Trump Trends: Trump’s Conservative Agenda (Year Two)

A year ago, I pointed out that the exciting “nationalist populist” outsider candidate Donald Trump of the campaign had disappeared and had been replaced by President Trump who only seems to advance unpopular mainstream conservative policies.

What has changed over the last year? President Trump spent his political capital on the corporate tax cut. He signed two bloated military budgets which spent roughly $1.5 trillion dollars on a military which can’t be used to secure our own border. He signed the budget busting Omnibus bill which forbids him from building his wall using his own prototypes. He signed a bill to deregulate banks and weaken Dodd-Frank. He also attacked Syria again because Assad had “gassed his own people.”

Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court. The FCC ended Net Neutrality for the cable companies while doing nothing about social media censorship. The United States withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal. The US embassy in Israel was moved to Jerusalem. Illegal immigration has soared to its highest level in a decade. The Trump administration has allowed the states to require work requirements for Medicaid. We have imposed more sanctions on Russia, Iran and Venezuela.

In the White House, we have seen Rex Tillerson, Gary Cohn and H.R. McMaster go, and have watched them be replaced by Mike Pompeo, Larry Kudlow and John Bolton. We’ve seen the demise of Steve Bannon who was perceived as the architect of the “nationalist populist” revolution in 2016 and 2017, but who is now seen as nothing more than a pawn of Jewish billionaires trying to subvert nationalist movements. Sholom Rubashkin, Scooter Libby and Jack Johnson were pardoned.

In spite of a trade war with China, the trade deficit with China is at an all time high. Suicides and deaths from the opioid crisis are at an all time high. The border wall was quietly downgraded to extending the existing George W. Bush era fence. Israel is doing good. We’ve increased foreign aid to Israel and looked the other way while it has bombed Gaza and attacked Syria dozens of times. Israel has been given a free hand to do whatever it wants now and recently declared itself a Jewish ethnostate.

The latest thing is NAFTA 2.0 which is little more than an updated and rebranded TPP with some minor tweaks. We heard a lot about doing welfare and entitlement reform from Congress, but that went nowhere because the GOP went out of its way to lose a Senate seat in Alabama. The Republican Congress has worked on prison reform, but hasn’t had the time to push it across the finish line yet.

In January, the Heritage Foundation boasted that Trump had embraced 2/3rds of its agenda. This was shortly after polls began to show that President Trump was no longer perceived as a populist, but as the most conservative president since Ronald Reagan. In the 2018 midterm elections, voters judged the policies that President Trump and the Republican Congress had delivered over the past two years and handed the House of Representatives back to Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

In 2017, there was a “pro-Trump” street activist movement, but the Justice Department’s prosecution of the Rise Above Movement and similar charges against the Proud Boys in New York City have smothered it. In contrast, Antifa have been emboldened to the point where they are now attacking the Marines and tearing down the Silent Sam monument on the UNC campus. Many of President Trump’s biggest supporters like Alex Jones and Infowars have been crushed by the acceleration of social media censorship. Gab is on life support now trying to survive through its P.O. Box.

A year ago, few people wanted to hear what was really going on. Now, more people than ever are finally seeing through the mirage of 4D Chess podcasts and silly God Emperor memes. The truth is that President Trump tweets and nothing happens like we saw with South Africa. Perhaps the only bright spot in this dismal picture is that the caravans are stalled in the mud at the border for now.

Will this trend continue in 2019? I can’t imagine it will without a revolt. By all accounts, the do nothing Congress is likely headed for a year of gridlock before the 2020 election cycle begins. Something is going to have to change and soon or the president will continue to bleed his populist supporters.