By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday, March 31, 2016
Donald Trump is not a details guy. From his checkered
experience in business, he draws this lesson: “One is to listen to your gut, no
matter how good something sounds on paper.”
Question: Who thinks that Donald Trump actually has read
the paper?
Asked at a town-hall meeting (which isn’t actually a
town-hall meeting, but we insist on calling these dog-and-pony shows that and
pretending that they are) to list the top three priorities of the federal
government, Trump responded: “Security, security, and security.” That the
candidate was stalling for time while his political mind, honed to the fine
edge of an old butter knife, ran through the possibilities was to be expected.
We are used to his filibustering by now. He was right to identify security as
the overriding concern of the U.S. government.
The federal enterprise was created to handle those tasks
that are by their nature interstate or national: War, relations with foreign
powers, international and interstate trade, immigration, and relations between
the states are the reasons it exists. A superior power is required to solve
problems that cannot be adjudicated by a single state, such as cooking up an
excuse for why Texas must be forced to honor your Massachusetts-issued
same-sex-marriage license while Massachusetts has no reciprocal obligation to
honor your Texas-issued concealed-carry permit, despite the pesky fact of gun rights
actually being right there in the Constitution and all. All right, maybe not
the best example. The federal government is necessary because it alone can
create and execute a program under which “aid” to foreign governments is
laundered back into the pockets of campaign contributors through
military-procurement rules. Okay, not a great example, either. But the federal
government does something useful, of that we are assured. It’s not like all
those thousands of federal factota hived up in Washington do nothing but sit
around and masturbate to Internet porn all day.
But the Trumpkin view of all Trumpkin enterprises is
expansive, demanding superlatives. And so Trump expanded. Other top federal
duties, he declared, included “health care, education . . . and then you can go
on from there.” Go on to where? “Housing, providing great neighborhoods.”
Anderson Cooper, tasked with the necessary duty of reminding Trump that this
contradicts everything he said until five minutes ago, asked: “Aren’t you
against the federal government’s involvement in education? Don’t you want it to
devolve to states?” Sure, Trump said, but — see if you can make anything of
this — we must consider the “concept of the country.” (If that sounds like a
cheesy theme hotel, well . . . ) And: “The concept of the country is the
concept that we have to have education within the country.” Indeed. Likewise,
he rejects the notion of a federally run health-care system, advocating instead
a “private” system that is . . . federally run, or, in Trump’s phrasing, led by
the federal government, in case you for some reason believe that “led by” and
“run by” mean different things when the federal government is involved — which
is to say, if you are a credulous rube.
One would think that a real-estate man from New York City
would have some appreciation of what kind of “great neighborhoods” are created
by federal policy, but one suspects that Trump is mainly unfamiliar with those
parts of New York between Central Park North and Yankee Stadium.
Trump, who until recently supported a Canadian-style
government-monopoly health-care system, says that the answer is in competition.
He’s partly right about that, but the idea that there is going to be robust
competition — strong enough to drive down prices and increase quality — under a
system led by the federal government is, forgive me for noticing, exactly the
thinking that produced the so-called Affordable Care Act, the Obamacare regime
that Trump professes to disdain.
Yes, professes:
His political donations helped sustain the Democratic politicians who created
it. Maybe you believe he is in earnest. Maybe you are a credulous rube. You can
believe that a guy whose preferred health-care policy was somewhat to the left
of the French model suddenly became a born-again Friedmanite in his seventh
decade walking this good green Earth, in much the same way that you can believe
that a man who had no moral reservations about the commercial vivisection of
human children for the purpose of accommodating sexual convenience suddenly
embraced Mother Teresa’s view of abortion at approximately the same politically
convenient moment.
Trump does not oppose big government. He believes that we
simply haven’t been doing it right. Trumpism, like the “true Communism” beloved
of Berkeley sophomores, has never been tried. Or so he thinks. Of course it
has: in Italy, in Germany, in Spain, in Venezuela — and here, under Woodrow
Wilson’s “war socialism” and the New Deal, which was little more than Wilsonian
war socialism filtered through Franklin Roosevelt’s sense of noblesse oblige. Trump, who has no
noblesse to oblige him, is constrained by no philosophy, no principle, and no
real knowledge of our constitutional order. To admit that there is something
that the federal government under Trump cannot do well is to admit that there
is something Trump cannot do well, and Trump cannot endure the thought.
Federally run health care? Sure, but it’ll be great this time around. A big
ugly federal footprint in education? If you cannot trust Donald Trump and his
third-grade reading skills to set education policy, who can you trust? And, of
course, expect the classiest housing
projects you’ve ever seen, because the government is going to build great
neighborhoods.
The concept of the country is well-ordered liberty with
the necessary evil of a federal government and a presidency that are severely
limited in their scope and ambition by provisions written into the Constitution
itself. The federal government has enumerated powers, and satisfying Donald
Trump’s bloated and cancerous sense of the importance of his own ridiculous
person is not one of them.
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