Robert W. Merry–a Wake Up Call for President Trump

President Trump at The Army-Navy NCAA College Football Game, December 8, 2018. (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)

America cannot stand another anti-capitalist, progressive administration in Washington. It is for this reason I am loathe to post this stinging rebuke of Trump from the most erudite Robert W. Merry.

In the final evaluation, I found nothing to quibble about with Mr. Merry’s analysis. As such I hope that joining Bob Merry in prodding the President to change his stripes and fast, it may help head off a government catastrophe in 2020.

Mr. Merry writes:

The saddest victims of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential victory, it now seems clear, are going to be his voters.

This political paradox stems from the seeming inevitability of this president leaving his constituency high and dry through political incompetence, behavioral incontinence, an inability to maintain a focus on anything, and an incapacity to think or act coherently. His presidency so far has been characterized by political failure, and it’s going to get worse before the end of his term, by which point the voters will have expelled him from the White House.

Trump’s great political feat was that he opened up a new fault line in politics: the elites of the coasts versus the heartland masses; the globalist upper crust versus the nationalist middle; anti-working class liberalism versus conservative populism.

In truth, this fault line was already there, roiling American politics just beneath the surface. But Trump had the instincts to see what just about everyone else missed—that these subterranean angers could be pulled up and harnessed into an electoral coalition that could win the White House.

Fred Barnes, writing in The Weekly Standard, correctly notes that the midterm elections demonstrated that Trump “has real-life reelection trouble.” He adds that millions of voters expressed their disdain for Trump in the congressional balloting, brushing aside the president’s achievements on taxes, judges, and deregulation. This showed “how strongly they felt about his personal behavior.”

Barnes hypothesizes that there’s still time for a Trump recovery.

There’s also no evidence that he wants to change in significant ways or that he could even if he wanted to.

Hillary Clinton, unlike Barack Obama, didn’t get “just enough” of those blue-collar Midwestern whites to capture the presidency in 2016. That’s because Donald Trump brilliantly pulled them under the GOP banner.