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The Trump Era Begins: What we've seen is what we'll get

Fred Barnes

By Fred Barnes

Published Jan. 24, 2017

The Trump Era Begins: What we've seen is what we'll get

Ronald Reagan loved Wash­ington but disliked the government. George W. Bush hated Washington but liked the government. Donald Trump loathes both Washington and the government.

This is why Trump won't make many accommodations in style or attitude as president. He dislikes Washington and nearly everything in it. His advisers have long since given up on persuading him to act "presidential." Newt Gingrich says the new president is bringing the whole Trump package we saw in the primaries and general election to the White House.

Gingrich actually calls it the full "Donald J. Trump." It consists of bludgeoning what he dislikes the most—political correctness, the left, and those who attack him. Those targets will get no relief. Nor will the bureaucracy, Washington's cast of busybodies who once worked in government and never left, and the press.

Trump will tweet. He will boast. He will speak candidly rather than communicate Washington-style through leaks, gossip, and insinuations. He will be paranoid, having written in Trump: The Art of the Comeback that the "slightly paranoid end up being the most successful." He will disappoint Republicans who believe they've tamed him. He will warm up to Democrats willing to do business with him, if there are any.

In the days before his inauguration, he delivered a demonstration of some of what's to come. He boasted at a posh D.C. dinner that 147 diplomats and ambassadors were in attendance. "Never been done before," he said.

When he criticized Democratic congressman John Lewis, Democrats, politically correct Republicans, and the media were appalled. Lewis was identified as a "civil rights icon." Though he was elected to the House in 1986 and has voted a straight party line ever since, his civil rights background has generally made him off-limits to attacks.

But not with Trump. When Lewis said Trump was illegitimate as president, Trump unloaded on him in tweets. Lewis said he would boycott the inauguration. He had said the same about George W. Bush after the 2000 election and skipped that inauguration too. The episodes looked similar, except I don't recall a response by Bush to Lewis.

On the matter of Trump's business interests, he ignored the advice of two "ethics" experts—former lawyers for Presidents Bush and Obama—who insisted he must put his holdings in a blind trust or something equivalent.

They might think so, but the law says otherwise, and Trump prefers to have sons Eric and Donald run the Trump Organization while he's president. The ethics duo "have been exploiting the situation to drag out their 15 minutes of fame unconscion­ably," Holman Jenkins wrote in the Wall Street Journal.

The press anointed them arbiters of what Trump should do, though he is free to do what he wants, legally speaking. Jenkins referred to them as aphids, "sap-sucking insects [and] unfortunately the aphid side of life is the side Washington specializes in." They were too small for Trump to acknowledge.

Polls, even bad ones, are too big for Trump to ignore. His approval numbers are historically low for an incoming president. He has two lines of attack. The polls are "rigged" by the same people "who did the phony election polls," he tweeted three days before his inauguration. Or Democrats were over-polled, driving down his approval rating. He's closer to being right on the second.

Given the political division in the country and the media's obsession with finding fault with Trump, he'd be smart to pay little attention to polls. Gingrich has a better idea. Trump isn't in the same situation as Reagan in 1981. He's more like Margaret Thatcher in her first two years as British prime minister. He should learn from her.

Her poll numbers were dreadful. The press was so critical of her, she stopped reading newspapers. She was called illegitimate. Her agenda—for instance, crushing a coal miners' strike and closing unprofitable mines—seemed unachievable. But she was tougher than her enemies and defeated them.

Is Trump capable of doing what Thatcher did? I suspect he thinks so. He's a believer in suppressing thoughts of failure. As a young man, he listened to sermons by Norman Vincent Peale, the author of The Power of Positive Thinking. He regards Peale as the greatest speaker he ever heard.

Trump believes in himself. And why not? He defeated a gang of 16 for the GOP nomination and whipped Hillary Clinton, once seen as a candidate for coronation. He did it largely without help from consultants, pollsters, and strategists.

I think Trump is tougher and smarter than his adversaries. That could lead as easily to blunders as to successes. But unlike Obama, he's willing to compromise. In that, he's more like Reagan, whose legacy is permanent. Obama's won't be.

Democrats and progressives may be too blindly anti-Trump to cooperate. But it's not Trump's policies they revile. What progressives detest about Trump "has mainly to do with appearance, attitude, style, and language," Barton Swaim wrote in the Washington Post.

If progressives were smart, they would recognize the possibility of dealing more productively with Trump than with a principled conservative. "But I'm not sure they're smart," wrote Swaim. I'm not either.

And that will leave Trump with the job of draining the swamp full-time. ¨

Fred Barnes is Executive Editor at the Weekly Standard.

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