How shall we view this guy called Donald J. Trump? - today's edition

I suppose the take to start with is the one garnering so much buzz on Twitter today: Joe Scarborough's over-the-top volley of slime:

Sixteen years of strategic missteps have been followed by the maniacal moves of a man who has savaged America’s vital alliances, provided comfort to hostile foreign powers, attacked our intelligence and military communities, and lent a sympathetic ear to neo-Nazis and white supremacists across the globe.

For those of us still believing that Islamic extremists hate America because of the freedoms we guarantee to all people, the gravest threat Trump poses to our national security is the damage done daily to America’s image. As the New York Times’s Roger Cohen wrote the month after Trump’s election, “America is an idea. Strip freedom, human rights, democracy and the rule of law from what the United States represents to the world and America itself is gutted.”

This is disgusting. It spits in the face of the first responders and those who died on 9/11 in the course of going to their jobs or boarding planes. As someone who strongly objects to most of what Donald Trump is about as a human being, I also resent the way it couches what is objectionable in the most polarizing terms. There is a way to sharply criticize Trump without getting into this kind of gratuitous hyperbole.

Then there's Victor Davis Hanson's take at NRO today. He's of course inclined to heartily applaud the Trump phenomenon overall, for reasons he outlines here, and which are compelling indeed. In each of several paragraphs, he makes clear just how Trump's habitual upsetting of the status quo has moved the needle on some previously sclerotic fronts: forthrightly letting China know we're onto their unfair trade practices, speaking candidly to NATO about its tepid contribution to European defense, dropping this pretense that "refugees" are at the core of the knot of issues regarding the Palestinians (by cutting off funding to their UN "relief" fund), recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital, and these undeniably great moves:

No one really believed that the Iran deal would stop Iranian nuclear proliferation, or even prune back Iran-backed terrorism. The deal’s asymmetrical nocturnal ransom-for-hostages payments, its myriad exceptions to spot inspections, and its inability to check ballistic-missile construction were all ignored. The fallback excuse for the deal was that it would take a little longer for Iran to gain nuclear weapons, and would make Iran a little nicer to the United States. Yet few even believed those yarns. And no one had been willing to invoke a crisis with Iran by saying so. So we shrugged that the Iran deal was bad, but it was at least our bad deal — and then Trump dashed our illusions.

Serious people assumed that the Paris climate accord was even more ridiculous than the Kyoto protocol — grandstanding without any real collective enforcement effort to address “climate change.” All agreed that the vast production and utilization of natural gas de facto made America the most effective major nation in reducing carbon emissions, far more effective than supposedly greener Europe. The elite assumed as well that the Paris deal was a blueprint for expropriating Western wealth and redistributing it to the non-West. All publicly praised it; none privately liked it. And now it’s gone with a whimper, not a bang.

Blocking the construction of the Keystone pipeline and the opening of the ANWAR oil fields to energy development had become iconic #Resistance causes. We knew the pipeline would streamline energy transference and likely take the burden off more dangerous rail and truck transportation, and that ANWAR would help to achieve U.S. energy independence or at least increase national wealth. So now both are under construction and development. The nation yawns its assent.

Even the proponents of open borders — Democratic strategists, Latino activists, corporate employers, the Mexican government — privately concede that without a border there is no nation, that walls work (as fences and walls do around their own yards), and that they would not wish to conduct their own lives on the principles of picking and choosing which laws to follow.

What bothers me about the tone of Hanson pieces in the last couple of years is that he seems to assume that only a personality and background like Trump's could set the table for all these great bold moves. I beg to differ. A number of the actual conservatives who ran for president in 2016 would have done likewise, and without the boorishness and bombast.

Dennis Prager, also at NRO, focuses on the should-a-president-be-a-role-model-to-children angle and concludes no, that the above cited policy accomplishments are what we hired the guy for, and that that's enough.

If your house were on fire, would you be more concerned with the character of the firefighters sent to extinguish the fire or their firefighting ability?

Finally, there's Erick Erickson at The Resurgent. In the course of a piece that's mainly about Ben Sasse, he makes this point:

Ben Sasse talks a fantastic game. When he laments a Congress whose members would rather be TV pundits than lawmakers, people cheer. When he talks about Congress not fulfilling its core functions, people take notice. But the response from some is that Sasse himself is all talk and no action. The growing chorus from Trump supporters it that Ben Sasse is a disloyal do-nothing who criticizes the President with no record to show for it.

On the latter, it is worth noting that Sasse has voted for the President's Obamacare repeal, tax cuts, and judges. In fact, Sasse has been not just a reliable vote for conservatives, but also for most of President Trump's agenda. To the extent Sasse has been critical of President Trump, a great deal of it has been about the President using powers Congress abdicated and needs to take back -- a view many of those who are now attacking him held with him when Obama was President. The other prominent criticisms from Sasse towards the President are about the President's conduct in office -- criticisms shared by even a lot of Republicans.

That is really the point. The people attacking Sasse have little to attack with Sasse's votes. They are not attacking Sasse for upholding the conservative principles they claim to have. They are attacking him for being disloyal to a man -- they are in a cult of personality.

Which gets us back to Hanson, who articulates his position with a historian's erudition and an appeal to the facts on the ground - there have been momentous changes in a year and a half - but who, bottom line, has come to admire the very qualities that embarrass those of us in the Erickson-Sasse camp.

This is a noteworthy stratum of the Trump-enthusiasm camp: Those who spoke plainly about what an uncouth blowhard he is during the last election cycle, but now dismiss Trump's distasteful qualities, or think they somehow make for his effectiveness. Bookworm, whose intellect I must still respect, but whose hypocrisy in the area of moral requirement (she sure doesn't want her kids to turn out with the level of character Trump exhibits) I can't respect at all. She recently actually called Trump a "patriot with a heart of gold."

No, the way to view Trump is the way LITD has viewed him since the election. He accomplishes a lot of laudable things because those he respects as being able to tell him what looks like winning have his ear. That's why he's moved the needle on the above-enumerated fronts. Other than that, he's doing great harm to American culture and is indeed unnecessarily ruffling the feathers of allies.

I think maybe Andrew McCarthy, writing at The Hill, puts it best:

Many people on both sides of the political divide complain that our discourse is broken. It won’t be repaired until we stop portraying our political opponents as treasonous enemies; and until each side unambiguously condemns activists of any stripe who cross the line from legitimate dissent into violence and the techniques of disruption that make civil discourse impossible.

Time to get a grip.

I won't call either the Scarboroughs of this world nor the Sean Hannities treasonous, but I can't work up much civility for them, either. Tribalist absolutism is damn hard to deal with cordially.  I think McCarthy is basically saying, "Knock it off with that stuff."