Don’t look now but Donald Trump is winning the War of Ideas

Special to WorldTribune.com

solBy Sol W. Sanders

Don’t look now but Donald K. Trump has won his war with the traditional media and the Hollywood luminaries.

In the process he has left the Democrats gasping for breath and searching for a missing program for action. It will take historians a while to figure out just what happened.

But our colleagues in the leading news media continue to carp at every misstep Trump makes, especially those sometimes uninspired uses of the alternative media.

Evan Vucci / AP

The fact is we have a politician who has learned to use these new communication tools to his advantage even when he sometimes does so awkwardly. That goes for a lesson to Hollywood’s politicians too who finally may be learning that while that whatever their popularity in their make-believe roles, they are rejected by the general population as authorities on government policy.

The naked truth is that neither the leading media titles nor Hollywood’s luminaries have accepted the fact that a rebellious public decided they would not take the instruction in the 2017 elections from what my Mother and a few of her rebellions old lady friends in retirement in Florida used to call “the all-rightnicks”.

They turned down both Establishments’ candidates. They voted in the outside choice as president – and even as their somewhat tainted continuing opponents’ opinion polls suggest, may even have increased their support.

And while nothing could be as dangerous as predicting where a free and vocal forgotten majority of the electorate is going to go in November, we are willing to lay a small wager that not only will they not follow the usual history of major losses for the incumbent president’s party, they may even boost the Republicans in the House – that minority who support him enthusiastically and those more lukewarm Trumpites – and nibble at that wavering stand-off in the Senate.

The confusion is rampant, of course. We have a major investigation that was supposed to sort out of the domestic mess under Robert Mueller, a man who seems to have turned leading such investigation into a profession. So far what we have from him and his commission is an expansion to other subjects than those they were originally named to find. [There was no Russian-Trump collusion, but growing evidence, to the contrary, that there has been a crossing of the palm with silver by the Russians and Hillary Clinton’s minions.]

There isn’t much of a secret in Trump’s success. As a successful businessman who inherited a small fortune and turned it into a gigantic one, he is a gambler. He proffers something out of the extraordinary – even his original slogan of “making America great again” – then doubling back to compromise with his adversaries,

The fact is he has gone on to successfully pass the greatest tax reduction in American history – the political effects will only be felt after this spring’s reductions are being calculated. He made an unsuccessful pass at the massive problem of the American health system, something that probably shouldn’t be undertaken in one piece of legislation anyway. He is well on his way toward a bombastic attack on the trade disparities the U.S. has given its European, Japanese, and more recently, Chinese partners. He won’t get those massive across the board tariffs he has proposed, but, of course, like his other policy exercises, he never expected to get all of it.

Note that a second term is almost an accepted fact in the general political discussion. That infuriates – and discombobulate his proponents even more – but one the majority of American voters probably now accept.

Sooner or later, the President is going to have to turn his full attention to foreign policy.

They are not problems which turned up only on his watch but have been around for a while and festering.

First, of course, is what to do about a rogue regime in North Korea which may be close to getting a transcontinental nuclear-clad missile. That would be an unbearable threat for U.S. domestic security and our role as leader of the Free World. It’s China’s direct and indirect support to Pyongyang that appears to be the Gordian’s knot which will have to be cut, not a small job.

In the Middle East, the festering mess Washington had faced since the beginning of the post-World War II is worse. Teheran’s aggressive revolutionary regime is under domestic pressure and the U.S. will have to find ways to apply non-military pressure, again sometimes despite our European allies’ greedy trade ambitions there. Not the least is the third threat – Vladimir Putin’s attempt to pick up the imperial roles of Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union. already threatening Ukraine and the Baltic states.

But then no one ever said the presidency of the U,S. was not a demanding job even when challenged by an inventive and original Trump, our first businessman to take on America’s business as business.