By Tiberiu Dianu, AMERICAN THINKER
On Saturday evening, March 10, 2018, President Trump held a rally at a Pittsburgh airport (in Moon Township, Pennsylvania) in an effort to help Republican Rick Saccone win a western Pennsylvania congressional district in today’s special election. The president won the district by 20 points during the 2016 election. The speech was vintage Trump 2016, displaying, in the midst of an enthusiastic crowd of supporters, both the president’s achievements since he has taken office on January 20, 2017 and his electoral promises that he has yet to deliver on in the years to come.
There were, however, some new – some would say unconventional – elements of the president’s populism prefiguring a departure from the traditional conservatism, as we know it, of the Reagan-Bush era.
The North Korea Issue
President Trump asserted that this issue “should have been handled over the last 30 years, not now.” Past presidents, including Republicans, treated North Korea with kid gloves, where diplomacy and payoffs were the rule, and the military option was not taken into consideration. In 2008, President George W. Bush removed North Korea from the Department of State list of terrorist countries.
President Trump has taken a new and bold approach, to the despair of diplomats and pundits in Washington, D.C. He has instituted strong sanctions against the Kim Jong-un administration, requesting with insistence, and eventually obtaining, China, South Korea, and other regional actors’ involvement for achieving this goal.
In addition, the president’s famous aggressive rhetoric has also played an important role. Speaking at the U.N. General Assembly on September 19, 2017, Trump threatened to “totally destroy North Korea.” His January 3, 2018 tweet about his “bigger nuclear button,” although regarded as ill advised and “infantile,” proved effective. “Little Rocket Man” (Trump’s nickname for Kim) decided to talk “complete denuclearization” with the United States “as soon as possible.” This has led to the first direct meeting between the American and North Korean leaders (without China’s traditional brokerage), set up for May.
The Trade Issue
The second issue where Trump criticized past Republican presidents is trade. Trump complained that these presidents “were not great on the trade,” as exemplified by China. Cars exported by the United States face a 25% tax from China, while China has a 2.5% car tax from the United States. This has generated a trade deficit with China of U.S. $500 billion a year, which the president has promised he would fix in a year. “Plenty of presidents and people who work for them allowed this to happen,” bitterly remarked the president.
One of the solutions promoted by the president (in fact, an electoral promise that he wants to deliver to his base) is his new set of tariffs for steel (25%) and aluminum (10%), which ignited the revolt of not only the pundits in Washington, D.C., but also part of his own Republican Party.
The Tax Cut Issue
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, adopted with no Democrat votes and signed into law by President Trump on December 22, 2017, is considered the most extensive rewrite of the U.S. tax code in more than 30 years and “the most massive tax cut since Reagan.”
With this remark, Trump criticized the previous Republican administrations of George H.W. Bush (1989-1993) and George W. Bush (2001-2009). Bush the father is known for raising taxes, despite promising not to, and losing the 1992 election to Bill Clinton.
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 reaches beyond fiscal matters to tick off a wish list of conservative priorities that include the reduction to zero of the fine in the Obamacare mandate (levied on Americans who do not buy health insurance) and opening Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling.
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