military support, Israeli forces can remove millions of Palestinian Arabs from Gaza and the West Bank, and Hezbollah from Southern Lebanon. Nevertheless, to secure Israel’s victory, PM Netanyahu insists that Iran and its proxies in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen must also be destroyed.
What do Netanyahu’s goals mean for the health of the American economy and the stability of the international system? Can Israel survive without attacking its numerous enemies?
In 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower refused to risk war with the Soviet Union over Hungary’s revolution against Communism. In the same year, Eisenhower refused to support the Anglo-French-Israeli intervention to seize the Suez Canal. In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson refused to employ American military power to halt the Soviet military intervention reasserting control of Czechoslovakia. None of these decisions harmed American national interests.
Eisenhower viewed the success of American Arms in the Second World War as the result of the carefully constructed grand strategy drawn by civilian leaders and executed by the senior leadership of the armed forces. Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film, Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, not only lampooned the thinking prevalent in the 1960s about nuclear war, but demonstrated the breakdown of this important policy-making process.
The film, starring Peter Sellers and George C. Scott, begins with a rogue Air Force general who orders nuclear-armed B-52 Bombers to attack targets inside the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the president, who says he does not want to go down in history as a mass murderer, suddenly discovers that the Soviets created a doomsday machine consisting of cobalt bombs set to strike the continental United States if the Soviet Union is attacked.
Eventually, all the bombers are recalled, except for one B-52 commanded by Major T.J. “King” Kong. Unaware of the recall order, “King” Kong completes his mission, yelling and waving his cowboy hat as he rides the bomb to his death. The outcome is nuclear Armageddon.
Hardly the stuff of comedy, but it is a cautionary tale. Any number of accidents or false flags could precipitate conflict in the Middle East, but Dr. Strangelove need not become a reality. In the words of the great coach Vince Lombardi, “The measure of who we are is what we do with what we have.” It is up to Trump to use American power wisely.
The post Trump and the Storm of the Century appeared first on The American Conservative.
Date: November 19, 2024, 5:05 am
They’re Lying About Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
PoliticsThey’re Lying About Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Contrary to popular belief, the Kennedy scion is anything but a health extremist.
(Rebecca Noble/Getty Images)If there’s one thing most Americans can agree on, it’s that most Americans are unhealthy.
In 2024, more than 40 percent of Americans are overweight and nearly one in 10 are severely obese. The top four leading causes of death for Americans are heart disease, cancer, accidental injury, and stroke, three of which are exacerbated by poor diet and a sedentary lifestyle.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the incoming Secretary of Health and Human Services, agrees with most Americans. In an ad campaign released this fall, Kennedy stood in front of a table of Cheez-Its, Cap’n Crunch, and Doritos, carefully explaining how the Food and Drug Administration allows chemicals banned in other developed countries into the American food supply to cut costs.
“A few people get very, very rich, and the toxins end up in every supermarket aisle,” Kennedy noted before expounding on the harmful properties in tartrazine, commonly known as Yellow 5 dye, which is found in many foods at American grocers.
“Like the frog in slowly boiling water, we didn’t really notice as we got sicker and sicker,” Kennedy explained. “We’ve grown now to accept chronic disease conditions as normal. But now, we’re finally waking up to this cataclysm and we’re asking ourselves, ‘How in the world did this happen?’”
Ultraprocessed foods make up an estimated 73 percent of the American food supply. These foods have been found to reduce the bioavailability of vitamins and lead to metabolic syndrome, diabetes, angina, elevated blood pressure and reduction in biological age.
Like Yellow 5, Red No. 3 is also commonly found in food products on the shelves of supermarkets throughout the United States. It has been nearly 35 years since the FDA banned the use of Red No. 3 in cosmetics after studies found it caused cancer in animals, yet the chemical still remains in the U.S. food supply while the agency continues to review the color additive used in food.
Kennedy’s views on corn are non-debatable. He has advocated for less reliance on the subsidy which is used to feed cattle and to cheapen production costs for many of America’s most popular food items. Michael Pollan’s fantastic 2006 book The Omnivore’s Dilemma provides an extensive look at how corn has invaded the U.S. food supply. From the beverages we drink, to the foods we eat, America relies on corn to cut food costs and power trade. Ninety-five percent of animal feed in America is now made with corn which, Pollan notes, is the root cause of liver disease in cattle.
High-fructose corn syrup, which is linked to cardiovascular disease, has singularly replaced cane sugar in soft drinks over the last half century. The most popular soft drink companies in the country all use it as a cheap alternative to cane sugar. Type 2 diabetes, childhood obesity, and poor dental health are all linked to the substance which Americans consume at twice the recommended limit. And it’s not just in the foods and drinks we consume. Corn is also found in trash bags, charcoal, toothpaste, batteries, matches, and lining the shelves in supermarkets across America.
But Kennedy’s concerns about corn aren’t what’s making waves across the American media landscape. The real fears over Kennedy’s ascension to the top of America’s federal health institution have to do with pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines.
The talking heads at CNN were practically apoplectic the day after President-elect Donald Trump nominated Kennedy to lead the HHS. For them, Kennedy is not so much a threat to the health of Americans but a serious challenge to their advertisers.
Whether it’s Ozempic, or Wegovy, or Jardiance, or Mounjaro, on CNN any hour of the day every ad break is peppered with pitches by leading pharmaceutical companies that have little interest in addressing the root causes of obesity and diabetes.
When the CNN host Kaitlin Collins recently read a tweet from Kennedy that promised to send FDA officials packing, her producers made sure not to highlight the section of his post which called for Americans to eat clean foods, get in the sun, and most importantly, exercise. There’s simply no money to be made off Americans getting off the couch and going for a walk in the sun. The pharmaceutical industry prefers our people sick so they can sell them pills. Kennedy is the first real challenge to the biggest game in town.
Kennedy’s outspoken views on vaccines are well documented. He has repeatedly questioned the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention schedule of immunization for children. During an appearance on the “Health Freedom for Humanity” podcast in 2021, he encouraged people to speak out against the over-vaccination of children.
“I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, ‘Better not get him vaccinated,’” Kennedy said. “If he hears it from 10 other people, maybe he won’t do it, you know, maybe he will save that child.”
In the 1940s, American children were recommended the vaccines for smallpox, diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis. Today, American children are recommended 15 different immunizations, including the recently added vaccination against Covid-19. Though Kennedy’s skepticism of the immunization schedule is debated by experts, what can’t be debated is that American children are receiving more vaccines than ever before in US history.
With his cabinet appointment looming, Kennedy has attempted to moderate his message on vaccines. In an interview with NPR following Trump’s victory, Kennedy promised he won’t be nearly as radical as his critics claim.
“If vaccines are working for somebody, I’m not going to take them away,” Kennedy told NPR. “People ought to have a choice and ought to be informed by the best information, so I’m going to make sure that scientific safety studies and efficacies are out there and people can make individual assessments about whether that product is going to be good for them.”
Virologists have specifically targeted Kennedy’s belief that the unprecedented surge of autism rates in American children is connected to vaccines. In 1997, one in 2,500 children were diagnosed with autism. By 2017, that number had exploded to one in 68. Experts claim the surge is a result of a better understanding of the disease, but skeptics, including Kennedy, have suggested the rise is linked to the broader immunization schedule for American children. Kennedy has repeatedly claimed that “vaccines cause autism,” a statement that is debated and dismissed by leading virologists.
“I don’t think there’s any scientific question that vaccines cause autism,” Kennedy stated during a podcast appearance with Patrick Bet-David. Speaking with Jesse Watters in 2023, Kennedy repeated his claim. “I do believe that autism comes from vaccines, but I believe most of the things people believe about my opinions on vaccines are wrong. All I’ve said about vaccines is we should have good science. We should have the same kind of testing, placebo-controlled trials, that we have for every other medication.”
Despite his stated objections to the ballooning immunization schedule, Kennedy claims his interests lie less in the prohibition of vaccines and more in creating transparency for informed consent. It’s a concern that is echoed by a broad swath of the American public, especially Republicans. In 2019, Gallup found that more than 50 percent of Republican voters with children believed it was “extremely important” to vaccinate their children. By 2024, that number had nearly halved to 26 percent.
Vaccine skepticism didn’t appear out of nowhere. The Covid-19 pandemic put American vaccine policy front and center as businesses, government institutions, and educational centers mandated a rushed, faulty vaccine that was advertised as a magic bullet but failed to live up to the hype. If the medical and media institutions of America harbor frustrations with increased skepticism surrounding vaccine policy, they need not blame Kennedy.
Robert Redfield, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the first Trump administration, defended Kennedy’s nomination to head HHS on Sunday. “Kennedy is not antivaccine,” Redfield said. “What Kennedy is about is transparency about vaccines, honest discussion about vaccines, asking for the data to show that these vaccines are safe and they’re efficacious.”
Those concerned that Kennedy’s appointment to lead America’s top health agency will usher in a wave of forced nutrition and government-prescribed dieting could rest a little easier Sunday after a picture posted this weekend aboard Trump’s plane showed Kennedy eating McDonald’s with the MAGA crew. Don Trump Jr. humorously captioned the image “Making America Healthy Again starts TOMORROW.”
For Americans, tomorrow can’t come soon enough.
The post They’re Lying About Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appeared first on The American Conservative.
Date: November 19, 2024, 5:03 am
Trump’s Silver Bullet
PoliticsTrump’s Silver Bullet
Increasing American energy production is the single most significant step the incoming administration can take toward delivering on its mandate.
Two key aspects of President-elect Donald Trump’s decisive electoral mandate are leading a working- and middle-class economic recovery and cooling overheated global tensions with the United States’ strategic competitors. These two tasks, which the Biden administration treated as mutually exclusive, can both be addressed by the MAGA agenda’s silver bullet: fossil fuel extraction.
Trump’s choices to lead the Interior and Energy Departments underscore the incoming administration’s commitment to a unified, pro-fossil-fuel energy strategy. At Energy, Trump has nominated Chris Wright, the CEO of Liberty Energy. Wright’s career has been defined by innovation in the energy sector. In 1992, he founded Pinnacle Technologies, pioneering the development of hydraulic fracturing technologies that were instrumental in advancing the commercial viability of shale gas production. Following Pinnacle’s sale in 2006, Wright reentered the energy market by founding Liberty Energy, which has since become a leading service provider for hydraulic fracturing operations.
At Interior and at the helm of the newly created National Energy Council, North Dakota’s Governor Doug Burgum is set to take the reins. North Dakota ranks third in the nation—behind only Texas and New Mexico—in both crude oil production and proven reserves, making Burgum’s state a central player in America’s energy landscape. Burgum, who ran a presidential campaign with a near-exclusive focus on energy policy, brings a personal understanding of the energy industry and a proven track record of championing fossil fuels. His appointment to Interior signals a decisive shift in federal policy: opening federal lands for exploration and extraction. This move has the potential to significantly expand domestic production capacity, bolstering economic growth and energy security.
Though these selections have garnered less press attention than Trump’s less conventional selections at other posts, Wright and Burgum’s appointments send a clear message to global markets and adversaries: The United States is back in business, and we intend to “drill, baby, drill!” The impacts of deregulatory, pro-production policies will quickly be felt both at home and abroad, allowing the Trump administration to deliver quick, substantive wins for the American people.
Though the U.S. faces a myriad of crises, no single issue drove Americans to the polls more than the ongoing affordability crisis. Reckless Covid-era spending, coupled with Biden’s so-called Inflation Reduction Act, fueled a modest rise in core inflation but burdened American households with extraordinarily high consumer inflation. The Inflation Reduction Act, the “Green New Deal” in disguise, delivered entirely predictable results. Gasoline prices rose 37 percent from January 2020 to June 2024. Groceries increased by roughly 22 percent over the same period, electricity costs jumped 30 percent, and the median home sale price skyrocketed by 50 percent. While wages have risen modestly, American households have been unable to keep up with crushing cost increases, fueling record-breaking reliance on credit cards as citizens scrabble to make ends meet.
Trump’s commitment to fossil fuel production, especially natural gas, will help alleviate costs on these hard-hit Americans who delivered his mandate. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates that liquefied natural gas (LNG) accounts for 36 percent of American electricity generation, far surpassing crude oil, coal, and renewable competitors. By investing heavily in natural gas extraction and lowering its price, the Trump administration could potentially deliver billions in savings to strained American households and businesses, which would then pass those savings on to consumers. Electricity prices are closely tied to the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Reducing electricity costs would directly alleviate financial burdens on American consumers. Trump’s bold commitment to cut consumer energy costs by 50 percent suggests his administration will incentivize a dramatic expansion of oil and gas production.
The incoming administration’s commitment to expanding oil and gas production also aligns with one of Trump’s key promises: job creation. The natural gas sector already supports 3.4 million jobs, and increased natural gas production could add tens of thousands more in areas such as transportation, infrastructure development, and extraction. Energy-producing states like Texas, Pennsylvania, and Louisiana are poised to see significant economic benefits. Trump’s nomination of Burgum signals a focus on supporting crude oil-producing states like North Dakota while unlocking the production potential of states with large federal land reserves. New Mexico, Wyoming, and Alaska are likely to see substantial benefits to their state economies and workforce development as result of the shift in policy.
Perhaps most critical to the success of Trump’s rare non-consecutive second term will be his handling of the spiraling geopolitical crises triggered by the Biden Administration’s belligerent incompetence. Trump stands to inherit a house-on-fire situation in both Eastern Europe and the Middle East. The Biden administration’s adversaries, Russia and Iran, have leveraged high energy demand to fund their wars in eastern Ukraine and in the Levant, respectively. The Trump administration can undermine these petro-reliant states by supplying the world, increasing demand for American energy exports. Weakening Russia and Iran’s hands with American energy production, prior to negotiations, may prove one of Trump’s key points of leverage if he is to deliver substantive settlements.
Cleaning up Biden’s geopolitical failures won’t be the only strategic advantage of expanded oil and gas production. The incoming administration is rightly prioritizing Asia, recognizing China as America’s chief competitor. Asia accounts for nearly 70 percent of global LNG demand and 37 percent of global crude consumption, with China as the largest individual importer. Trump is sure to leverage American energy to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan or in the South China Sea. Japan and South Korea, key American allies for Trump’s containment strategy, are the second- and third-largest LNG importers in the region. Meeting their demand with affordable, emission-reducing energy serves to bolster allied economies and sovereignty. Affordable American energy exports also serve to undermine China’s strategy of using vast energy imports to consolidate influence over petro-states, including the Gulf States, Iran, Russia, and Venezuela.
The success of the once and future president in fulfilling his mandate will hinge largely on fossil fuel production, particularly natural gas. The administration’s ability to cut regulatory red tape, expand domestic production, and boost international exports will shape both the trajectory of the American economy and the nation’s international standing. If production thrives, so will America. If it falters, America’s position will weaken. With Wright and Burgum guiding the administration’s energy strategy, the president has taken a decisive step toward an energy boom and a renewal of American prosperity.
The post Trump’s Silver Bullet appeared first on The American Conservative.
Date: November 19, 2024, 5:01 am
Trump’s Opportunity in Lebanon
Foreign AffairsTrump’s Opportunity in Lebanon
The dealmaker-in-chief has a chance to make a new, stable Middle Eastern combination.
As the United States’ President-elect Donald Trump gears up for his second term in office, there are indications that Lebanon may be a focal point of his Middle East policy. Trump has made more than one gesture to this effect, raising hopes that his return to the White House may end the suffering in the war-ravaged country. Prioritizing peace in Lebanon would serve American interests and be consistent with an America First foreign policy insofar as it could dramatically reduce tensions in the Middle East and especially with Iran. This would allow Trump 2.0 to focus on more pressing issues like competition with China. For such an endeavor to succeed, however, Trump would need to abandon Washington’s long-standing anti-Hezbollah Lebanon policy.
Prior to his electoral victory, the president-elect signed a written pledge to end the war in Lebanon, where Israeli military operations have claimed the lives of almost 3,500 people since last October. News of the statement surfaced after Trump’s visit to a Lebanese restaurant in Michigan, home to America’s largest Lebanese community, which went on to vote overwhelmingly for the Republican candidate.
In another sign of how Lebanon may be given special attention in Trump 2.0, the president-elect granted an exclusive interview to the Lebanese MTV channel in the final weeks before the elections, promising that things would turn out well for the people of the country under his watch.
Trump attaching a special importance to Lebanon would be consistent with his family-influenced foreign policy approach in the Middle East. His elder son-in-law Jared Kushner played an outsized role in the Abraham Accords during Trump 1.0, by which the U.S. successfully brokered the normalization of ties between Israel and several Arab states.
Kushner belongs to an Orthodox Jewish family that has long-standing ties with Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu. His father, Charles Kushner, is also known for being a donor to pro-Israeli initiatives.
Given Kushner’s influence in shaping Trump’s Middle East policy during his first term, it would not be all that surprising if a similar dynamic were to play out in the president-elect’s second term, only this time with his new son-in-law Michael Boulos, who has been married to Trump’s second daughter Tiffany since 2022.
Boulos hails from a Lebanese Christian family that is said to have connections with prominent Lebanese political figures like Suleiman Frangieh, a close ally of Hezbollah and the Shiite movement’s preferred candidate for Lebanon’s presidency, which has been vacant for over two years.
There are already signs that the Boulos family may be heavily involved in Trump 2.0 Middle East policy. Boulos’s father, Massad, worked as Trump’s campaign advisor to court the Arab-American vote; he has been rumored as a possible replacement for Amos Hochstein, the Biden administration’s point man for Lebanon. The elder Boulos has also recently held meetings with Lebanese cabinet ministers and lawmakers.
Securing a ceasefire in Lebanon could no doubt go a long way towards achieving wider regional stability. (Trump has reportedly greenlit a ceasefire proposal between Lebanon and Israel, although, according to Lebanese media, sticking points remain.)
Despite its tiny size, Lebanon is known for reflecting the broader power dynamics of the Middle East. More importantly, an end to the war in Lebanon could be pivotal to reaching a new agreement with Iran, something Trump has openly declared he wishes to pursue.
This, however, would require the abandonment of the anti-Hezbollah policy that has dominated the American approach towards Lebanon for decades, even if the war were to end. Events that took place in the aftermath of Israel’s assassination of Hezbollah’s former leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in late September speak to the importance Iran attaches to Lebanon and its special relationship with the Lebanese Shiite movement.
Just days after Nasrallah’s death, Iran launched a large-scale missile attack on Israel, which was considerably heavier-handed than a previous attack it had carried out in April. This was followed by a rare public speech by the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in commemoration of Nasrallah.
Given how Hezbollah represents a vital national interest for Iran, a reduced focus on undermining the Lebanese Shiite movement could be an important confidence-building measure that may help Trump bring Tehran to the negotiating table to discuss a nuclear deal and possibly even a wider regional understanding. Pursuing such an approach is almost certain to have a better chance at success than the maximum-pressure campaign waged during Trump 1.0. Despite the severity of the sanctions applied in that campaign, Iran’s nuclear program continued to develop and Tehran proceeded to enhance its ties with the Eastern bloc led by China and Russia.
The biggest challenge to such a scenario playing out is the special relationship between the United States and Israel. As is the case with Washington’s broader Middle East policy, it is this special relationship that has long shaped America’s strategy towards Lebanon. It is also the case, however, that this has often been to the detriment of American interests, and Lebanon is no exception. In fact, U.S. support for Israeli objectives in Lebanon has come at a particularly bloody cost, having been identified as the cause behind the Marine Barracks attacks in Beirut that killed 220 American servicemen.
Most importantly, the weakening of Hezbollah does not necessarily serve U.S. interests. With the shale revolution significantly reducing the importance of the Middle East as an oil supplier, the remaining core American interest in this region is preventing the establishment of terrorist safe havens that could be used to plot attacks on American assets and/or the homeland. Not only does Hezbollah not have a history of conducting such operations (the Marine barracks attacks happened before it existed as an organization, and the Marines were seen as active participants in the Lebanese war at the time), but it has actively fought against groups that constitute a real terrorist threat to the United States.
In Syria, the Lebanese Shiite movement was instrumental in the degradation of Salafi-Jihadi groups like the Al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front and ISIS. The Lebanese Shiite movement’s role in fighting these groups was fundamental in preventing them from establishing a foothold in Lebanon, one of the countries on which the Salafi-Jihadis had set their sights.
Given these dynamics, there exists a strong case for Trump to adjust American policy regarding Lebanon. Making such an adjustment would be consistent with the America First foreign policy the president-elect has advocated, as opposed to the “Israel First” policy which has been the dominant feature of Washington’s approach to the region for decades. Some of the choices for senior positions in the upcoming administration—like Marco Rubio for Secretary of State and Mike Waltz for National Advisor—do not bode well in this regard. Nevertheless, as observers have pointed out, it is likely that Trump and not his aides will be running the show this time.
The post Trump’s Opportunity in Lebanon appeared first on The American Conservative.
Date: November 18, 2024, 3:06 pm
Honor Patrick J. Buchanan with the Presidential Medal of Freedom
PoliticsHonor Patrick J. Buchanan with the Presidential Medal of Freedom
The TAC co-founder made the world we’re living in.
Pat Buchanan speaks at a Christian Coalition Rally in 1996. (Brooks Kraft LLC/Sygma via Getty Images)The Presidential Medal of Freedom is the highest honor a civilian can receive, and over the years it has been awarded to a diverse group of recipients. In 2020, during the State of the Union Address, President Donald J. Trump awarded Rush Limbaugh the Medal of Freedom. Limbaugh, a leading conservative voice and defender of liberty, was worthy of the high honor. Now in retirement, Patrick J. Buchanan is another leading conservative voice and defender of liberty who is also worthy of such an honor. It was Buchanan’s traditional conservatism that paved the way for President Trump’s America First movement.
During the 1990s and into the 2000s, Buchanan was a voice of one calling in the wilderness, warning the nation about unrestricted immigration, free-trade agreements that were decimating the middle class and outsourcing our manufacturing base, and the consequences of the neoconservative and liberal internationalism that resulted in endless wars. Buchanan also defended traditional values such as marriage and the life of the unborn, and he fought against the progressive attacks upon American history.
As a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 1992 and in 1996, and as the Reform Party nominee in 2000, Buchanan also championed traditional conservative positions such as opposing affirmative action, reducing the size and scope of the federal government, placing the Constitution first, and protecting the sovereignty of the United States.
Buchanan did not just campaign on an America First platform, but he also reminded conservatives about their intellectual heritage. For decades both the Republican Party and the conservative movement had embraced liberal internationalism characterized by free trade, open borders, and promoting democracy overseas. This liberal internationalism had more in common with President Woodrow Wilson and progressivism than it did with conservatism.
Whether it was NAFTA, WTO, granting Most Favored Nation (MFN) status to China, among other free trade agreements, Buchanan warned that blindly embracing globalization would have consequences to both the economy and national sovereignty. Further, endless wars to spread democracy and exercises in nation building resulted in a grand failure of foreign policy. “How did America lose the world? Through an ignorance of history, an embrace of ideology, and an arrogance of power—hubris,” wrote Buchanan in Day of Reckoning: How Hubris, Ideology, and Greed are Tearing America Apart.
Buchanan was also prophetic about the dangers of unlimited immigration both legal and illegal. During his campaign for the Republican nomination, he called for not only a secure border, but a border fence, long before “build the wall” became the rallying cry of the Trump campaign. Buchanan was part of a minority within the conservative movement and the Republican Party that opposed uncontrolled immigration.
In a Republican Party and a conservative movement that increasingly viewed immigration and citizenship as a jobs program, Buchanan took the direct opposite position. “Uncontrolled immigration threatens to deconstruct the nation we grew up in and convert America into a conglomeration of peoples with almost nothing in common—not history, heroes, languages, culture, faith, or ancestors,” wrote Buchanan in The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization. Uncontrolled immigration not only represented a security threat, but it had economic consequences, and it impacted the cultural framework of the nation.
Perhaps most important was Buchanan’s defense of Americanism and Western civilization. Buchanan, like Trump, defends the United States and its history. What made the United States exceptional was not only its history and ideals, but also the Christian foundation of the nation. “Is it not a people of a common ancestry, culture, and language, who worship the same God, revere the same heroes, cherish the same history, celebrate the same holidays…,” stated Buchanan in Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? This is a philosophy that is also expressed by Vice President-elect J.D. Vance.
Buchanan’s conservatism appealed to Americans who increasingly believed that both political parties had forgotten them; many of these “Buchanan Brigade” members would become Trump supporters. “They don’t read Adam Smith or Edmund Burke, but they come from the same schoolyards and the same playgrounds and towns as we come from. They share our beliefs and convictions, our hopes, and our dreams. They are the conservatives of the heart,” stated Buchanan in describing these patriotic Americans.
Through his political campaigns, television commentary, twice-weekly newspaper columns, and numerous books, which will stand the test of time, Buchanan was both prophetic and a movement conservative that influenced many. In a 2017 interview with POLITICO, Buchanan stated that his “ideas made it,” but “I didn’t.”
When Trump selected Vance as his running mate, many free-market conservatives were disappointed, and others stated that the Republican Party was now the party of Pat Buchanan.
Although trying to win the presidency, Buchanan was more of an intellectual. He helped remind conservatives of their heritage and their philosophy. The American Founders, Whigs like Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, and Republican Party leaders from Abraham Lincoln through Herbert Hoover, all embraced the conservative nationalism that Buchanan wrote about and defended.
It was the conservatism of Presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge that reflected Buchanan’s philosophy the most: a commitment to limited government, a protectionist trade policy, and a realist foreign policy.
Buchanan is retired, but he paved the way for the America First movement, while defending traditional conservatism and fighting to preserve the history, principles, and values that have made the United States an exceptional nation.
The post Honor Patrick J. Buchanan with the Presidential Medal of Freedom appeared first on The American Conservative.
Date: November 18, 2024, 3:06 pm
