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A Besieged Trump Presidency Ahead

Patrick J. Buchanan

Posted 11-22-2016

http://freedomsback.com/pat-buchanan/a-besieged-trump-presidency-ahead/

 
After a week managing the transition, vice president-elect Mike Pence took his family out to the Broadway musical “Hamilton.”
As Pence entered the theater, a wave of boos swept over the audience. And at the play’s end, the Aaron Burr character, speaking for the cast and the producers, read a statement directed at Pence:
“(W)e are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights, sir. But we truly hope this show has inspired you to uphold our American values.”
In March, the casting call that went out for actors for roles in this musical celebration of “American values” read:
“Seeking NON-WHITE men and women.”
The arrogance, the assumed posture of moral superiority, the conceit of our cultural elite, on exhibit on that stage Friday night, is what Americans regurgitated when they voted for Donald Trump.
Yet the conduct of the “Hamilton” cast puts us on notice. The left neither accepts its defeat nor the legitimacy of Trump’s triumph.
His presidency promises to be embattled from Day One.
Already, two anti-Trump demonstrations are being ginned up in D.C., the first on Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, by ANSWER, Act Now to Stop War and End Racism. A second, scheduled for Jan. 21, is a pro-Hillary “Million Woman March.”
While the pope this weekend deplored a “virus of polarization,” even inside the church, on issues of nationality, race and religious beliefs, that, unfortunately, is America’s reality. In a new Gallup poll, 77 percent of Americans perceived their country as “Greatly Divided on the Most Important Values,” with 7 in 8 Democrats concurring.
On the campuses, anti-Trump protests have not ceased and the “crying rooms” remain open. Since Nov. 8, mobs have blocked streets and highways across America in a way that, had the Tea Party people done it, would have brought calls for the 82nd Airborne.
In liberal Portland, rioters trashed downtown and battled cops.
Mayors Rahm Emanuel of Chicago and Bill de Blasio of New York have declared their cities to be “sanctuary cities,” pledging noncooperation with U.S. authorities seeking to deport those who broke into our country and remain here illegally.
Says D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, “I have asserted firmly that we are a sanctuary city.” According to The Washington Post, after the meeting where this declaration had been extracted from Bowser, an activist blurted, “We’re facing a fascist maniac.”
Such declarations of defiance of law have a venerable history in America. In 1956, 19 Democratic Senators from the 11 states of the Old Confederacy, in a “Southern Manifesto,” rejected the Supreme Court’s Brown decision ordering desegregation of the public schools.
Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus, Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett and Alabama Gov. George Wallace all resisted court orders to integrate. U.S. marshals and troops, ordered in by Ike and JFK, insured the court orders were carried out.
To see Rahm and de Blasio in effect invoking John C. Calhoun’s doctrine of interposition and nullification is a beautiful thing to behold.
Among the reasons the hysteria over the Trump election has not abated is that the media continue to stoke it, to seek out and quote the reactions they produce, and then to demand the president-elect give assurances to pacify what the Post says are “the millions of … blacks and Latinos, gαys and Lesbians, Muslims and Jews — fearful of what might become of their country.”
Sunday, The New York Times ran a long op-ed by Daniel Duane who said of his fellow Californians, “(N)early everyone I know would vote yes tomorrow if we could secede” from the United States.
The major op-ed in Monday’s Post, by editorial editor Fred Hiatt, was titled, “The Fight to Defend Democracy,” implying American democracy is imperiled by a Trump presidency.
The Post’s lead editorial, “An un-American Registry,” compares a suggestion of Trump aides to build a registry of Muslim immigrants to “nαzι Germany’s … singling out Jews” and FDR’s wartime internment of 110,000 Japanese, most of them U.S. citizens.
The Post did not mention that the Japanese internment was a project of the beatified FDR, pushed by that California fascist, Gov. Earl Warren, and upheld in the Supreme Court’s Korematsu decision, written by Roosevelt appointee and loyal Klansman, Justice Hugo Black.
A time for truth. Despite the post-election, bring-us-together talk of unity, this country is hopelessly divided on cultural, moral and political issues, and increasingly along racial and ethnic lines.
Many Trump voters believe Hillary Clinton belongs in a minimum-security facility, while Hillary Clinton told her LGBT supporters half of Trump’s voters were racists, sexists, homophobes, xenophobes and bigots.
Donald Trump’s presidency will be a besieged presidency, and he would do well to enlist, politically speaking, a war cabinet and White House staff that relishes a fight and does not run.
The battle of 2016 is over.
The long war of the Trump presidency has only just begun.

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http://buchanan.org/blog/america-first-trump-trade-policy-126074

An 'America First' Trump Trade Policy

Patrick J. Buchanan

Posted 11-26-16

Donald Trump’s election triumph is among the more astonishing in history.

Yet if he wishes to become the father of a new “America First” majority party, he must make good on his solemn promise:

To end the trade deficits that have bled our country of scores of thousands of factories, and to create millions of manufacturing jobs in the USA.

Fail here, and those slim majorities in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin disappear.

The president-elect takes credit for jawboning William Clay Ford to keep his Lincoln plant in Louisville. He is now jawboning Carrier air conditioning to stay in Indiana and not move to Mexico.

Good for him. But these are baby steps toward ending the $800 billion trade deficits in goods America runs annually, or bringing back factories and creating millions of new manufacturing jobs in the USA.

The NAFTA Republicans tell us the plants and jobs are never coming back, that we live in a globalized world, that production will now be done where it can be done cheapest — in Mexico, China, Asia.

Yet, on Nov. 8, Americans rejected this defeatism rooted in the tracts of 19th-century British scribblers and the ideology of 20th-century globalists like Woodrow Wilson and FDR.

America responded to Trump’s call for a new nationalism rooted in the economic principles and patriotism of Hamilton and the men of Mount Rushmore: Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt.

The president-elect has declared the TPP dead, and says he and his negotiators will walk away rather than accept another NAFTA.

Again, good, but again, not good enough, not nearly.

The New International Economic Order imposed upon us for decades has to be overthrown.

For the root cause of the trade deficits bleeding us lies in U.S. tax laws and trade policies that punish companies that stay in America and reward companies that move production overseas.

Executives move plants to Mexico, Asia and China for the same reason U.S. industrialists moved plants from the Frost Belt to the Sun Belt. Given the lower wages and lighter regulations, they can produce more cheaply there.

In dealing with advanced economies like Japan, Germany, and the EU, another critical factor is at work against us.

Since the Kennedy Round of trade negotiations, 50 years ago, international trade deals have reduced tariffs to insignificance.

But our trade rivals have replaced the tariffs with value-added taxes on imports from the USA. Even to belong to the EU, a country must have a VAT of at least 15 percent.

As Kevin Kearns of the U.S. Business and Industry Council writes, Europeans have replaced tariffs on U.S. goods with a VAT on U.S. goods, while rebating the VAT on Europe’s exports to us.

Some 160 countries impose VAT taxes. Along with currency manipulation, this is how European and Asian protectionists stick it to the Americans, whose armed forces have defended them for 60 years.

We lose at trade negotiations, even before we sit down at the table, because our adversaries declare their VAT nonnegotiable. And we accept it.

Trump has to persuade Congress to deal him and our trade negotiators our own high cards, without our having to go to the WTO and asking, “Mother, may I?”

Like this writer, Kearns argues for an 18 percent VAT on all goods and services entering the United States. All tax revenue raised by the VAT — hundreds of billions — should be used to reduce U.S. taxes, beginning by ending the income tax on small business and reducing to the lowest rate in the advanced world the U.S. corporate income tax.

The price of foreign-made goods in U.S. stores would rise, giving a competitive advantage to goods made in America. And with a border VAT of 18 percent, every U.S. corporate executive would have to consider the higher cost of leaving the United States to produce abroad.

Every foreign manufacturer, to maintain free access to the U.S. market of $17 trillion, greatest on earth, would have to consider shifting production — factories, technology, jobs — to the USA.

The incentive to produce abroad would diminish and disappear. The incentive to produce here would grow correspondingly.

Inversions — U.S. companies seeking lower tax rates by moving to places like Ireland — would end. Foreign companies and banks would be clamoring to get into the United States.

With a zero corporate tax, minority businesses would spring up. Existing businesses would have more cash to hire. America would shove China aside as the Enterprise Zone of the world.

Most important, by having Americans buy more from each other, and rely more on each other for the necessities of life, U.S. trade and tax policies would work to create a greater interdependence among us, rather than pull us apart as they do today.

Why not write new tax and trade laws that bring us together, recreating the one nation and people we once were — and can be again?

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