printA friend—a brilliant scholar of Objectivism—expressed concern over my support (albeit waning support) for Donald Trump. He pointed out in an email that the president was “slowly, but surely, abandoning that outsider stance and was becoming part of the very system he fought against.”
It’s hard to disagree.
However, I had hedged my words in the book, The Trump Revolution, which stands up quite well, since I supported Trump’s “creative destruction” or “process,” more than anything else.
My friend points to Trump sending more troops to Afghanistan (“well, at least he’s committed to no nation-building”). He laments that “it was like pulling teeth to get POTUS to condemn the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville; yes, they had the support of the ACLU, just as they had the support of the ACLU when similar groups marched on Skokie”:
I’d be the first to defend their rights to march. But his initial response seemed so tepid to me; he finally was able to utter the words Obama wouldn’t: “Islamic terrorist”, but he couldn’t seem to utter the phrase “neo-Nazi” in his condemnation of those brown-shirt nutjobs who were chanting “Jews will not replace us” and who thought he wasn’t racist enough because he gave his beautiful daughter to that “bastard Kushner”. The whole thing reminded me of the Nuremberg rallies. …
Now, don’t get me wrong: “Antifa” are not interested in freedom. They are like the Red Stalinists who were for Hitler when Stalin and Hitler were “allies” and then against Hitler when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union.But I’m just puzzled that you’re not concerned by this scent of anti-Semitism that keeps emerging from some of Trump’s constituency; it seems like he doesn’t want to come down hard on them because he’s starting to act more and more like a politician: afraid of alienating a group of disaffected and disenfranchised voters who most obviously voted for him, and who he will need in any bid for re-election.
My response to the last is that I’ve never looked to the Leader to utter feel-good moral fatuities. A leader in the American tradition should stick to the Constitution. Moreover, the race meme and its use in American politics sickens me. Seriously, I support people’s right to hate me, even not to serve me. Maybe I
am that radical a propertarian. I want my president to shut up about race and uphold the Constitution, which he has failed miserably to do. I’m a minimalist gal.
My friend goes on to emphasize that he’s “a little puzzled not to have read much in [my] columns about this troubling issue. For me, a lot of it came out of the Bannon wing (despite Bannon’s valuable opposition to the neocons), but for me, there is no love lost with his ouster.”
My reply: I’ve never railed against anti-Semitism. So long as your mitts stop at my face, I don’t care if you hate me qua Jew. Maybe it’s naïve, but … I confess to hating the Left even more than caring about anti-Semitism.”
My friend was sadly right to have feared
that Trump would be absorbed by the very system he opposed, because it’s just in the nature of politics. Now with his amping up of the war in Afghanistan and his tepid responses to Jew haters, I’m extremely concerned. Help me out here.
Like my friend, my concern is more with War and the Deep State. I don’t see Jews becoming targets for more than verbal aggression. I certainly can no longer look up to Trump: His nepotism; his kids in the White House, his wars, no tax reform, no free market in medicine, no wall. All those issues consume me more than his reaction to the words of a fringe group.