How Barack Obama Created Donald Trump

Politico Magazine (Op-Ed)

By Keith Koffler

July 15, 2015

How Barack Obama Created Donald Trump 

It is an unassailable doctrinal truth in the modern Republican Party that Ronald Reagan was a great president and that the United States can be restored to its former glory—i.e., the 1980s—if he is resurrected and returned to earth in the form of someone just like him who claims the GOP presidential nomination and then wins the general election.

That is, someone who, like Reagan, combines genial optimism with disciplined strength. Someone with longstanding, core conservative convictions based in a comprehensive ideology that he or she can articulate convincingly to the masses. And someone with wit, charm and never-ending charisma.

In other words, someone who is the opposite of Donald Trump.

And yet today millions of conservatives are swooning for The Donald, nothing less than the anti-Reagan. They ignore Trump’s surly, intolerant suggestions that illegal immigrants are largely rapists and other types of miscreants. They tolerate his meanness, boastfulness and vengefulness against those who have crossed him. And they believe his fantastical claims, like that he can build walls atop the Mexican border and make Mexicans pay for it.

And yet I am here to tell you that despite what you’ve read in the media, even some outposts of the conservative media, these Trump acolytes in general are not racist against Latinos and they have not been seized by madness.

They are, however, angry. Very angry. And many are agonizingly fearful about the future of the nation. They believe that vast changes to the country are being wrought in ways that are undemocratic, dishonest and perhaps even illegal.

Trump, who seems perpetually angry, is an expression of the angst of conservatives who believe the United States has gotten so deep into a mess that a little extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. What they adore about Trump is that he is a pugilist who has emerged at a time when someone needs to start throwing punches.

His blunt promise to stop illegal immigration touches on perhaps the conservatives’ deepest concern of all: that their culture and the Constitutional order are disintegrating with such rapidity that they hardly recognize the country they are living in. There is a sense of desperation that is fueling support for a proven achiever and fearless confrontationalist like Trump.

As the editor of a conservative website, I am in contact with the Republican base every day. I read their voluminous comments on my website, and I exchange emails with them about their concerns.

Many of them right now genuinely, and even passionately, support Trump. They are happy to contradict me when I write that Trump is a self-aggrandizing demagogue who lacks a coherent agenda—conservative or otherwise—unless a scattered list of personal grudges and obsessions can be considered an agenda. In a poll last week on my website he won easily, cornering 25 percent of the vote.

Though I disagree with them, these comments make complete sense to me. Because I share much of the worldview that is animating support for Trump.

Let’s start with immigration. America is, as President Barack Obama and his “immigration reform” allies like to say, a land of immigrants. But it is not a land of endless immigration from one culture that is different than ours and in many ways far less successful. Most immigrants from Mexico, no doubt, are good, hardworking people seeking a chance to better their circumstance in America. But they are not Americans. And in the numbers they are coming, the serious concern is that they are not easily assimilated.

Other cultures are supposed to augment ours, not replace it.

What’s more, so many of these immigrants have, as their first act in this country, broken the law by coming here illegally. This indisputable fact is so minimized that it has become politically incorrect to call them “illegal immigrants.” They are to be termed “undocumented,” as if their lack of papers were a clerical error. This is a big problem for conservatives, who feel the rule of law is eroding fast under Obama.

Obama attempted to give millions of illegal immigrants legal status by simply not enforcing the law. This recourse to “prosecutorial discretion” is a shocking development, an effort to circumvent Congress and write de facto law out of the West Wing.

Many conservatives understand that millions of people cannot just be carted back to Mexico. But they want to be sure that this would be the final amnesty, unlike the last final amnesty, a law ironically enough signed by Reagan in 1986 that was supposed to mitigate illegal immigration. They don’t trust Obama to enforce immigration reform that would block further illegal immigration, since he has a habit of not enforcing laws. And they believe their own Republican Party leaders are captive to business interests ravenous for cheap labor.

That is why Trump’s unequivocal promise to build a wall has such resonance. They believe he’ll do it. And most likely, put his name on it.

But Trump fever is about much more than immigration.

Obama’s immigration fiat—which is thankfully running into trouble with the judiciary, which has halted it for now—is apiece with other solo measures he has taken that seem to many conservatives designed to dispense with the inconvenience of our system of check and balances. All in the name of doing what is “correct” as perceived by one side of the debate. The unilateral imposition of a certain viewpoint is exactly what the Constitution was designed to prevent.

Many were shocked when Obama peremptorily decided the statutory due dates of the Affordable Care Act were not to his liking and simply changed them. They were aghast that the president misled everyone about the consequences of the law, saying that people would be able to keep their doctors and health plans when they could not.

The law itself, perhaps the most sweeping legislation in half a century and a wholesale change in the way health care will be administered in this country, was rammed through Congress not by any consensus, but in a partisan vote that defied the will of the people, who opposed it. Norms were sacrificed to advance an agenda, contrary to how a republic is supposed to operate.

Meantime, the president is set to implement carbon emissions reductions that he could never get the people’s elected representatives to approve. He decided on his own that the Senate was not in session and appointed judges the senate didn’t approve. The IRS targeted the president’s opponents, while Obama’s secretary of State employed her own email server and then, after releasing what she wanted from it, erased it.

The president who cynically pretended to be “evolving” on the issue of gay marriage and then simply jettisoned beliefs supposedly grounded in his religious faith.

This president, who sold himself as “post-political,” is seen by conservatives as very political, and more accurately described as “post-Constitutional.”

The climate of Constitutional disorder perpetrated by Obama paves the way for demagogues like Trump to gain traction. With the rules of the game already being violated, there is greater tolerance for a man doesn’t seem temperamentally inclined to obey any rules at all.

In many ways, Trump is the creation of Barack Obama.

Society, many conservatives feel, is simply unraveling.

The administration informs Americans that Obama has fixed the economy, even as it slogs along about around two percent growth. The nation debt soars skyward without anyone even faking that they have a plan to stop it—not even the supposedly budget-conscious Republican Congress. Even the Republican presidential candidates have mostly failed to explain how they will curb entitlement benefits to retirees that have been promised but cannot possibly be provided.

The institution of marriage—the foundation of society—is collapsing, as the out-of-wedlock birth rate explodes, with what conservatives fear are dire consequences for children and for women who have to raise their kids alone. Even so, the Supreme Court—at Obama’s urging—unilaterally redefines marriage to include members of the same sex instead of allowing people to democratically change the status quo and—if they like, sometime in the future—change it back.

Men can now be women and women can now be men simply if they choose to, no matter what’s actually in their pants. The Court’s notion that personal desires and an individual conception of “dignity” is the basis of the right to marriage surely opens the door to polygamy.

Culture seems to be falling apart—and society seems to be coarsening. Art and music alone aren’t good enough anymore for commercial success; a good chanteuse today needs in her arsenal of skills a talent for twerking. Police are becoming hesitant to do their jobs lest they be accused of racism, and the murder rate in major cities is rising.

Overseas, a new terror threat in the form of ISIL is permitted to emerge and metastasize throughout the Middle East. Its virulence may soon be coming to a skyscraper near you. Iraq, which had been stable, is in pieces, as are other portions of the Middle East. China pushes up islands out of sea as it prepares for future conquests. A deal struck this week to prevent the extremist, expansionist and possibly insane leaders of Iran from gaining a nuclear weapon will actually allow them to do so within 15 years. Israel, one of our closest friends, is treated like a foe.

It is into this leadership void that Donald Trump has stepped. Say what you will about The Donald—and people certainly say plenty—but no one doubts that he’s decisive and confrontational.

A strong hand like that wielded by Trump is seen as one that can help piece the seething disorder back together. That is always the promise of demagogues, who convey a sense of certainty during bewildering times, and who blame “others” and foreigners—in Trump’s case Mexico and China—for the ills besetting the homeland.

What conservatives who support him are missing is that he too is a unilateralist who will only carve further cracks into the foundation of the republic.

But it is understandable that they are fooled by him. Because they are just not sure that temperate, compromising people can save the country. And in this, given how far we have fallen, they may be right.

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