It’s Trump’s Party, Now
Via Patrick Buchanan of Buchanan.org,
ZeroHedge.com
Mar 3, 2017
Before the largest audience of his political career, save perhaps his inaugural, Donald Trump delivered the speech of his life.
And though Tuesday’s address may be called moderate, even inclusive, Trump’s total mastery of his party was on full display.
Congressional Republicans who once professed “free-trade” as dogmatic truth rose again and again to cheer economic nationalism.
“We’ve lost more than one-fourth of our manufacturing jobs since NAFTA was approved,” thundered Trump, “and we’ve lost 60,000 factories since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.”
Yet a Republican party that embraced NAFTA and voted MFN for China every time it came up gave Trump standing ovations.
“(W)e have inherited a series of tragic foreign policy disasters,” said Trump, “America has spent approximately six trillion dollars in the Middle East — all the while our infrastructure at home is crumbling.”
And from Congressional Republicans who backed every Bush-Obama war — Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen — not a peep of protest, as their foreign policy legacy was being consigned to the dumpster.
Watching Republicans rise again and again to hail Trump called to mind the Frankish King Clovis who, believing his wife’s Christian God had interceded to give him victory over the Alemanni, saw his army converted by the battalions and baptized by the platoons.
One had thought the free-trade beliefs of Republicans were more deeply rooted than this.
“We have withdrawn the United States from the job-killing Trans-Pacific Partnership,” Trump exulted, having just tossed into the trash that mammoth trade deal beloved of Bush Republicans.
GOP champions of the TPP, if there are any left, sat mute.
Trump cited the first Republican president, Lincoln, as having got it right when he warned, “abandonment of the protective policy by the American Government (will) produce want and ruin among our people.”
Celebrating protectionism, hailing “America First!” in a virtual State of the Union address — it doesn’t get any better than this.
To open-borders Republicans who backed amnesty for 11 million illegal immigrants, Trump had this message, “We will soon begin the construction of a great wall along our southern border.”
And the cheering did not stop.
The president invoked Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System, the greatest public works project of the 20th century, as a model.
Yet Ike was opposed by the Taft wing of his party and Ike’s republicanism gave birth to the modern conservative movement.
Yet, in leading Republicans away from globalism to economic nationalism, Trump is not writing a new gospel. He is leading a lost party away from a modernist heresy — back to the Old-Time Religion.
The Rest…HERE
