President Trump’s Promise
When Americans go to the polls November 3, The New York Sun urges a vote to re-elect President Trump and Vice President Pence. We do so in the belief that the principles for which the President, the Vice President, and the Republican Party stand offer far more promising prospects for the kind of economic growth — and full employment — that can best return our politics to a state of amity.
We have no illusions about how bitter — and personal — things have become. To those who say that Mr. Trump is unfit, we say, compared to whom? Not, in our view, Mr. Biden and his camarilla. In any event, we prefer the advice offered in Cato I, the first of the two letters from the anonymous American revolutionary pamphleteer who enjoins: “Attach yourselves to measures, not to men.”
By our lights, the ad hominem nature of this — and the last — campaign is laid to the Democrats. Shocking is the word for their refusal to accept Mr. Trump’s victory in 2016 and their efforts to foil his presidency. This campaign began even before Mr. Trump swore the constitutional oath. It was, we’ve been learning, set in motion by, in President Obama and Vice President Biden, the highest officers in the country.
From it flowed the vainglory of “resistance.” It was pressed throughout the government in a campaign of leaks, disparagement, and obstruction. The resistance festered not only within the “deep state” of the executive branch. It saw federal district judges issue nationwide injunctions in policy disputes. And the House impeach the President on a party-line vote on charges that, the Senate concluded, did not stand up.
Worst of all, the resistance to the result of a free election was egged on by the press. Our aging eyeballs have never seen anything like it. The Times announced even before the 2016 election that it was abandoning the ideal of objectivity. Others followed. Today, our biggest social mediums have discovered the only way they can defend the Democratic nominee is by refusing to circulate stories on corruption in his family.
This is no sudden attack of probity. The Left has been all too happy to spew the most outlandish libels of the president (including blaming him for the coronavirus crisis). So today the astounding story is not, contra the press, that President Trump is a fascist, a bigot, a crook, and incompetent. It’s that Mr. Trump turned out to have the commitment, and fortitude, to stand up in the face of an unprecedented onslaught.
Throughout Mr. Trump’s first term, we have heard a lot of loose talk about the President’s alleged lack of integrity. Yet we define integrity in politics as keeping campaign promises. What president in our time has done better on this head than Mr. Trump? An early signal was his redemption of his promise to move our embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. The result has turned out to be a burst of peace-making in the Middle East.
Another test was the wall on our own southern border. In 2016, Mr. Trump made the wall one of the bluntest promises ever offered in a presidential campaign. We may favor, as we do, the deregulation of immigration, so markets can work most freely. Yet given the election result, it’s hard to deny that Mr. Trump gained a mandate for his approach of enforcing, including by a wall, existing immigration laws until Congress enacts a reform.
The fact is that strong, open, legal immigration meshes more smoothly with the pro-growth policies of Mr. Trump than with the socialism of the Democrats. The Trump doctrine is tax cuts and regulatory reform calculated to maximize jobs and growth. He delivered full — even record, in some cases — employment, including for African Americans. Vice President Pence nailed the Biden-Harris ticket on its plan to raise taxes.
By our lights, the most consequential plank on which Mr. Trump stood is monetary reform. It’s in the 2016 platform via the vow to establish a monetary commission to begin charting a return to the kind of sound money President Nixon and Congress, and much of the world, abandoned in the 1970s. This has yet to be gained, but at least Mr. Trump signals he wants to keep this issue alive.
That’s what we take from his nomination of economist Judy Shelton to a seat on the Federal Reserve Board. It’s of a piece with his nominations to our court system of plain language constitutionalists, fulfilling another of the campaign promises on which he stood for office. Mr. Trump has shown an unparalleled ability to stand by nominees — particularly Justice Kavanaugh — facing demagogic attacks.
All this would be enough to make a clear choice in respect of Mr. Trump, but the stakes are higher in this election than others in our lifetime. The Democratic Party is now in thrall to an element far more radical than we have seen before. It is prepared, as we’ve seen in the past year, to take to our streets, attacking government and private property, even while the Democratic candidate stood silent.
President Trump marked the point at Mount Rushmore, where he decried a campaign “to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children.” We prefer Mr. Trump’s road to normalcy via capitalism — growth, abundant legal immigration, jobs, prosperity, and, as he put it at Rushmore, a unity that no one expected. That is what we take to be President Trump’s promise.
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