At the end of last year, when everyone was still going through the motions of pretending Nikki Haley was running a viable campaign against Trump, I noted she was making, in my humble opinion, the absolute worst argument that could be made against her supposed rival. Some version of the following remark became a fixture in her stump speeches for the next few months until she inevitably dropped out.
“And the truth of it all — and this is another hard truth — I believe President Trump was the right president at the right time. I was proud to serve America in his administration, and I agree with a lot of his policies. But the truth is, rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him,” said Haley. “You know I’m right. Chaos follows him. We have too much division in this country and too many threats around the world to be sitting in chaos once again.”
This was a repulsive and dishonest observation coming from an ostensible Republican. The vast majority of “chaos” surrounding Trump’s presidency came from a never-ending barrage of wildly disingenuous media coverage surrounding manufactured scandals such as the Russia-collusion hoax.
Further, if by some incredible turn of events Haley did somehow become the Republican nominee, the same cabal of media and deep-state operatives that smeared Trump and even accused milquetoast Mitt Romney of being a dog-abusing, gay-bashing felon who gave people cancer would no doubt turn on a dime to “fortify” any presidential election in which Haley was the nominee by lying about her too.
In any event, as news broke that Iran was launching a barrage of missiles at Israel this past weekend, one might reach the conclusion that, yes, presidents who create actual chaos are a bad thing. The problem is that America’s political class has its head so sunk into its posterior, it can’t begin to be honest about what real “chaos” looks like.
As one of the more incisive pseudonymous X accounts observed over the weekend, “Most of what the media is referring to when they describe the Trump presidency as ‘chaotic’ were things like tweets, personnel changes and Russiagate leaks. Now the whole world is on fire and they’re still behaving like going back to that would be catastrophic.”
With that in mind, let’s add some context to the Iranian attack over the weekend: Biden has been eager to continue the Obama-era policy of abandoning our traditional Sunni allies in the Middle East to make Iran the center of power in the region. This meant a questionable deal to make Iran a nuclear power and handing over billions of dollars to the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism, which was also responsible for killing a large number of American troops in the Iraq war. The result is that when Israel was shooting down Iran’s missile over the weekend, it was a depressing demonstration of this meme:
Of course, this latest escalation from Iran was just the culmination of the Biden/Obama Iran policy. Let’s not forget very early on, Biden removed the Houthis — an Iranian proxy — from the official list of “Specially Designated Global Terrorist Groups” as a sop to Tehran. Before returning them to the list earlier this year, the Houthis were basically allowed to run amok, launching missiles at Israel and wreaking havoc with global shipping routes by launching attacks in the Red Sea. In February, the Houthis attacked and sank a tanker ship leaving an 18-mile-long oil slick and creating a major environmental catastrophe.
Under Biden, the U.S. Navy, whose major peacetime responsibility is securing global shipping routes, looks feckless to address a bunch of bush league terrorists. The result is that Americans are paying more for gas and all manner of goods because a huge amount of global shipping is being rerouted around the horn of Africa for security reasons.
In fact, not only is Biden and the Democrat Party’s monstrously stupid foreign policy establishment directly responsible for this chaos — we’re watching these catastrophes unfold after the Trump administration had made major progress unscrewing the Obama-era Middle East policy.
When Iran launched its barrage of missiles at Israel, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and other Arab states aided the efforts to shoot the missiles down. It’s hard to overstate how unthinkable it would have been a decade or two ago for Israel to be engaged in a war with the Palestinians and these same Arab states to step in to aid Israel and prevent a wider war. It seems the Abraham Accords and Middle East alliances Trump forged are proving surprisingly resilient, despite the Biden administration’s best efforts to set the region on fire. The best the Biden admin was able to do was send a pathetic message to Iran telling them their attack on Israel “must be within certain limits.”
Of course, that’s not the only region that threatens to start World War III at the moment. The Biden administration seems bound and determined to make sure the Ukraine war is prolonged as long as possible. What’s remarkable about the Ukraine war from an American standpoint is that whether you support or oppose the war, everyone honest on both sides agrees that the Biden administration’s Ukraine policy is terrible.
If you think Ukraine’s fading chances mean we should have negotiated a settlement long ago, it’s objectively true that the Biden administration failed at deterrence bigly and has needlessly escalated a proxy war with a nuclear power in Europe. If you think this is a war worth fighting to counter Russian aggression, well, the Biden administration has been strategically inept and has failed to make any major domestic push to earn support for funding the war in Congress and beyond. You don’t have to be an expert in statecraft to know that, as a general rule, you either try to avoid wars or win them quickly and decisively.
In Ukraine, however, the Biden administration has chosen the chaotic middle path between those two options — though “chosen” implies they had a strategy to begin with, rather than being reactionary at every step. Russia invaded when Biden was vice president and again when Biden was president. Trump, the supposed Putin stooge, actually had an effective deterrence strategy — he gave Ukraine lethal military aid, which the Obama-Biden White House had pointedly refused to do, flooded Europe with liquid natural gas exports to depress Russia’s energy profits, and aggressively countered Russian efforts in Syria to send a message.
By contrast, the latest major developments regarding Ukraine are pretty indicative of where the White House’s head is at. Biden has banned liquid natural gas exports to please his left-wing environmentalist base, which, as congressional Republicans have noted, is “a gift to Russian President Vladimir Putin that will harm our European allies.” And he has asked Ukraine to stop attacking Russian oil refineries. While bombing refineries may help Ukraine win the war sooner, it’s an election year and Biden doesn’t want to raise gas prices heading into the summer.
Now maybe it’s just me, but this all seems like pretty horrific foreign policy. Yet here’s how a recent book on Biden by Franklin Foer, former New Republic editor and current staff writer at the allegedly illustrious Atlantic, describes Biden’s foreign policy leadership: “It was his calming presence and his strategic clarity that helped lead the alliance to such an aggressive stance, which stymied authoritarianism on its front lines. He was a man for his age.”
Anyway, we have yet to discuss the worst inflation in 40 years, up from just 1.4 percent when Biden took office; more than 10 million illegal border crossers; a massive spike in urban crime; mortgage rates going from 2-3 percent to 7; more Americans dying of Covid in Biden’s first year than died under Trump without the benefit of a supposed vaccine; chronic truancy becoming a permanent epidemic in America’s schools thanks to the White House allowing teachers unions free rein to keep schools closed for upwards of 18 months; the inexcusable penchant for ignoring horrific murders and natural disasters so long as they afflict Trump voters; Biden pissing off the families of the Marines killed at the Kabul airport during his disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal by rambling about his own family and checking his watch repeatedly; seeing Biden, who’s wife campaigned against Trump by saying “decency is on the ballot,” then host transgender perverts who flash their fake-in-every-sense boobs on the White House lawn, as well as appoint important public health and nuclear officials who force anyone who has the misfortune of even seeing them to contemplate why the hell their tax dollars pay the salaries of obvious sexual deviants; using the Justice Department as his personal Stasi to go after septuagenarian pro-life activists and traditionalist Catholics, which is really something when your handpicked vice president supported bail funds for people who burned a police station; and finally, he’s clearly experiencing age-related dementia, slurs entire paragraphs, and has to be led around by the elbow on and off stage or else bounces off walls like a Roomba.
We could go on… yet despite the obvious, we’ve been stuck in an endless loop of insulting news coverage lecturing Americans about why the economy’s really not that bad — seriously, this topic has become a media obsession in the last several months. Chris Cillizza, an otherwise earnest former CNN personality whose career largely rests on his total inability to reject even the most tendentious D.C. groupthink, is out there boldly informing the apparently confused public they’re just flat-out wrong to romanticize the Trump years:
A number that stunned me in the NYT/Siena poll: 42% of people said that the years Donald Trump was president were “mostly good” for America.
Just 33% said they were “mostly bad.”
It speaks to the power of nostalgia — and how we as humans tend to remember the good stuff and block out the bad.
Alternatively, maybe those same voters recall that Trump was the first president since Jimmy Carter not to start any new foreign wars. Perhaps they also have a vivid memory of the fact that last year a dozen eggs cost 90 percent more than they did when Trump was president.
If the media are still incapable of seeing this disconnect, it’s only helping Trump — Biden hasn’t led in the polls in over six months. Opinions have hardened, and if Biden wants to win the election, he has to radically change the narrative around his presidency, not rely on the establishment to gaslight voters by telling them not to believe their bank statements and the constant barrage of foreign explosions on the news.
Out in the real world, it’s genuinely not difficult to see why voters look around, see the whole world is on fire, and think that going back to the Trump years, and whatever problems existed then, would still be a welcome respite from the current chaos.
