Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens summed up my current attitude towards President-Elect Trump:
“It should be a rule in democracies that candidates for high office should be judged guilty till proven innocent, while the winners deserve to be held innocent till proven guilty.”
This made me think back on Obama’s 2008 victory, where many accused many others of wishing Obama to fail.
Back then, I did indeed wish that he would fail… to “fundamentally transform” America into a socialist hellhole, which seemed to me to be his heart’s desire. I didn’t wish the President to fail. Instead, I wished that he would not succeed in instituting policies that I disagreed with and knew were bad for the country. He succeeded in instituting a number of such policies, they have by-and-large failed, and I am saddened by the resultant lost years and lost opportunities. Am I happy his policies failed? I’d be happy if they weren’t instituted in the first place, but I can’t be happy about the harm they have done. I can appreciate the lessons their failure offer, and I am happy that the nation’s march towards socialism has been checked by those failures, but the great shame is that those lessons will likely be ignored.
Today, I do indeed wish that Trump fails… to turn America into a closed-border, nativist fortress. Free trade and free movement of people are what make a nation prosperous. Protectionism, trade wars, and vilification of foreigners are what send a nation into decline. But, I can’t even be sure the latter are what Trump wants.
I had a pretty good sense of what Obama’s promises entailed. He spoke the language of socialists, of big-government pedants. Trump? Not so much. His ideas are a mixed bag, and they have both vagueness and inconsistency. Some of his proposals will be, if done right, good for the country. Others, not so much. Still others, terrible.
Even though I expect him in many ways to anger me (I can’t say disappoint, because my expectations are low), I feel, and I don’t quite know why, that there’s a chance he might surprise me. I didn’t feel that at all with Obama.
This doesn’t mean I’m going to join Team Trump. He’s given me no reason to and plenty of reasons not to. But, there’s something to the idea that he’s not a literalist, that he’s not planning to pursue to the letter all that he proposed. It suggests a wait-and-see mindset regarding his presidency, rather than a high-probability conclusion that his agenda’s going to take the country in the wrong direction.
And, even as he receives criticism for his appointments, I still want to “wait and see” what he and they are going to do. Obama was an ideologue. Trump and his current-and-likely advisors and cabinet? Not really. That makes it harder to pre-judge, so we might as well wait to see what they do.
Would Trump successes, from this libertarian’s perspective absolve the ugliness of his campaign? They shouldn’t, and I won’t think him a better person even if he manages to clean up and shrink government, cut taxes, reduce regulation and unshackle the economy, but it is a reality in politics that success can forgive all sorts of sins, and, frankly, if the nation is somehow in good shape in four years, you bet your sweet bippy that Trump the Candidate will have been forgotten and Trump the President will be lauded.
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