Donald Trump, Unpalatable to Some but Necessary

During the Covid episode of hyped-up alarm, denial of human rights, and police thuggery, Steve Waterson, a senior writer at The Australian, was simply magnificent. I put it this way in a new book of essays Against the Corporate Media edited by Michael Walsh:

…we conservatives in Australia, old enough to still read newspapers, have to make do. Put up with the wishy-washy editorial stance of The Australian. Accept that the paper is firmly on the climate-change bandwagon, was an early advocate of pricing carbon dioxide emissions, and pretty well bought into Covid hysteria, as did most of its journalists. Accept lies. Apropos January 6: “One officer who was beaten by Mr Trump’s supporters died the next day.” (Hugh Tomlinson, ”Proud Boys guilty of Capitol riot,” Weekend Australian, May 6-7, 2023.) The reward. It gives ample space to conservative commentary. For example, the paper allowed one of its senior writers Steve Waterson to periodically make the case, superlatively and powerfully, against the grotesque overreaction to Covid. His writing ranked above anything else I read on the topic. Almost alone, among Covid bedwetters, Waterson made buying the paper worthwhile.

In view of his peerless efforts to counter Covid mania, you might think Waterson would pass the Trump test. But, no, sadly, he fails it, as do so many lukewarm conservatives. I use the term advisedly. Revelation 3:15-16 provides an apt biblical analogy in referring to lukewarm churches. “I will spue thee out of my mouth.” Like lukewarm churches, lukewarm conservatives focus on things that don’t matter.

What matters is substance. Defending Judeo-Christian values against the barbarians. Supporting cultural cohesion. Minimising the reach of government into people’s everyday lives. Supporting the integrity of the nation state. Valuing traditional marriage and the traditional family. Rejecting the replacement of biological sexuality with genderism and its spawn — doing irreparable harm to teenagers confused about their sexuality.

What does not matter is packaging. Handsome is as handsome does, is an applicable old adage. Gavin Newsom might be a suave kind of guy but his policies are ruining California. Donald Trump is not nearly so suave. However, his policies benefited America and the civilised world.

He did some good things, lukewarm conservatives often say grudgingly, as prologue to the personal invective. Here are just a few of those incidental good things off the top of my head:

• Forcing NATO countries to stump up more for their own defence.
• Moving America’s embassy in Israel to West Jerusalem.
• Crippling Iran economically.
• Brokering the Abraham Accords.
• Deregulating and reducing business taxation; so creating a booming economy, and the lowest women’s unemployment since the 1950s and the lowest black unemployment on record.
• Protecting American manufacturing by imposing selective tariffs on Chinese imports.
• Strengthening the US military.
• Appointing three originalist judges to the US Supreme Court.
• Reducing illegal immigration across the southern border.
• Presiding over a period of relative peace.

Not bad methinks, and there is much more not off the top of my head.

His opposition is Kamala Harris. A supporter of the (nonsensical) green new deal, of price controls, of bailing BLM vandals out of jail, of removing criminal sanctions against illegal migrants, of sanctuary cities, of gender reassignment, and of abortion up to the point of birth (and beyond?). And she supports the banning of fracking unless it is politically expedient not to. The fact that she has a tangled way with words and a cackling laugh is entirely by the way. It’s her never-changing values, stupid.

It is not a hard choice for a conservative, you would think.

But hold on. Trump is not your typical weak-reed conservative. He can’t be cowed by the corporate media. At times, God forbid, he’s even rude to his adversaries! Ergo, he has proved to be the quintessential test case for conservatives of persnickety disposition. He’s the exception which tests and proves the rule about whether or not you are in fact a muscular conservative versus the lukewarm variety.

Waterson shows himself to be lukewarm. It is not so much that Trump “strikes” Waterson “as an arrogant pig of a man.” Or, that in the same article in The Weekend Australian (August 31), he hypocritically deplores “argumentum ad hominem.” It is this statement which offends: “What a poisonous choice the people have to make in November.” Arrant nonsense.

One choice is poisonous. The other offers a range of beneficial policies for which Trump’s previous presidential record attest. There is no great pondering required. Trump offers the possibility, if he can set the stage for two following terms for JD Vance, of saving Western civilisation and its peerless values from the brink of destruction. Mean tweets are not the issue. Are lukewarm conservatives capable of getting that? Or will they still be deploring brusque syntax when the leftists and Islamists are mobbing outside with pitchforks and nooses?