RUTHFULLY YOURS

When I was a kid, an outfit called Big Time Wrestling would come to town. The favorite rivalry was between stage gringo Ray Stevens and the chivalric Pepper Gomez. Fierce disputes over which champion was better would break out on the playground after a bout. Then one day an older Mexican kid shattered our illusions by informing us that he had seen Stevens and Gomez laughing together over dinner in Chinatown.

Welcome to American politics, where the educational and economic elites, especially in the bicoastal politico-media complex, are bound together by a privilege that transcends the lurid dramas of conflicting ideologies.

Two recent columns talk about this divide between mass and elite in American society. David Brooks, house-conservative at the New York Times, wrote a much-ridiculed, but still perceptive column about what defines the American elite, and how they ensure that their children will inherit their privilege, and the less-privileged will be kept out. By using their wealth to “invest” in their kids’ success––the best schools, public or private; the means to pay for tutors, SAT prep courses, internships, and foreign travel; and the social connections to help them matriculate at Ivy League and other top-notch schools, 70% of whose admissions come from the top 25% of income distribution.

The gate-keeping comes in the form restrictive building codes that in deep-blue redoubts of privilege like San Francisco and Manhattan keep housing prices high, and schools demographically homogenous. The result is a shared social and cultural capital that is second-nature to insiders, but alien to those who have not been exposed to the knowledge, mores, manners, and taste that comprise it.

A specific example of elite solidarity across partisan lines appeared in a New York Post column by Maureen Callahan. She peruses the guest-list for an annual soiree hosted by Washington Post heiress Lally Weymouth in the Hamptons:

It was full of politicians and power brokers — the ones who pantomime outrage daily, accusing the other side of crushing the little guy, sure that the same voter will never guess that behind closed doors, they all get along.

Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner partied with billionaire Democratic donor George Soros, who rubbed shoulders with billionaire GOP donor David Koch.

Chuck Schumer and Kellyanne Conway were there. So were Democratic Rep. Carolyn Maloney, Ronald Lauder, Carl Icahn, Joel Klein, Cathie Black, reporters Steve Clemons and Maria Bartiromo, columnists Richard Cohen and Margaret Carlson, Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross and Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao, Ray Kelly, Bill Bratton and Steven Spielberg.

Like Pepper Gomez and Ray Stevens, these denizens of the 1% are fierce partisans in front of the cameras, but old pals at a tony party or a chic restaurant or a high-end golf resort. They share the same zip codes, the same tastes, the same amenities of celebrity and wealth, and ultimately the same interest: keeping themselves on top, and hoi polloi at a distance.

This social reality can help solve the mystery of Republican NeverTrumpers and their obsessive anger––Trump is a 1% traitor who has turned against his own in a bid for political power. From ancient Athens on, populist demagogues have usually been aristocrats who betray their class by enlisting the support of the grubby masses and legitimizing their grievances. They buy loyalty by promising to redistribute the property of the wealthy, and by sneering at their mores and taste, their education and proper pronunciation, and especially their reflexive sense of superiority.

In antiquity it was land and lineage that defined privilege. In our day, prep schools, top-ten university degrees, formal speech, correct diction, proper manners, and high-cult allusions all mark off the elite, and hide the fact that their position comes from money and connections as much as merit. Someone like Trump, who violates every one of these canons and enjoys the support of the “bitter clingers” and “deplorable” masses, infuriates the elite by challenging their right to rule by virtue of their presumed intellectual and cultural superiority.

It turns out the Moscow-based lawyer whose brief meeting with Trump campaign officials last year was obtained under false pretenses has significant ties to Democrat opposition researchers in the United States and was extended special privileges by the Obama administration.

Could this mean attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya came, or perhaps was sent, to America to hurt Donald Trump’s campaign for president? And if Veselnitskaya had less-than-honorable intentions, what role, if any, did Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee play in this unfolding drama?

The Hill newspaper reports that the Obama administration went to extraordinary lengths to allow Veselnitskaya to enter the U.S. and remain here to complete her business in this country. After Veselnitskaya, who reportedly has several pro-Hillary Clinton and anti-Donald Trump items on her Facebook page, was denied a U.S. visa, then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch personally intervened and cleared the way for her to come to this country.

British music publicist Rob Goldstone helped to set up the storied June 9, 2016, meeting at Trump Tower in Manhattan between Veselnitskaya, Donald Trump Jr., then-campaign manager Paul Manafort, and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner, claiming boastfully in an email exchange with Donald Jr. that the Russians wanted to share incriminating information about Democrat Hillary Clinton.

We now know Veselnitskaya had no earth-shattering revelations to impart about the Russia-friendly former secretary of state who was then running against Donald Trump. Instead of offering “Political Opposition Research” at the roughly 20-minute-long get-together, the Russian woman “had no information to provide and wanted to talk about adoption policy and the Magnitsky Act,” Donald Trump Jr. said earlier this week in a statement on Twitter.

The Magnitsky Act, which Russian President Vladimir Putin despises, allows the U.S. government to refuse visas to Russians considered guilty of human rights violations. After it was enacted at the end of 2012, Russia retaliated by halting American adoptions of Russian orphans and banning entry to Russia by specific U.S. officials.

Veselnitskaya, who was a prosecutor in Russia 16 years ago, told NBC News she “never had any damaging or sensitive information about Hillary Clinton,” adding she wanted to let people know about “the real circumstances behind the Magnitsky Act,” and was hoping to testify about the sanctions statute before Congress.

There is some evidence that Democrats were working with Russia against the Trump campaign, radio talk show host Erick Erickson suggests.

“There is a remarkably small degree of separation between Natalia Veselnitskaya and Fusion GPS, the Democrat opposition research firm that came up with the Trump dossier,” Erickson writes, and this “raise[s] the issue of whether Democrats and Russians were as collaborative as the Democrats claim the Trump team was.”

The “piss-gate” dossier is the unvetted 35-page report written by former British spy Christopher Steele and published by cat-video website BuzzFeed. The FBI had been considering paying Steele “for his Trump dossier work,” Erickson notes.

“Fusion GPS was paid by a Democratic ally of Hillary Clinton’s to conduct the research,” the Daily Caller reported. The dubious document claimed, among other things, that Trump hired prostitutes to urinate on a hotel room bed in Moscow.

WASHINGTON—Peter W. Smith, a Republican political activist and financier from Chicago who mounted an effort to obtain former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails from Russian hackers, died on May 14 after asphyxiating himself in a hotel room in Rochester, Minn., according to local authorities. He was 81 years old.

Mr. Smith’s body was found in the Aspen Suites hotel, located across the street from the Mayo Clinic, according to a medical examiner’s report. An associate of Mr. Smith said that he had recently visited the clinic. A representative for the facility wouldn’t confirm if Mr. Smith was a patient.

It wasn’t clear who found Mr. Smith’s body.

Mr. Smith died about 10 days after an interview with The Wall Street Journal in which he recounted his attempts to acquire what he believed were thousands of emails stolen from Mrs. Clinton’s private email server. He implied that Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, then serving as the senior national security adviser to presidential candidate Donald Trump, was aware of his efforts.
Peter W. Smith Photo: –

Mr. Smith’s attempts to obtain what he believed would be politically damaging emails marked the first potential evidence of coordination between members of the Trump campaign and Russian hackers, a central issue in probes by Congress and the Federal Bureau of Investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

When the Journal reported on Mr. Smith’s efforts last month, it wasn’t clear how he died. His obituary listed no cause of death, officials in the town where he lived didn’t release information, and messages left at Mr. Smith’s home went unanswered.

The Chicago Tribune , which first reported Mr. Smith’s cause of death on Thursday, said a pile of documents and a statement that police called a suicide note were found with his body. The note said that Mr. Smith had been ill and that he held a life-insurance policy that was due to expire, the Tribune reported.

Mr. Smith apologized in the note and said that “no foul play whatsoever” had occurred with his death, according to the Tribune.

In emails and documents meant to recruit others to his efforts to find Mrs. Clinton’s deleted emails, Mr. Smith and an associate identified Mr. Flynn’s company, Flynn Intel Group, and Michael G. Flynn, the general’s son, as allies in the operation.
Peter W. Smith’s body was found in the Aspen Suites hotel, across the street from the Mayo Clinic. Here, the clinic’s campus in Rochester, Minn. Photo: Elizabeth Nida Obert/Associated Press

Neither Mr. Flynn nor his son responded to requests for comment at the time of the original article.

The group Mr. Smith assembled included technical experts, lawyers and a private investigator in Europe who spoke Russian, he said. The group made contacts with five groups of hackers, including two that were Russian, who claimed to have obtained Mrs. Clinton’s emails, Mr. Smith said. He ultimately didn’t acquire the messages because he said he couldn’t verify their authenticity. Instead, he urged the hackers to give the emails to WikiLeaks.

“Where are the Congressional hearings on Hillary’s collusion with the Ukraine? Where are the hearings on her making it possible for Russian interests to control 20 percent of our uranium supply in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation? ”
Call it “the Seinfeld meeting,” because the conversation between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer was a meeting with a nobody about nothing, from which nothing resulted. Yet in the Democratic and media (sorry for the redundancy) alternate universe, it is more worthy of attention than North Korea, ISIS, or jobs and the economy.

In a bit of irony, the lawyer with which Donald Trump Jr. was allegedly colluding, Natalia Veselnitskaya, was allowed to be in this country by the Obama administration and its attorney general, Loretta Lynch. Natalia may have overstayed her visa and at the time of the meeting may have been, dare we say it, an illegal alien. Extreme veting, anyone? As reported by Fox News Politics:

The Obama administration granted the Russian attorney who met with Donald Trump Jr. last June a special type of “parole” to be in the United States after she initially was denied a visa, Fox News has confirmed – though it remains unclear whether she had permission to be in the country when she attended the Trump Tower session. …

Well before the June 9, 2016, meeting, she was denied a visa to enter the U.S. in 2015, according to court filings first reported by the Daily Beast. She was granted a “parole” to be in the country from October 2015 through early January 2016. However, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York told Fox News on Thursday that their office did not extend that status.

“She was not granted a second parole by our office,” office spokesman James Margolin told Fox News in an email. “Her case-related immigration parole ended early in 2016, and it was not renewed by us.”…

“She shouldn’t have been in the country,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, told “Fox & Friends” on Wednesday. “I think the lady Russian lawyer that was there in that meeting, I’ve written to [The State Department and Department of Homeland Security] to find out what she was doing in the country when presumably either her visa or parole expired.”

Maybe the Obama administration and the Hillary Clinton campaign were colluding with the Russians to let her in and let her stay to try to st up Team Trump? Why was she allowed in the country? Why was she allowed to overstay her welcome or “parole”/ Media curiosity about the meeting apparently has its limits.

Some, such as Mark Steyn, have approached the meeting with the trivial pursuit it deserves:

…Mark Steyn dismissed the notion that Russian President Vladimir Putin was pulling the strings behind the meeting of Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer.

“The guy [who Trump Jr.] is colluding with is a washed-up pop music publicist for John Denver in the 1980s,” Steyn, a “Rush Limbaugh Show” guest host, said.

Steyn said Robert Goldstone, who he said is now a publicist for a pop star in Azerbaijan, would never be someone Putin would confide in to collude with the Trumps.

Others, including the usually-grounded-in-reality Charles Krauthammer, seem to have swallowed this “evidence” of “collusion” whole:

Charles Krauthammer said the scandal surrounding Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer who promised dirt on Hillary Clinton was “the first empirical evidence” of the campaign’s collusion with Russia.

Collusion to do what exactly? Conspiracy to adopt Russian children? Collusion to get front row tickets at that Azerbaijani pop star’s next concert? Opposition research is not a crime and Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting was far less interesting than the fake dossier the Democrats used to fuel their “Russia, Russia, Russia” campaign.

On January 4, 2017, The New York Times printed a full-page ad calling on the American people to: “STOP THE TRUMP/PENCE REGIME BEFORE IT STARTS.” Signers included Bill Ayers, co-founder of the Weather Underground, a revolutionary- left group, known for its deadly bombings, and reportedly a friend of former President Barack Obama.

The January 4 ad having failed in its aim, the organization behind the ad — www.refusefascism.org — is bringing its Hate Trump/Pence message to the nation this Saturday, July 15, with protests scheduled mainly at locations in Deep Blue America, including New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angles. Boston, and Seattle. (Other cities include Detroit and Philadelphia, cities in states, Michigan and Pennsylvania, that narrowly voted for Trump/Pence.)

The theme of the July 15 demonstrations is “Protest and Demand — THE TRUMP/PENCE REGIME MUST GO!” As of the date of this writing, it is not clear if any Democrat — or Republican — anti-Trump elected officials will participate. Nor has it been suggested that officials from the Obama administration — National Security Adviser Susan Rice, or former CIA director John Brennan — will take part. Nor is there word that Senator John McCain will attend one of these Trump-Pence Hate gatherings to declare: This reminds me of my involvement in the Maidan protests in Kiev, a few years ago, when Ukraine overthrew its duly-elected president.”

Protest material does not set forth plans for the federal government, once Trump and Pence “GO!” Certainly, the July 15 demonstrations must have a deleterious impact on our democratic institutions, and erode confidence in our election process. And haven’t leftists been claiming, since November 8, that this has been the intention of the Kremlin?

Evan McMullin, in a New York Times op-ed piece, December 5, 2016, pointed out:

“Authoritarians often exaggerate their popular support to boost their perceived legitimacy. But the deeper objective is to weaken the democratic institutions that limit their power. Eroding confidence in voting, elections, and representative bodies gives them a freer hand to wield power.”

McMullin was identified by the Times as “a former C.I.A. officer [who] was a conservative independent presidential candidate in 2016.” The print title of his op-ed ,”The Constitution in Danger,” appears on-line, as “Trump’s Threat to the Constitution.”

In view of John Brennan’s apparently contributions to the “Trump must go” campaign, should we be surprised that “a former C.I.A. officer” sought to draw votes from candidate Trump and, after his election, charged Donald J. Trump as a threat to the Constitution, putting him in the Trump Hating mainstream?

Material promoting the July 15 Hate Trump demonstrations include this battle cry: “We will not accept the cruel and brutal future of the Trump/Pence Regime…they must GO!” This theme appears in the ravings of New York Times Trump Hate columnists and, certainly, in the Republican-Hate propaganda spewed by congressional Democrats, with nary a reply from the Republicans.

We interrupt this week’s Don Jr. loop to tell a tale of a real ethics scandal. It’s one perpetrated not by the Trump administration, but by the man atop Washington’s ethics-industrial complex: Walter Shaub.

If you’ve never heard of Mr. Shaub, you soon will. He is resigning as director of the Office of Government Ethics—effective next week—so that he can continue more publicly the war he’s been waging against the administration internally since last fall. Unquestioning media outlets are providing him a big podium for his accusations, so it’s worth noting some facts.

Mr. Shaub was already playing the indignant watchdog on Sunday, as he explained his resignation on ABC’s “This Week.” He complained that the White House was consistently “challenging OGE’s authority to carry out its routine and most basic functions.” Understanding those “functions” is critical to realizing the Shaub drama is so much grandstanding.

The OGE isn’t a watchdog or an inspector general’s office. As its own website makes clear, it doesn’t adjudicate complaints, investigate ethics violations, or prosecute misconduct. Rather, it was set up in 1978 to help the White House. Its job is to “advise” and to “assist” the executive branch in navigating complex ethical questions, a job undoubtedly more frustrating and messy under President Trump. Nonetheless, Mr. Shaub’s attempt to act as ethics czar, to ride herd on the Trump operation, is outside his office’s mission. It’s the act of a pious political operator who doesn’t like this president.

Only weeks after the election, as speculation swirled about how Mr. Trump would handle the ethical complexity of his business dealings while president, Mr. Shaub was already trolling, posting a series of sarcastic tweets about divestiture to the Office of Government Ethics’ official account. When Mr. Trump released his plan for his assets, Mr. Shaub blasted it at a public event with press in attendance. So much for the “help” part.

The best insight into Mr. Shaub’s methods can be seen in the long fallout from Kellyanne Conway’s bone-headed February attempt to defend Ivanka Trump by calling on Americans to buy her clothing line. Deputy White House counsel Stefan Passantino, who leads the internal ethics team, reached out within minutes to reassure Mr. Shaub the situation would be reviewed. Mr. Shaub nonetheless waited only four days before dropping a public letter essentially demanding action against Ms. Conway.

In a Feb. 28 response to Mr. Shaub, Mr. Passantino noted that some of the OGE’s ethics regulations do not apply to White House staff. He nonetheless immediately reassured Mr. Shaub that a separate regulation did hold them to some of the same standards and that he had reschooled Ms. Conway in them. CONTINUE AT SITE

If the Trump administration has one overarching goal, it’s to Make America Great Again. But what does this mean? It means we are promoting MAGAnomics—and that means sustained 3% economic growth.

For most of our nation’s modern history, a healthy American economy meant one that grew at roughly 3.5%. That was the average growth rate between the late 1940s and 2007. Since then, it has hardly topped 2%.

The difference between those two growth rates is staggering. If the American economy had grown at only 2% between the end of World War II and 2000, average household income would have been roughly $26,000 instead of $50,000.
Over the next 10 years, 3% growth instead of 2% will yield a nominal gross domestic product that is $16 trillion larger, federal government revenues $2.9 trillion greater, and wages and salaries of American workers $7 trillion higher.

For merely suggesting that we can get back to that level, the administration has been criticized as unrealistic. That’s fine with us. We heard the same pessimism 40 years ago, when the country was mired in “stagflation” and “malaise.” But Ronald Reagan dared to challenge that thinking and steered us to a boom that many people thought unachievable. In the 7½ years following the end of the recession in 1982, real GDP grew at an annual rate of 4.4%. That is what a recovery looks like, and what the American economy is still capable of achieving.

The focus of MAGAnomics is simple: Grow the economy and with it the wealth of, and opportunity for, all Americans. It does that by focusing on fundamental principles that made the U.S. economy the greatest engine of prosperity in the history of the planet:

• Tax reform. We need to boost productivity. Fundamental to that is encouraging capital investment. We’ve seen for decades that growth in private-sector jobs correlates to growth in private business investment. When businesses invest in new plants and equipment, they tend to hire more people, who produce more. Lower tax rates and faster cost recovery are two levers that will reduce the cost of capital and thereby help ignite economic growth. And since 70% of business income goes to wages, the benefits flow to workers as well.

• Curbing unnecessary regulation. Much like commonsense tax reform, rolling back unnecessarily burdensome regulations will reduce the cost of doing business. When regulations increase costs, they decrease returns, leaving less capital to invest. If they are too burdensome, they discourage any investment at all, as businesses choose to forgo opportunities. This is important to all business, but especially to capital-intensive sectors like manufacturing. Overly zealous environmental regulations have played a role in pushing many U.S. businesses overseas. Requiring realistic and fact-based cost-benefit analyses of regulations will help protect both the environment and American jobs.

• Welfare reform. Growth also depends on the size of the workforce. Although the labor pool is aging, we are also seeing people who could be working but are staying home. We badly need them to go back to work. We believe that most want to do this but simply lack the opportunity. Our welfare system often creates disincentives for people to seek work. We intend to change that. We need to reform welfare to ensure it helps those truly in need of it, but does not encourage people to stay home.

• Smart energy strategy. The president’s “all of the above” energy strategy expands the economy’s growth potential. Yes, it puts coal miners back to work. But cheaper, cleaner, more abundant energy will also increase investment and employment across dozens of industries, from chemicals to automobiles. By ensuring reliable supplies and stable prices, the president’s energy plan will reduce uncertainty, especially in the manufacturing sector, thereby reducing the risks associated with building new plants and hiring more American workers.

• Rebuilding America’s infrastructure. The president’s plan to rebuild America’s infrastructure will create immediate job opportunities. More important, it will boost the long-term productivity of American industry. Rebuilding roads, bridges, airports and ports will pay dividends both now and in the future.

• Fair trade for America. The president is right in that the U.S. is frequently abused when it comes to international trade. Ensuring that other nations do not undermine our economy by unduly taxing our products, by dumping products here, or by stealing our intellectual property is essential to our economic future.

• Government spending restraint. When government spends a lot, it takes money away from private investment. And private investment is always a more efficient allocator of capital than government. We will continue to fund critical government functions, including a social safety net that gives people the comfort of knowing they will not be overlooked while encouraging them to be more willing to take chances. But we will watch every dollar to minimize waste. We will, in short, seek to take from you only what government actually needs to function.

Andrew C. McCarthy is a former federal prosecutor and a contributing editor at National Review.

“Collusion” is a hopelessly vague term. Alas, the word has driven the coverage and the debate about possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Vladi­mir Putin’s regime. But it is a term nigh useless to investigators, who must think in terms of conspiracy. Collusion can involve any kind of concerted activity, innocent or otherwise. Conspiracy is an agreement to commit a concrete violation of law.

Thus has the collusion question always been two questions: First, was there any? Second, if so, collusion in what?

The first question, to my mind, is no longer open to credible dispute. There plainly was collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. This is firmly established by emails exchanged in June 2016 between Donald Trump Jr. and an intermediary acting on behalf of Russian real estate magnate Aras Agalarov. A Putin crony, Agalarov is also a business partner of President Trump.

The emails report that Agalarov had met with Russia’s chief government prosecutor and that the latter offered to provide “official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary [Clinton] and her dealings with Russia.” The intermediary, Rob Goldstone (a publicist for Agalarov’s pop-star son, Emin), told Trump Jr. that the information “would be very useful to your father” and — more significant — that it was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

In a subsequent email, Goldstone told Trump Jr. that Emin Agalarov wanted Trump Jr. to meet with a “Russian government attorney” who would be flying in from Moscow. Trump Jr. agreed to the meeting and elaborated that it would include then-campaign manager Paul Manafort as well as Jared Kushner, Trump Jr.’s brother-in-law.

The meeting took place at Trump Tower. The Russian attorney, whom Goldstone accompanied, was Natalia Veselnitskaya. She is a former regime prosecutor who now represents Putin cronies and lobbies the U.S. government to repeal the Magnitsky Act, a human rights provision enacted to punish Russia for torturing and killing a whistleblower. The act’s undoing is known to be a Putin priority.

Consequently, we now have solid documentary evidence that the Trump campaign, fully aware that Putin’s regime wanted to help Trump and damage Clinton, expressed enthusiasm and granted a meeting to a lawyer sensibly understood to be an emissary of the regime. Top Trump campaign officials attended the meeting with the expectation that they would receive information that could be exploited against Clinton.

That is collusion — concerted activity toward a common purpose. We can argue about whether the collusion amounted to anything, in this intriguing instance or over time. That is under investigation, and deservedly so. To my mind, though, it is no longer credible to claim there is no evidence of a collusive relationship. It is there in black and white.

Now we are on to the real question: Collusion in what? There are two aspects to this question: legal and political.

As a matter of law, mere collusion is not a crime. As noted above, it must rise to a purposeful agreement to carry out a substantive violation of law. It is not a crime to collude with a foreign government, even a hostile one, if the point is to accept information in the nature of opposition research. The suggestion that it might violate campaign law to accept information — as a “thing of value” — would raise significant constitutional questions while trivializing the conduct, which is egregious because of the nature of the relationship, not the money value of the information. To rise to the level of conspiracy, there would need to be proof, for example, that (a) violations of U.S. law were orchestrated by the Russian regime, and ( b) Trump campaign officials knew about them and were complicit in their commission.
At the moment, there is no such evidence. We will have to see what the investigation yields.

That, however, is not the end of the matter. The framers included impeachment in the Constitution in order to address violations not just of law but also of the public trust — transgressions in the nature of abuse of power or that otherwise demonstrate unfitness for office. Among the most profound concerns of our Constitution’s authors was the specter of a president who aligned with a foreign power covertly and against U.S. interests.

Of course, a political remedy is subject to political considerations. On the matter of unsavory relations with Russia (and other regimes, for that matter), we have gotten in the habit of tolerating much that ought not be tolerated, from politicians of both parties. Trump’s relationship with Putin’s regime should not be examined in a vacuum. But that said, it must be examined.

Christopher Wray, President Trump’s nominee to replace James Comey as FBI director, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee at his confirmation hearing on Wednesday. He performed so well that key Democratic members of the committee such as Senator Dianne Feinstein said they were impressed and were inclined to vote for his confirmation. Senator Al Franken, a chronic skeptic of anything coming from the Trump administration, said to the nominee, “I think you had a good hearing today, and I wish you luck.”

Christopher Wray is eminently qualified for the position of FBI director, based both on his experience as well as his temperament. He served previously as a deputy attorney general in charge of the criminal division during President George W. Bush’s administration. Prior to that, his public service included a stint as assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, prosecuting individuals who committed a variety of crimes including bank robbery, gun trafficking, kidnapping and arson. Right after graduating from Yale Law School, he clerked for United States Court of Appeals Judge J. Michael Luttig, who described Mr. Wray as “balanced, thoughtful, deliberative” and “unflappable.”

Mr. Wray has a reputation for a calm demeanor. He avoids the limelight whenever possible. “Chris is a very gentle soul,” says Monique Roth, who served as his senior counsel at the Justice Department. “He’s not one of those grandstanders or ego-driven people. He’s very self-effacing and thoughtful.”

Indeed, Mr. Wray could be considered in one respect the antidote to Comey, who craved the spotlight. However, like Comey, he demonstrated his independence from political pressure while serving in the Bush Department of Justice. He joined Comey and Robert Mueller, who was then the FBI director and currently the special counsel overseeing the Russian investigation, in preparing to resign over a controversy involving a proposed domestic surveillance program.

Mr. Wray was asked repeatedly during his confirmation hearing whether, as FBI director, he would remain independent of the White House and partisan pressures. He assured the senators on several occasions that his loyalty would be only to the Constitution and the rule of law. He said that he was never asked to pledge his loyalty to the president and that he would not do so in any case. Mr. Wray said he would resign if asked by the president to do something he considered to be “illegal, unconstitutional or even morally repugnant” and could not talk the president out of taking that course of action.

“Nobody should mistake my low key demeanor for lack of resolve,” Mr. Wray declared. “Anybody who thinks that I would be pulling punches as the FBI director sure doesn’t know me very well.”

Mr. Wray offered his understanding of the FBI’s role, which is to do fact finding and accumulate evidence on which to base a recommendation whether to prosecute or not. Prosecutors, not the FBI, are responsible for the decision whether to prosecute. When asked whether former FBI Director Comey had acted responsibly in holding the press conference in which he held forth on his views of the Hillary Clinton e-mail imbroglio, Mr. Wray indicated what he would not do as FBI director. He said he would not hold a press conference disclosing derogatory investigatory information regarding an uncharged individual.

If Donald Trump recited “The Star-Spangled Banner” before a baseball game, it would be criticized as an alt-right dog whistle. So naturally spring-loaded opinions rained down in Poland after he delivered a defense of Western values.

Only this particular American president could say, “Let us all fight like the Poles—for family, for freedom, for country, and for God,” and elicit attacks from the left as sending subliminal messages to his isolated rural supporters, and from the anti-Trump right as a fake speech because he gave it. We live in a cynical age.

Angela Stent, a professor at Georgetown University, provided the reductio ad politics analysis: “He wants to show at least his domestic base that he’s true to all of the principles that he enunciated during the election campaign.”

The Trump “base.” It’s still out there, isn’t it?

It was conventional during the presidential campaign to think of the Trump candidacy as a beat-up bus caravan of marginalized American citizens, who someone called the deplorables. In the event, about half the total U.S. electorate somehow voted for the man who in Warsaw gave a speech that his opponent, Hillary Clinton—or any current Democrat—would never give.

To simplify: One side of this debate will never be caught in anything it considers polite company using that phrase of oppression—“the West.” Ugh.

For an enjoyably trenchant takedown of the left’s revulsion at the Trump speech, I recommend Robert Merry’s essay in the American Conservative, “Trump’s Warsaw Speech Threw Down the Gauntlet on Western Civilization.” As Mr. Merry says, this is a big, worthy debate, and one I think the Trump “base” instinctively understood in 2016.

In fact, that Warsaw speech on Western Civ was really about the current edition of the Democratic Party and its two-term leader, Barack Obama. Mr. Trump momentarily suppressed the urge to call out his opposition, so allow me.

The Trump “base” knew the 2016 presidential election—the contest between Mr. Obama’s successor and whoever would run against her—wasn’t just another election. It was a crucial event, deciding whether America would go on in the Western tradition as it had developed in the U.S. or continue its steady drift away from those ideas.

Progressives have an interest in ridiculing the Trump speech as a stalking horse for the heretofore obscure and microscopic alt-right because it deflects from their own political values—on view and in power the past eight years.

If there is one controlling Western idea developed across centuries in Europe, including by resort to war, it is that the individual person deserves formalized protection from the weight of arbitrary political authority, whether kings, clergy or dictators.

Bernard Bailyn, the great historian of the pre-revolution politics of the U.S. colonies, showed through a deep reading of colonial pamphleteering that the early Americans were ardently resentful of distant, central authority. CONTINUE AT SITE