The Case for Trump summary

Trump’s relentless plugging of his two campaign issues was not, in itself, enough to win over swing-state voters; it was also the fact that it wasn’t a career politician like Jeb Bush, but Donald Trump – the vulgar, divisive and promiscuous entrepreneur, who was promoting these issues that helped him win over the electorate.

If candidates like McCain or Romney had been a balm to soothe conservatives, Trump was the chemotherapy needed to cure America’s progressive cancer. In other words, Trump may have been bad, but sometimes you need something bad to fight off something far worse. In this case, that something far worse was the Washington swamp of deep-state bureaucrats and progressive globalists that Trump promised to drain. And in doing so, he claimed, he would emancipate the American worker from the intractable webs of globalist servitude.

Even with his bombastic rhetoric and media-savvy strategy in hand, Trump didn’t enter the presidential race in a vacuum. There were other candidates, both Republican and Democrat, who stood in his way. Why weren’t they able to impede the forward march of Trumpism?

Well, for starters, take the sorry state of the Democratic party. Their slow drift to the left under Obama had left the white working class behind. More regulation and taxes had forced industries and companies to slow down hiring and caused wages to stagnate. Meanwhile, low interest rates meant that middle-class savings accounts hardly grew.

By the time the nominees for both parties had been selected, Trump had managed to simplify his message down to two main talking points: making America great again, and making sure the corrupt insider Clinton never got elected.

Polls showed that 56 percent of Americans believed that since 9/11, the “power and prestige” of the nation had declined. What’s worse was that only ten percent believed the reverse. It was therefore no surprise that Trump’s warnings of continued American decline resonated with a huge portion of the electorate. What’s even less of a surprise was that people flocked to his promise to reverse this decline – and make America great again.

On January 5, 2018, Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury was released. For the first few months of the year, mainstream media outlets could not get enough of its lurid stories of the Trump campaign and White House.

As the media reported story after story of the supposedly inept and dysfunctional White House, the economy was painting a different picture. By late 2018, the stock market was hitting record highs, GDP growth was at its highest point in a decade, and unemployment figures were at their lowest point in the twenty-first century. Additionally, America’s place in the world was being successfully recalibrated – the Iran nuclear deal was no more, and America had recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

The very thought of Trump being remembered as a good president probably makes half of Americans laugh out loud. But once one goes beyond the media frenzy and looks at his accomplishments, the story begins to change.

It’s undeniable that the first year of Trump’s presidency was difficult. Relentless attacks from the mainstream media and a revolving door for White House staff mired the administration in drama, making the task of governing difficult.