Trump’s
Speech: An Assessment
By Paul
Craig Roberts
February 07, 2019 "Information
Clearing House"
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Readers are requesting my take on President
Trump’s state of the union speech. Briefly,
judging by the polls taken by his hostile
critics—CNN and CBS—the speech was very
successful with 76% of the public expressing
approval. And this despite several years of
demonization of Trump by the presstitutes,
Democratic Party, former intelligence and FBI
officials, and a number of generals.
The
speech was successful, because Trump spoke
common sense and appealed for unity. He
emphasized restoring America’s greatness, a
Reagan theme, and he made it clear that the
Democrats’ policy of trying to discredit him and
get him out of office was preventing the
government from moving ahead with issues that
need addressing. I believe everyone knows this,
including the Democrats and the presstitutes.
When I
say the speech was successful, I mean for
Americans. Foreigners witnessing the
chant—USA-USA-USA—saw the “exceptionalism” that
has been Washington’s excuse for doing so much
damage to others in the 21st century. It is not
clear what viewers made of the congresswomen in
white with their hostile demeanor. Were the
white clothes meant to signify their purity in
contrast to Trump’s corruption or were the white
suits a sign of disapproval like the white dress
of the KKK meant disapproval of the black
politicians put in power by Reconstruction? What
did the Democratic Party gain by displaying
female members of Congress as Trump foes?
As for
Trump’s economic claims, they were largely based
in the official data. As I have emphasized for
many years, it is the official data that are
false.
Let’s
move to more important questions about the
speech.
A
country without defended borders is not a
country. If a country has no respect for its
borders, why does the country need a military to
repel invaders? Clearly, for the Democratic
Party the United States is some kind of
universalistic place where people from other
lands come and go at will unimpeded. Having
borders is nationalism, and nationalism has been
redefined from the patriotism it once was to
fascism. For Democrats, as for Macron and
Merkel, patriotism is the refusal to defend the
country’s borders. In other words, the
Democratic Party is now without any doubt the
party of The Camp of the Saints.
I don’t
think that the Democrats’ view of America is
shared by the American people. Many commentators
attribute the Democrats’ preference for massive
non-white immigration to a belief that the
immigrants will make the Democrats by far and
away the dominant party and bring about an era
of one party rule. Possibly Democrats are this
stupid, but the likely effect will be that the
immigrants themselves will rule.
As for
Trump himself, I think Trump was, and still is,
sincere. Whereas the Democrats are now the party
of victim groups, Trump focused on the plight of
ordinary Americans and on normalizing US
relations with Russia. Ordinary Americans, not
victim groups, are the backbone of the country.
America cannot be great if ordinary people have
dim prospects, and a government that is
provoking conflict with powerful opponents that
it itself has made into opponents has no time,
energy, or resources to devote to improving the
prospects of its population.
Nevertheless, sincere or not, Trump is misled on
many issues. For example, China has not stolen
US jobs. US jobs were exported to China by US
global corporations in order to enrich
themselves and their shareholders via lower
labor costs. It was American firms that took the
jobs to China.
Trump’s
worst defeat, a defeat that could result in the
destruction of the US and the world, is his
defeat on the Russian front. Russiagate has
achieved its purpose of forcing Trump off of his
agenda of improving the US/Russian relationship.
The military/security complex, the Mueller
“investigation,” the presstitutes, and the
Democratic Party have successfully characterized
all efforts to improve US/Russian relations as
collusion with the enemy. Trump has been forced
to impose more sanctions on Russia, to withdraw
from the Iran nuclear agreement, to withdraw
from the Intermediate Range Nuclear Treaty, and
to declare his intent to scrap the last
remaining arms control agreement in 2021.
These
agreements to control nuclear weapons and to
minimize the chance of their ever being used
were the work of many US and Russian governments
over decades. They have all now been scrapped at
the worst of all possible times. The
demonization of Russia and her President is part
of the attack on Trump, and the aggression in
the demonization creates the impression that
Western people are being prepared for an attack
on Russia. The US destruction of Iraq and Libya
followed the demonization of the countries and
their leaders, as did the US orchestrated ISIS
proxy attack on Syria. When Hillary Clinton, who
came close to being elected president, declared
Vladimir Putin to be “the New Hitler,” it
confirmed Moscow’s view created by US unilateral
withdrawal from arms control agreements that a
US nuclear first strike against Russia was being
planned.
As this
is the very last thing a sane government would
want, I have concluded that the US government is
insane.
This
fact should disturbe us far more than anything
else. Yet, as I, Stephen Cohen and a few others
have emphasized, the rapidity with which
Washington is pushing us to nuclear Armageddon
receives no attention.
It is
equally disconcerting that Trump, himself a
target of an ongoing coup to remove him from
office, has given his support to a coup to
remove the elected president of Venezuela and to
replace him with an unelected American stooge
who declared himself to be president.
That
Trump is conspiring against Maduro exactly as
the corrupt Obama conspired against the elected
presidents of Hondras and Ukraine leads me to
see poetic justice in the Democrat Party’s
conspiracy against Trump.
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of
the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate
editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was
columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News
Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many
university appointments. His internet columns
have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts'
latest books are
The Failure of Laissez Faire
Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West,
How America Was Lost,
and
The Neoconservative Threat to
World Order.
The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.
