Hugh Hewitt is absurd
Rebutting a bizarre op-ed!
A friend of mine sent me this “off-the-wall” op-ed and asked if I could rebut it. After about a half-hour on Google, I developed this reply. I await your comments.
The case for Trump will come down to his record. It’s a strong one.
Opinion by Hugh Hewitt Contributing columnist
August 1, 2020 at 9:00 a.m. EDT
President Trump’s record of accomplishments is easy to compile.
Most significantly, he has brought the existential threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party into the sunlight. No more nice words. No more treating the Tiananmen Square massacre as a bug, not a feature. The light is on. Trump has pulled the cord.
Well, his record on China is decidedly mixed. He has alternated between praising and damning Xi, even on the coronavirus, and has been notably silent on both the clampdown on Hong Kong and the Uighur genocide. He has been more assertive in opposing China’s military expansion in the South China Sea. On the economic front, however, his revocation of the TPP has left us virtually alone opposing China’s economic expansion, with many of our allies now forming ties to China’s “Belt & Road” initiative.
Just in passing, this piece says not one word about US policy towards Russia. Perhaps this is because there is not a single foreign policy initiative of this administration that would be different if we had elected Vladimir Putin himself as president.
With huge help from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Trump has put two justices on the Supreme Court, 53 judges on the federal courts of appeals, 144 and counting on the District courts, and more than 20 on the specialty courts. The Constitution has been buttressed.
This is the one campaign promise he has kept, largely because of McConnell, who refused to consider dozens of Obama appointees, including one for the Supreme Court. Virtually all of these judges have been hand-picked by the Federalist Society. Yet, despite this success, one of the founders of the Federalist Society has just called for Trump to be impeached and removed from office!
Trump’s tax cuts, along with the massive deregulation he orchestrated, led to 3.5 percent unemployment until the regime in Beijing acted with criminal recklessness toward a virus that has devastated the world. Economic recovery depends on those rule rollbacks, and not just grotesque overreaches such as the Clean Power Plan and “Waters of the United States” rule, but on hundreds of other intrusions into the private businesses and onto the private property of Americans.
This is bogus. Trump merely preserved the boom begun during the Obama years, until it petered out before the epidemic as a result of his tariff wars. Look at any graph of the economy (GDP, DJI, unemployment, etc.) and there is no change in slope when Trump took over. The nonpartisan CRS analysis of the tax cuts shows that only corporations and the rich benefited, and that few jobs were created as a result.
Ignore the BS about the “China Virus.” Trump has repealed just about every initiative with Obama’s name on it, with no demonstrable economic advantage. For example, despite rolling back dozens of regulations on the coal industry, production has just hit a 40-year low.
Trump took a military operating in President Barack Obama’s last years at about $600 billion and moved that budget by his third year to $738 billion, with more in the budget coming soon. The Navy necessary to meet China on the high seas, all 355 ships of it, is being planned and built.
Trump has increased the military budget, including (as all presidents do) items the military not want. He is correct in expanding our naval presence in the Far East to offset China. I would also note that on several occasions he has diverted budgeted funds away from necessary military programs to finance his Wall.
Trump tore up the so-called Iran nuclear deal, which was a tower of absurd hopes built on a policy of appeasement and a foundation of hostility to Israel.
This may be his worst move ever. Every observer agreed that Iran was complying with the terms. It was, however, engaging in other non-nuclear hostile activities, which could have been dealt with via additional multinational agreements. By pulling out of the JCPOA, which was signed by our allies and Russia & China, he eliminated the possibility of joint action and left us completely alone imposing unilateral and ineffective sanctions.
Trump moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem and blessed Israel’s necessary annexation of the Golan Heights. His peace plan is the closest to reality of any since Oslo.
This was one area in which I was optimistic about Trump’s plans. He had an experienced negotiator, Jason Greenblatt, and a coalition of Sunni Arab states, fearful of Iran, who could influence the Palestinians to bend enough for a deal. Unfortunately, he was not acting alone. The zealot (Amb. David Friedman) and the neophyte (Jared Kushner) took the lead, and they had to compensate Bibi for his help in Trump’s election. As a result, Friedman resigned and we have “peace plan” which will never lead to peace and, if implemented,will spell the end of Israel as a democratic, Jewish state.
Trump took the United States out of the unbalanced, absurd, doomed-to-fail Paris Climate Agreement and has instead focused on and delivered American energy independence. People have real job security in Pennsylvania as a result, if not in jetting off to Paris for follow-up seminars.
False! Trump announced our intention to withdraw, which will not take effect until one day after the November election. President Biden can reinstate us in January. Of course, all the limits have always been voluntary. Energy independence based on hydrocarbons was and is a pipe-dream. We did have a brief period of being a net petroleum exporter, thanks to the shale oil boom, which started under Obama. That is now coming to an end, as noted by the Department of Energy, a bit later than I predicted in 2015. As noted above, coal is dying a natural death.
Trump ordered Iran’s master terrorist, Gen. Qasem Soleimani, killed, accomplished the complete physical destruction of the Islamic State caliphate and successfully hunted down its terrorist chieftain, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The former was never contemplated by Obama, the latter couldn’t get done by him even though his scampering from Iraq in 2011 led to the rise of Islamic State and its thousand barbarities. The Syrian butcher, Bashar al-Assad, has twice used chemical weapons and twice had cruise missiles remind him that the red line is back and is real. Russian mercenaries attacked U.S. troops in Syria and were mowed down. Not an American was killed. Those are “Trump rules of engagement.” Even Cuba is back in its box, joined there by Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro.
A somewhat rose-colored view. As I recall, the “wimpy” Obama managed to kill Osama bin Laden a terrorist who actually attacked the US. The caliphate may be gone but ISIS is as strong as ever. Trump’s “cut and run” from Syria have empowered them, Assad, the Russians and the Turks, making the area even more dangerous for us and for the Israelis. Oh and BTW, four Americans were killed last year in Syria. His comments about Cuba and Venezuela are pure piffle, and Mexico is about to re-nationalize its oil industry. Spotty progress at best.
At home, Trump pushed through the long-overdue justice reform legislation and the reorganization of Veterans Affairs, and, this year, the Great American Outdoors Act that fully funds the Land and Water Conservation Fund. House Democrats passed a piffling bill when covid-19 arrived, while Trump, McConnell and Senate Republicans advanced the innovative and massive Paycheck Protection Program that kept the U.S. economy from collapsing even as it contracted by nearly 10 percent in the second quarter as the China’s principal export, covid-19, ravaged the country.
Trump’s border wall, proceeding apace, makes obvious sense. More than 200 miles completed, with Trump tweeting Thursday the length with be 300 miles by September.
The things he is bragging about (the First Step Act, and the Great American Outdoors Act) are in fact very important. They were also totally bipartisan. His description of the legislative history of the CARES Act, which included the PPP is inaccurate. The wall numbers are bogus since they include sections that were repaired or upgraded, but still fall far short of his promises, and Mexico has not contributed a single peso!
Trump got his United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, replacing the North American Free Trade Agreement. From dairy farms in Wisconsin to border businesses in Arizona, the USMCA was a huge win for the United States. Trump doesn’t want to deport the “dreamers” and won’t, but his deals with Mexico, El Salvador and Guatemala have helped stem a flow of illegal entries into the United States that Obama was helpless to halt.
Apart from not having Obama’s name on it, USMCA involves only minor changes to NAFTA, and the most important ones dealing with improving labor conditions in Mexico were forced on him by the Democrats in Congress. The flow of undocumented immigrants has slowed because of his repressive and illegal treatment of them, and more recently by the pandemic. If Trump “doesn’t want to deport the ‘dreamers’,” why was he suing to suspend DACA?
While establishing himself as the most accessible-to-the-media president in modern times, Trump has also stripped off the veneer of objectivity from the “fake news.” “Blue Bubble” journalists are the last to know the contempt in which they are held beyond the Acela corridor and outside Silicon Valley and Hollywood. They mistake their small audience share for success. In fact, most of America would rather watch a mystery poetry slam than their “news.” Trump hammered that home, and journalists hate him for it. In turn, Blue Check Twitter confirms the contempt that “elites” feel for more than half of America.
Pure propaganda! Trump has been the least accessible to the media (if you don’t count Twitter), and the press conferences held by his four Press Secretaries started as farce (debating the crowd at his inauguration), degenerated into “alternative facts,” and have reached the point where nothing is communicated but his administration’s total contempt for the First Amendment. The rest of this rant is almost unintelligible.
Trump’s brawling, slugging, tempestuous approach to everything in every hour has worn down many, but his road is marked by these accomplishments. Former vice president Joe Biden’s near-50-year run in government is marked by . . . well, you fill that in. Polls say Biden is far ahead. We shall see.
Indeed we shall! Trump is so confident in his win that he is undermining confidence in the system, lying about mail-in ballots, and trying to cook the census. This is in addition to the ongoing GOP voter suppression activities and gerrymandering.
Fortunately, the American public does do not wear the rose-colored kaleidoscope glasses that Mr. Hewitt favors. They can see the disastrous response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed >150,000 Americans and cratered the economy, that he carefully avoids in this essay.
