Note: this is based on the prepared text, not the one Donald Trump actually delivered, which was fairly similar. Key passages:
America is far less safe – and the world is far less stable – than when Obama made the decision to put Hillary Clinton in charge of America’s foreign policy.
I am certain it is a decision he truly regrets. Her bad instincts and her bad judgment – something pointed out by Bernie Sanders – are what caused the disasters unfolding today. Let’s review the record. In 2009, pre-Hillary, ISIS was not even on the map.
Libya was cooperating. Egypt was peaceful. Iraq was seeing a reduction in violence. Iran was being choked by sanctions. Syria was under control. After four years of Hillary Clinton, what do we have? ISIS has spread across the region, and the world. Libya is in ruins, and our Ambassador and his staff were left helpless to die at the hands of savage killers. Egypt was turned over to the radical Muslim brotherhood, forcing the military to retake control. Iraq is in chaos.
Iran is on the path to nuclear weapons. Syria is engulfed in a civil war and a refugee crisis that now threatens the West. After fifteen years of wars in the Middle East, after trillions of dollars spent and thousands of lives lost, the situation is worse than it has ever been before.
This is the legacy of Hillary Clinton: death, destruction and weakness.
Translation: no more neoconnery. He’s rhetorically going after Hillary here, and is correct to do so, but he’s dialectically including the Bush administration’s aggressive foreign policy as well. 2016-2009=7, not 15. This is the real reason why the conservative media is opposed to Trump; they want their foreign wars.
The most important difference between our plan and that of our opponents, is that our plan will put America First. Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo.
It’s important that he directly called out globalism here. America First could be empty rhetoric, but rejecting globalism puts some teeth into it.
The damage and devastation that can be inflicted by Islamic radicals has been over and over – at the World Trade Center, at an office party in San Bernardino, at the Boston Marathon, and a military recruiting center in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Only weeks ago, in Orlando, Florida, 49 wonderful Americans were savagely murdered by an Islamic terrorist.
Islam. Not radical Islam. This is potentially significant, as the problem is with Islam itself, not the various variants of it. It is Mao’s old fish/sea challenge.
we must immediately suspend immigration from any nation that has been compromised by terrorism until such time as proven vetting mechanisms have been put in place. My opponent has called for a radical 550% increase in Syrian refugees on top of existing massive refugee flows coming into our country under President Obama. She proposes this despite the fact that there’s no way to screen these refugees in order to find out who they are or where they come from. I only want to admit individuals into our country who will support our values and love our people.
Translation: no more Muslim immigration. Not quite as good as going back to admitting only white Christians of good character, but it’s a very good start.
We are going to build a great border wall to stop illegal immigration
He’s either lying to the American people, again, or he lied to the elite media that he specifically calls out as a problem in this speech. I’d bet on the latter.
By enforcing the rules for the millions who overstay their visas, our laws will finally receive the respect they deserve.
Translation: deportation. Again, it’s a start.
I pledge to never sign any trade agreement that hurts our workers, or that diminishes our freedom and independence. Instead, I will make individual deals with individual countries. No longer will we enter into these massive deals, with many countries, that are thousands of pages long – and which no one from our country even reads or understands. We are going to enforce all trade violations, including through the use of taxes and tariffs, against any country that cheats.
This includes stopping China’s outrageous theft of intellectual property, along with their illegal product dumping, and their devastating currency manipulation. Our horrible trade agreements with China and many others, will be totally renegotiated. That includes renegotiating NAFTA to get a much better deal for America – and we’ll walk away if we don’t get the deal that we want.
Holy cow, I NEVER thought he’d take on NAFTA directly. This is phenomenal stuff, even better than I’d anticipated. There are brief throwaways about “fixing” TSA and Obamacare, and while it would have been better to simply announce that they’d be shut down, all in all, he hit the three main issues that are on the table good and hard: immigration, free trade, and globalism.
As for the other two big ones, gun control and the Fed, he didn’t mention them nor did I imagine he would. Trump isn’t interested in gun control and he’s probably not equipped to even begin thinking about the monetary system. Trump is not only more appealing to the Alt Right than I thought he’d be, he’s also more appealing to conservatives and moderates than I would have imagined. It was such a good speech, it even won over the cuckiest of cuckservatives:
Trump is definitely speaking to the moment. He may not be speaking to you, but he is speaking to many, many people in the country right now…. That’s rhetorical gold. All of it. I have never heard Trump or any other politician since Pat Buchanan put it so succinctly.
8.5 out of 10. I see no reason to revise my prediction that the election will be “a Trumpslide of Mondalean proportions.”
Meanwhile, the man who was Trump before Trump, Pat Buchanan, sums up what we saw taking place at the Republican National Convention:
The crisis of today’s Republican Party stems from a failure to recognize, after Reagan went home, and during the presidency of George H. W. Bush, that America now faced a new set of challenges.
By 1991, America’s border was bleeding. Thousands were walking in from Mexico every weekend. The hundreds of thousands arriving legally, the vast majority of them Third World poor, began putting downward pressure on working-class wages. Soon, these immigrants would begin voting for the welfare state on which their families depended, and support the Party of Government.
By 1991, free trade had begun to send our factories and jobs overseas and de-industrialize America.
By 1991, an epoch in world history had ended. With the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the Cold War was suddenly over. America had prevailed.
“As our case is new,” said Lincoln, “so we must think anew and act anew.” Bush Republicans did not think anew or act anew.
They were like football coaches who still swore by the single-wing offense, after George Halas’ Chicago Bears, the “Monsters of the Midway,” used the T-formation to score 11 touchdowns and beat the Washington Redskins in the 1940 NFL championship game, 73-0.
What paralyzed the Republicans of a generation ago? What blinded them from seeing and blocked them from acting on the new realities?
Ideology, political correctness, a reflexive recoil against new thinking, and an innate inability to adapt.
The ideology was a belief in free trade that borders on the cultic, though free trade had been rejected by America’s greatest leaders: Washington, Madison, Hamilton, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.
The political correctness stemmed from a fear of being called racist and xenophobic so paralyzing, so overpowering, that some Republicans would ship the entire Third World over here, rather than have it thought they would ever consider the race, ethnicity or religion of those repopulating America.
The inability to adapt was seen when our Cold War adversary extended a hand in friendship, and the War Party slapped it away. Rather than shed Cold War alliances and rebuild our country, we looked around for new commitments, new allies, new wars to fight to “end tyranny in our world.”
These wars had less to do with threats to vital interests, than with providing now-obsolete Cold Warriors with arguments to maintain their claims on national resources and attention, not to mention their lifestyles and jobs.
With Trump’s triumph, the day of reckoning has arrived.
The new GOP is not going to be party of open borders, free trade globalism or reflexive interventionism.
The new GOP is not going to be a republican party. It is an American party, which is to say that it is, for all intents and purposes, the White party. That doesn’t mean it won’t have any non-white support; what most people don’t understand is that more than a few Hispanics, Asians, and even blacks want to live in a mostly white country.
The age of ideology is over. The era of identity politics is upon us, courtesy of those who eroded and expanded America’s demographics in 1965.
