Trump’s Summer of Malaise
Legacy still stands, but power is being squandered after Court rebuke, JD’s Iran surrender, and other missteps.
“This was supposed to be the Summer of George!”
So declared the Seinfeld character George Costanza about an ambitious summer that began with his hope that he would “taste the fruits” of the good life but ended in wasted time and squalor.
Will it be so with President Donald Trump, who could have expected a sunny respite in the latter half of his sixth year in the White House, the one before likely setbacks in his final midterm elections and the point when talk about decreased stamina, succession, and lame-duck status grows inexorably louder?
As July commences, the prospect of a successful season is peeling away.
Egged on by Vice President JD Vance, who is cultivating anti-Israel ideologues as a potential activist pillar of a presidential run, Trump agreed to a framework for Iran that ultimately will leave Tehran as the perceived victor of the Iran War that Trump himself commanded.
As part of the Vance capitulation, the Trump administration has now allowed Iran to sell oil in U.S. dollars for the first time in 17 years, and for U.S. companies to buy Iranian oil for the first time in 31 years.
While the Treasury Department waiver that allows Tehran to do so is limited to a 60-day negotiating period, many analysts expect the waiver, and the talks themselves, to lurch on indefinitely. Regardless, the Iranians and the rest of the world know the heat is off.
The administration has already all but overlooked Iranian violations of the ceasefire meant to test Washington’s resolve. More broadly, since the war began, Tehran has demonstrated a long-suspected ability and newfound willingness to disrupt global energy markets by manipulating the Strait of Hormuz. These events now overshadow Trump’s significant accomplishments in increasing U.S. oil and gas production.
Proceeds from Iranian oil sales, as well as unfrozen funds, will eventually get Americans killed. If there are reformers in Iran--and Vance assures the public, “They’re certainly talking differently than they have in the past”--one can bet those liberal reformers who still hang people for being gay or having the wrong opinion won’t get the newly flowing money. It will instead go to its current beneficiaries: the hardline IRGC, Hezbollah, and others who live to export terrorism and kill Americans.
“H-1B JD”
Once thought to be an asset and natural successor to Trump, Vance has transitioned into a liability and has harmed Trump politically, especially among congressional Republicans.
Unkind wags who previously labeled the vice president “H-1B JD” for his deference to Silicon Valley immigration practices and his Indian-American wife have now added “Jihad JD,” “Neville Vance,” “JCPOA JD,” and “Vichy Vance” to the mix.
Furthermore, there is now a real question whether Trump can freely handpick his successor in office, a standard measure of a truly successful president after two terms. Examples include Theodore Roosevelt, who chose William Taft; Ronald Reagan, who chose George H. W. Bush; and Franklin Roosevelt, who chose himself.
Publicly, all Democrats oppose the Iran deal. Privately, congressional Republicans are also in disbelief. Not just some: effectively all.
So too are the Gulf Arab allies of America who stuck their necks out to support U.S military operations and must now deal with an enraged and eventually enriched Iran.
China
The Iran debacle comes on the heels of a lackluster summit between Trump and Chinese dictator Xi Jinping in Beijing. Critics contend that Trump conceded an unprecedented willingness to consult China over arms sales to Taiwan in exchange for some pageantry and a gift box of mysterious oriental virility powders.
A more coherent explanation of the trip, that Trump was tactically easing rhetoric on China while his administration finds alternative sources of critical minerals and rebuilds America’s military posture in the Pacific, was never made and might not be true.
No one really seems to know.
Xi was confident enough after the summit to ignore even Trump’s request for the humanitarian release of two dissidents, an easy personal favor to warm relations that Xi has rudely declined so far. Xi will come to Washington for a state visit in late September, which creates hope for more tangible outcomes.
Supreme Setback
Deepening Trump’s summer of malaise, yesterday the Supreme Court dealt the president a blow by rejecting his executive order restricting the birthright citizenship that is guaranteed by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. The vote among the justices was 6-3 to uphold a lower court’s injunction.
It should have been 9-0 and the staffers who had Trump sign the order should have known they were setting him up for predictable failure.
The Amendment’s language is simple: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
The tinfoil hat crowd contends that the “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” phrase means the Amendment does not apply to children of illegal immigrants, even though such children are plainly subject to U.S. criminal jurisdiction. The contemporaneous understanding of the Amendment’s authors in 1866 was that the clause was meant to exclude Indians whose allegiance at the time was legally tied to their tribal nations, as well as the offspring of foreign diplomats and enemy soldiers occupying U.S. territory, whose primary allegiance remained with another nation.
Conservatives, including the three justices who dissented, used to believe that the Constitution meant what it said. For example:
Second Amendment: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
Tenth Amendment: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Historically, lefty judges and lawyers thought that such enumerated rights had unwritten “penumbras, formed by emanations,” as Justice William Douglas wrote in 1965. They asserted that the Constitution was a “living document” subject to their reimagination.
How convenient.
Conservatives thought the Constitution meant what it said. (We’ll come back another time to the collapse of 10th Amendment federalism even among some on the right.)
The same special people who have misled Trump on Iran misled him on birthright citizenship. The tinfoil hat crowd doesn’t seem to care about the consequences for the nation of a multigenerational stateless class that would have emerged if the 14th Amendment had been curtailed. Put simply, if you like the way Gaza functions, you’ll love a future USA without birthright citizenship.
Opponents of the Amendment as written also ignore the risk to other individual rights if Republicans further adopt the left’s mystical ability to reimagine the Constitution via penumbras and emanations they can read between the lines of the written Constitution and law.
As Mark Simon and I discussed in video linked above last year with John Yoo, the former U.S. official and legal scholar, the remedies to abuse of birthright citizenship can be accomplished by deportation and immigration control, including steps Trump has already implemented—as well as legislation restricting travel by women late in their pregnancies or forfeiture of an expensive bond if they do not agree to renounce their child’s citizenship if they give birth during travel.
Conservatives have fared relatively well in the Court’s recent spate of decisions, including victories on gun rights and presidential power. But Trump attended arguments in person for the birthright citizenship case he has now lost, an unprecedented act that marked it as his top judicial agenda item.
Vance and the tinfoil hat crowd have accentuated the negative for Trump.
The Legacy Thing
Despite these setbacks, Trump’s administration remains intact and the president’s legacy is secure.
Two references come to mind.
The first is from the late, irrepressible Jesse Helms, longtime senator from North Carolina. In May 2000, as Bill Clinton’s pointless administration slouched to its end, and as his aides and the media tried to spruce up his reputation before losing the 2000 elections to Republicans, Helms remarked on the Senate floor: “So, Mr. Clinton is in search of a legacy. La-di-da. He already has one.”
The point, of course, was that late-game PR shinola was not going to change history’s eventual verdict on Bubba’s presidency.
The other comes from the Evans-Novak Political Report, a paid newsletter that had its heyday in the 1980s and spoke from the insider right.
As an intern on Wall Street at Oppenheimer in the summer of 1995, I stumbled on old copies filed away and gave them a look, since the bank had not only subscribed but retained the copies for nearly a decade.
Expecting ardent support for Reagan, I instead found dissent. This struck me as odd because by the mid-1990s, when I read the reports, conservatives had begun to succeed in defining Reagan’s success accurately, despite the best efforts of the liberal media, squish Republicans, and that cadre of lefty academic losers known as presidential historians.
And yet here were some of the demurs from those newsletters and other articles they wrote in the later Reagan years:
One headline from 1987 declared “A President Dealing From Weakness,” especially after the stock market crash that year.
“A Sad Week for Old Reaganites” was the intonation after Reagan hosted Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev for a state visit in Washington.
In 1986, ironically the peak year of Reagan buildup defense spending, they worried that allies saw Reagan “presiding over the dissolution of American influence.”
Today, conservatives and others familiar with history see Reagan as the greatest president since Franklin Roosevelt. Reagan reversed American decline, transformed the economy, and defeated European communism. The point is that on-side grumbling is common, does not reverse past achievements, but still should not be ignored.
Trump too already has a legacy of greatness. He has transformed the economy, ended globalism, secured America’s borders, ushered the New Right into power, and mortally wounded the left’s deadly and impoverishing civic religion of climate change alarmism.
But he could do better. When the summer of malaise ends and is followed by elections likely shaped by an energetic left, Trump will face fundamental decisions on policy and personnel if he wants the final two years of his administration to matter much.
