Lux Lucet

MAGA’s dead. Long live the empire.

Three years ago, during the last presidential election cycle, many Americans found in Donald Trump a candidate whose ideas resonated with them. Trump was an outsider, we were told. He cared about forgotten Americans. The sort of people who lived in unfashionable places and had unfashionable jobs. Who drove unfashionable cars, wore unfashionable clothes and held unfashionable opinions. He was, we were told, the antidote to the sort of scripted, empire building, establishment politician – the Jeb Bush’s of the world, for example – that many of us had come to loath.

My own take on Trump was that I didn’t know if he was for real of not. Hoping that a politician will keep his word is always a gamble, and generally a losing one. As the Bible warns us, “Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.” As Christians, we know where our help comes from. Our help comes from the Lord, maker of heaven and earth. And it is him that we trust.

And yet knowing that, we also know that God not only determine the ends, but he also ordains the means by which he will accomplish those ends. And one of the institutions he has ordained for executing justice in this world and allowing his people to live peaceful lives is civil government. Paul calls the civil magistrate “God’s minister” and tells us he is put in his position to punish evil doers and praise the good. I mention this as a way of saying that, even though Christians look to God as our ultimate defender, there is nothing wrong with their supporting candidates for public office. In fact, one could argue that Christians have a duty before God to be involved in politics to help ensure that justice is done and evil avoided.

It had been my hope that Donald Trump would at least make some headway in restoring sanity to our republic. I didn’t expect him to be perfect. There is only one perfect man, and he wasn’t on the ballot in 2016. But it’s not unreasonable to hold a man accountable for his words. Donald Trump promised, among other things, to end the senseless foreign wars, to restore vitality to a hollowed out middle class and, most famously, to build that wall and to stop the flood of illegal immigrants, migrants and bogus refugees.

And if it’s fair to hold a man accountable for his words, we need to ask, So how is Donald Trump doing on his promises?

I’m afraid the answer is not very well.

Foreign Wars

Not much progress has been made in ending America’s wars of empire. In fact, one could argue that the US has never had so warlike a foreign policy as it does right now. Not only have none of the wars ended – one could argue that Syria is an exception, but even after supposedly defeating ISIS, the US still has not pulled troops out of that country and is not likely to do so in the foreseeable future – but the Trump administration has ramped up new tensions with Iran, pulled out if the INF treaty – one of the great accomplishments of President Reagan – with Russia and is now in the process of regime changing Venezuela and threatening with sanctions any nation that stands against this.

Someone please explain how overthrowing the elected president of Venezuela – whether Americans like him or not, whether he is a good leader or not, is beside the point – is in any way consistent with Trump’s campaign call to end useless foreign wars and use the savings to strengthen America at home?

Restoring the Middle Class

We’re constantly assured that the economy is booming and that high paying, middle class jobs are returning. But if that’s the case, why are American increasingly drowning in debt. Auto loan defaults are at record highs. More retail stores have closed so far in 2019 than closed in all of 2018, and 2018 was a disastrous year for the retail industry. Home affordability is at record lows while, unsurprisingly, homelessness is exploding across the country, with tent cities springing up in major metropolitan areas such as L.A. and Seattle.

While not all of this is Donald Trump’s fault, these problems have gotten worse, not better under his administration.

During his presidential run, Donald Trump rightly called the stock market a big, fat, ugly bubble. But now that he’s in office, he’s taken, not only to aggressively jawboning the Fed to lower interest rates – artificially low interest rates lead to stock market bubbles – but actually has had the audacity on multiple occasions to call for more Quantitative Easing (QE). QE is a polite word for money printing, which is to say, legalized counterfeiting.

And QE does not benefit the middle class, the deplorables who voted for Trump in droves. It benefits the big time bankers on Wall Street.

If you don’t believe this, consider the what John Huszar has to say in his Wall Street Journal article “Confessions of a Quantitative Easer.”
Wrote Huszar, “I can only say: I’m sorry America. As a former Federal Reserve official, I was responsible for executing the centerpiece program of the Fed’s first plunge into the bond-buying experiment known as quantitative easing. The central bank continues to spin QE as a tool for helping Main Street. But I’ve come to recognize the program for what it really is: the greatest backdoor Wall Street bailout of all time.”

While QE destroys the middle class – Trump’s constituency – by exacerbating inflation, it’s great for the millionaires and billionaires on Wall Street. QE is substantially responsible for the explosion in income inequality that’s turning America into a neo-feudal state and had led to the rise of far left socialists who call for nonsense such as free college tuition, Medicare for all, and Guaranteed Basic Income.

And yet, Donald Trump was out there today calling for more QE. Perhaps he needs to change his campaign slogan to Make Crony Capitalism Great Again.

Build That Wall!

I’ve never seen such enthusiasm for any political candidate as there was for Donald Trump in 2016. Despite what the MSM wanted you to believe, Trump had all the energy. Hillary’s campaign was a morgue by comparison.

And nothing – except for maybe “lock her up” chants – got Trump supports more fired up than “build that wall.”

So how’s Trump doing on this promise. Not too well.

Inexplicably, he signed a budget bill in 2017 that did not include wall funding, and this at a time when Republicans held both houses of Congress.

When he decided to dig in his heels and insist and wall funding, he was faced with an intractable Democratic House, and once again failed to secure wall funding from Congress.

Trump declared a National Emergency and said he was going to fund building a wall that way. But so far, no new wall has been built.

More troubling from my perspective is that Trump has repeatedly misrepresented what little work has been done on the wall as fulfilling his promise.

Many times the President has tweeted about how new wall is being built. But the truth isn’t quite what Trump wants his supporters to believe.

Yes, new wall has been built…but as replacement for old wall that already was in place.

To date, Trump has built no new wall where previously there had been none. As NBC notes, “To date, the administration only completed the repair and replacement of older border fencing, all while claiming that the president’s promise to build a brand new, concrete wall is being kept.”

I don’t know about you, but when I heard “build that wall,” I wasn’t primarily thinking about replacing old sections of wall with updated fencing. But to date, that’s all Trump has delivered. Over two years into the Trump presidency, it’s fair for supporters to ask whether they’re being taken for a ride by Trump’s repeated claims that that he’s building the wall.

In Closing

For what it’s worth, I did not undertake to write this piece because I hate Donald Trump or somehow wish to see him fail.

Rather, I write as a Christian who believes that it’s fair to hold a man accountable for his words. The Bible tells us to let our “yes” be “yes” and our “no” be “no.” As much as I want to see Trump succeed, and as much as I dislike the motley collection of socialists, feminists, homosexuals, race baiters, flaming SJW’s and wing nut environmentalists the Democrats have so far presented as their field of 2020 presidential candidates, it would be wrong for Republicans to ignore the increasingly disturbing failures of Donald Trump to live up to his campaign promises.

For my part, I will continue to pray, in the first place, that God would save his soul, and secondly, that he would give him the judgment and courage to execute his duties as President and to uphold his promises to the voters.

But that said, I refuse to turn a blind eye to, and to make lame excuses for, the growing gap between Trump’s campaign rhetoric and his on the job performance.

If Trump does not reverse course soon, let it be said: MAGA’s dead, long live the empire.