RUTHFULLY YOURS

You hear it all the time from Trump supporters: “I like a lot of what he’s done, especially the judges and tax cuts. But I wish he’d stop tweeting and picking fights. I wish he acted more presidential and stopped insulting reporters, entertainers, senators, foreign leaders and Gold Star families.”

Sounds right, seems smart. Yet for millions of Trump voters it misses the point entirely. Mr. Trump’s style is part of his substance. His most loyal supporters back him because of, not despite, his brash behavior. He would not be in the Oval Office today had he followed a conventional path or listened to the advisers telling him to tone down his rhetoric and discipline his behavior. If Republican primary voters had wanted a border wall, tax cuts and sound judges without the drama, they could have picked Ted Cruz. Instead they elected Mr. Trump for exactly the reasons that the mainstream media, late-night comics, and party elites cannot stand him.

GOP voters have traditionally demanded their leaders demonstrate fealty to conservative principles through life experience: by offering a spiritual conversion story, standing with a supportive spouse and children, talking about the deer bagged during last year’s hunting season. The apparent authenticity mattered, given that many competing politicians converged around the same policies. Hence the damage when a candidate came across as inauthentic, as in 2007 when Mitt Romney said he had hunted “a number of times,” mostly “small varmints.”

The reality was that voters trusted candidates who were like them in beliefs, habits and appearance. Knowing this, candidates tried to find common ground with regular people. That’s why Democrats in red states cut ads showing them shooting guns and professing their faith. It’s why Marco Rubio repeatedly told the story of his father, the immigrant bartender, and why John Kasich offered paeans to his father, the mailman.

But what was really achieved by all those years of supporting politicians with perfect church attendance and lifetime memberships in the National Rifle Association? Relatively little in enacted legislation. That’s why in 2016, after years of broken promises about repealing ObamaCare, balancing the budget and imposing term limits, conservative voters decided they’d had enough. They decided to support someone whose primary virtue was that he would not back down from fighting for them. CONTINUE AT SITE

The unveiling of the portraits of the Obamas for the National Portrait Gallery puts me in mind of Winston Churchill’s reaction to the ghastly Graham Sutherland portrait (left) presented to him for his 80th birthday, which Churchill (a talented painter in his own right, keep in mind—see his great short essay “Painting as a Pastime”) called “a remarkable example of modern art,” to much laughter in the audience. That was, of course, his way of saying he didn’t like it. Clementine Churchill later had the painting destroyed in a backyard bonfire, which the artist, Sutherland, complained bitterly was “an act of vandalism.”

The real vandalism was letting Sutherland paint Churchill in the first place. And ponder the vandalism that is the official portraits the Obamas apparently chose for themselves and approve. You may think the Obamas simply have no taste, but the departure from the traditional mode of presidential portraits is yet another subtle signal of their contempt for American traditions. They won’t have the good sense to throw these ghastly portraits on a bonfire. (And remember: Trump is vulgar.)

To the contrary, these portraits fuel the bonfire of their vanities, especially their vanity of being different and better than the ordinary run of Americans and the presidents they followed. Just take a look, and spot the one that doesn’t belong:

When your entire public life has been blessed with the adulation of courtiers it can be very difficult not merely to determine how many of their hosannas are genuine but also the worth of what you imagine to be your own good taste.

Take Barack Obama, for example. The only editor of the Harvard Law Review never to have contributed a bylined essay to the publication, he was nevertheless hailed by admirers as a genius of jurisprudence. Make a dreadful mess of US policy and actions in the Middle East and those blunders are deemed to be of no accord. An ambassador is butchered in Libya and the grim facts of his murder are draped in layers of lies about an obscure YouTube clip allegedly prompting an entirely understandable reaction on the part of Islam’s faithful. No matter what Obama’s offence against competence, truth and US national interests, a claque of editorialists could be counted on to pound their keyboards in his defence.

Having for so long been bathed in the admiration of sycophants and the feting of toadies, Obama’s newly unveiled official portrait testifies to the perils of accepting flattery as fact. The picture, reproduced above, is perhaps the biggest advertisement for oddness since the New York Post profiled a nasty piece of work with the memorable front-page headline “Ghadafi Goes Daffy: Libyan leader is a transvestite druggie.”

What is the artist, Kehinde Wiley, trying to say? That Obama needs be regarded as a somewhat advanced form of vegetation? That he is the fairy at the bottom of the garden? That his most notable achievement was using White House antiques as outdoor furniture? Don’t laugh, all those options are possibilities from an artist whose earlier schtick was the depiction of black women brandishing the severed heads of white people.

Apparently Obama likes it, which tells you everything you need to know about the man and his judgement.

New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik purports to care about black lives—except when doing so would violate liberal nostrums. In an essay on the nation’s 20-year crime drop, inspired by New York University sociologist Patrick Sharkey’s new book, Uneasy Peace, Gopnik declares that the “urban crime wave is over.” Anyone who has recently raised an alarum about crime—that would be Donald Trump, of course—is appealing to “preexisting bigotry.” Trump campaigned “against crime and carnage where it scarcely exists,” Gopnik writes, in order to exploit the “fetishistic role” of crime in the racist American imagination.

Let’s look at what Gopnik calls crime that “scarcely exists.” In 2016, candidate Trump spoke repeatedly about the rising bloodshed in inner cities. That year was the second in a two-year, 20-percent increase in the nation’s homicide rate, the largest in nearly half a century. Violent crime overall rose nearly 7 percent in 2015 and 2016—the largest consecutive one-year increases in a quarter-century. Up until 2015, crime had been steadily dropping across the country, thanks to the spread of data-driven, proactive policing and the use of determinate sentencing to lock away violent criminals. But as 2014 drew to a close, that 20-year crime drop stalled and then reversed itself.

The victims of the 2015 and 2016 homicide increase were overwhelmingly black. In 2014, there were 6,095 black homicide victims, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports. In 2015, there were 7,039 black homicide victims; in 2016, there were 7,881 black homicide victims. Those 7,881 dead black bodies in 2016 comprised more than half the total homicide victims that year, though blacks are only 13 percent of the population. An additional 2,731 blacks were killed over the course of 2015 and 2016 compared with 2014. To Gopnik, that loss of an additional 2,731 black lives is not worth paying attention to—it “scarcely exists.”

Trump regularly referred to Chicago’s crime increase during the presidential campaign. In 2016, 4,300 people were shot in Chicago—one person every two hours. The victims were overwhelmingly black. Two dozen children under the age of 12 were shot in Chicago in 2016, among them a three-year-old boy mowed down on Father’s Day 2016 who is now paralyzed for life, and a ten-year-old boy shot in August whose pancreas, intestines, kidney, and spleen were torn apart. Those child victims were also overwhelmingly black. Trump called those Chicago shootings and others like them in Baltimore and St. Louis “carnage.” What does Gopnik call them? A mere “bump or burp in the numbers.” If 4,300 white people had been shot in any city of the country, there would be a revolution. But because the victims were black, it would be dog-whistle racism to call attention to them. Racism once consisted of ignoring black-on-black violence as a fact of nature that was beneath concern. It is a bizarre twist in contemporary liberalism that drawing attention to the black victims of street crime is now the racist position. This deflection has come about in order to avoid acknowledging that the perpetrators of this crime are black, too. So it is better to look away entirely.