A tale of two presidents: the real Trump and the media caricature

Donald Trump may not need a second term, since he is already concurrently serving two presidencies. Firstly, there is the workaday presidency involving executive orders, consultations with congressional leaders, interaction with US business, foreign governments, the initiation of legislation, etc.

Then there is the para-presidency, as imagined by the mainstream media in Britain and elsewhere, rooted in the Twittersphere, a dystopian world in which Trump, owing his tenure of the Oval Office not to the American electorate but to Russia, is preparing to blow up the world, is a constant menace to women, is mentally deranged, but fortunately only days away from impeachment as Robert Mueller closes in.

You could not ask for a more damning example of groupthink in action than the near-unanimity of the UK media in their knee-jerk hostility to Trump. The mind-numbing inanity of the relentless daily sniping at Trump – unrelated to the news agenda except for the presidential tweets – reflects not the decline of the American presidency but of British journalism.

Journalists are indulging their prejudices, virtue signalling to their peers and evading the responsibilities of proper reportage and analysis. They have formed a consensus, which is the reverse of what journalism should be about. They have been going through this routine almost daily for more than a year, so that the invective has become repetitive: “man child” is a favourite term, with a pleasing resonance of psychobabble that appeals to the infantile detractors who employ it.

If you relied on the mainstream media, although you would be completely au fait with every alleged crassness in the latest presidential tweet, you might not be aware that last December President Trump successfully passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, slashing the corporate tax rate from 35 per cent to 21 per cent, cutting individual rates for all income tax bands, doubling the child tax credit to $2,000 and radically increasing the standard deduction. Embodying $5.5bn of tax cuts, it was the biggest tax reform in America since Ronald Reagan in 1986, with significant consequences for the world economy; but, outside the specialist financial pages, how much discussion and analysis of this major reform have you seen in the British media?

The people whose professional responsibility it is to inform us have played down not only the tax reform but many other achievements of the Trump administration. In his first year Trump broke all previous records in judicial appointments, not only securing the nomination of Justice Neil Gorsuch, a strict constitutional originalist, to the Supreme Court, but also 12 federal appeals court appointments.

Trump was elected on a pledge to abolish Obamacare, the inappropriately titled Affordable Care Act, which is not a reform but an unsustainable fiscal ticking time bomb. Although he has so far been obstructed from doing so, his tax reform killed off Obamacare’s individual mandate. Similarly, although he has not yet built the Mexican wall, illegal border crossings have fallen by 60 per cent compared to the Obama era.

Then there is the draining of the regulatory swamp. On coming into office Trump signed an executive order insisting that two regulations must be abolished for every new one created. By the end of his first year that target had been massively exceeded, with 16 regulations quashed for every one created, at a saving of $8.1bn. Nor did Trump hesitate to disembarrass America of international commitments that were disadvantaging her, withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and opening up NAFTA for renegotiation.

In a massive injection of realism Trump withdrew from the Paris Climate Agreement, an Obama legacy that is probably the biggest scam on earth. Anthropogenic Global Warming is rapidly joining Piltdown Man in the museum of junk science. Very discreetly and by inches, more and more scientists are resiling from previously expressed views on climate in an effort to salvage their academic credibility.

The divergence between computer models and reality is now too extreme to be concealed and there is a wider recognition that a computer delivers what it is programmed to deliver. Remember the BBC reporting a consensus among several senior scientists that the Arctic would be completely free of sea ice by September 2015? By that date, it had increased by 21 per cent since the low of 2012. The world is tired of experts, not to mention the BBC.

On defence, Donald Trump is allocating increased expenditure, has directed the revival of the National Space Council to develop space war strategies and promoted U.S. Cyber Command to a major war-fighting agency – which makes one wonder why Vladimir Putin supposedly went to so much trouble to get him elected.

He has also honoured his commitment to social conservatives – which all conservatives should be, if the term is to have any philosophical validity – by supporting pro-life causes, reinstating and expanding the Mexico City Policy, preventing around $9bn in foreign aid being diverted to fund abortions, and working with Congress on legislation to reverse an Obama regulation that barred states from defunding abortion providers. He has listened to a large constituency that insists there must, in 2018, be better options for women than automatic resort to abortion.

A hallmark of the Trump administration has been the President’s determination to fulfil his election promises, insofar as the political arithmetic in Congress will permit. Military veterans have been prominent among the beneficiaries of this unusual spectacle of a politician doing what he promised to do. So have steel workers. There are those doctrinaire free traders in the Republican camp who cry heresy at even the most selective protectionist measures. They should calm down. The principles of Adam Smith are not being trashed; but Smith could not have envisaged a scenario in which China dumped cheap steel on the markets on a gargantuan scale, to the prejudice of competitors’ prosperity.

On the international stage, too, Trump has acted. Journalist snowflakes squealed with outrage when Trump dismissed Kim Jong-un as “Rocket Man”. Now a meeting is being negotiated between the two protagonists and North and South Korea have tentatively collaborated in international sport.

These developments carry a huge health warning. The meeting may never take place, or may end in recrimination and disarray. North Korea has a track record of using negotiation as a delaying tactic. Yet it is obvious that Trump’s “un-presidential” and “crude” remarks about Kim may have caused senior members of the Pyongyang regime to think: “This is as mad and dangerous a bastard as our boy; time for some jaw-jaw before the Supreme Leader gets us all vapourized.”

The anti-Trump media consensus is also obsessed with the revolving-door Apprentice-style hiring and firing soap opera in the White House. Of course it is unorthodox: is that not what Trump’s base sent him to do? The departing officials largely earned their conge. Most of the residents of the State Department needed to be dismissed, but Rex Tillerson should have realized it was not a cost-cutting exercise, keeping their posts vacant, but replacement with suitable personnel that was needed.

Meantime, any mainstream platform or print source will be able to keep us up to date on the latest Oval Office tweets, to reinforce received opinion that Trump is contemptible. Consensus is what it is all about.