What Will It Take to Beat Donald Trump?

Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both campaigned for, and won, the White House on the watchword “hope.” What watchword will it take for a Democrat to win this time?

My suggestion: soap.

Nearly three years into Donald Trump’s presidency, America needs a hard scrub and a deep cleanse. It needs to wash out the grime and grease of an administration that every day does something to make the country feel soiled.

Soiled by a president who, Castro-like, delivered a two-hour rant at a rally in Michigan the night he was impeached. Who described his shakedown of Ukraine as “perfect.” Who extolled the world’s cruelest tyrant as someone who “wrote me beautiful letters. … We fell in love.” Who abandoned vulnerable allies in Syria, then opted to maintain troops in the country “only for oil.” Who, barely a year before the El Paso massacre, demonized illegal immigrants who “pour into and infest our Country.”

The list goes on, and most everyone feels it. In June, the Pew Research Center published a survey on how the country sees the state of public discourse. The most striking finding: “A 59 percent majority of Republicans and Republican leaners say they often or sometimes feel concerned by what Trump says. About half also say they are at least sometimes embarrassed (53 percent) and confused (47 percent) by Trump’s statements.”

What’s true of Republicans is far more so of the rest of the United States. Pew found that overwhelming majorities of Americans were “concerned” (76 percent), “confused” (70 percent), “embarrassed” (69 percent), “angry” (65 percent), “insulted” (62 percent) and “frightened” (56 percent) by the things Trump says.

These numbers should devastate Trump’s chances of re-election. They don’t, for three reasons.

First, 76 percent of Americans rate economic conditions positively, up from 48 percent at the time of Trump’s election. Second, the progressive left’s values seem increasingly hostile to mainstream ones, as suggested by the titanic row over J.K. Rowling’s recent tweet defending a woman who was fired over her outspoken views on transgenderism. Third, the more the left rages about Trump and predicts nothing but catastrophe and conspiracy from him, the more out of touch it seems when the catastrophes don’t happen and the conspiracy theories come up short.

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No wonder Trump’s average approval ratings have steadily ticked up since the end of October. In the view of middle-of-the-road America, the president may be bad, but he’s nowhere near as bad as his critics say.

In that same view, while Trump’s critics might be partly right about him, they’re a lot less right than they believe. In a contest between the unapologetic jerk in the White House and the self-styled saints seeking to unseat him, the jerk might just win.

How to avoid that outcome?

The most obvious point is not to promise a wrenching overhaul of the economy when it shows no signs of needing such an overhaul. There are plenty of serious long-term risks to our prosperity, including a declining birthrate, national debt north of $23 trillion, the erosion of the global free-trade consensusthreats to the political independence of the Federal Reserve, and the popularization of preposterous economic notions such as Modern Monetary Theory.

But anyone who thinks blowout government spending, partly financed by an unconstitutional and ineffective wealth tax, is going to be an electoral winner should look at the fate of Britain’s hapless Jeremy Corbyn.

What would work? Smart infrastructure spending. New taxes on carbon offset by tax cuts on income and saving. Modest increases in taxes on the wealthy matched to the promise of a balanced budget.

What these proposals lack in progressive ambition, they make up in political plausibility and the inherent appeal of modesty. They also defeat Trump’s most potent re-election argument, which is that, no matter who opposes him, he’s running against the crazy left.

Hence the second point. Too much of today’s left is too busy pointing out the ugliness of the Trumpian right to notice its own ugliness: its censoriousness, nastiness and complacent self-righteousness. But millions of ordinary Americans see it, and they won’t vote for a candidate who emboldens and empowers woke culture. The Democrat who breaks with that culture, as Clinton did in 1992 over Sister Souljah and Obama did in October over “cancel culture,” is the one likeliest to beat Trump.

Finally, the winning Democrat will need to make Trump’s presidency seem insignificant rather than monumental — an unsightly pimple on our long republican experiment, not a fatal cancer within it. Mike Bloomberg has the financial wherewithal to make Trump’s wealth seem nearly trivial. Joe Biden has the life experience to make Trump’s attacks seem petty. Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar have the rhetorical skills to turn Trump’s taunts against him.

As with most bullies, the key to beating Trump is to treat him as the nonentity he fundamentally is. Wouldn’t it be something if his political opponents and obsessed media critics resolved, for 2020, to talk about him a little less and past him a lot more?

When your goal is to wash your hands of something bad, you don’t need a sword. Soap will do.

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Peggy Noonan: On Impeachment

A young foreign-affairs professional asked last week if the coming impeachment didn’t feel like Watergate. He was a child during that scandal, I in college. I said no, Watergate had the feeling of real drama, it was a reckoning with who we were as a people; it felt grave. This is more like the Clinton impeachment, grubby and small.

But watching the first day of hearings I thought that wasn’t quite right. There was something grave in it, and a kind of reckoning. This was due to the dignity and professionalism of the career diplomats who calmly and methodically told what they had seen and experienced. They were believable. It didn’t feel embarrassing to have faith in them.

Republicans on the panel didn’t know what to do. They know what this story is, and I believe they absolutely know the president muscled an ally, holding public money over its head to get a personal political favor. But they’re his party, they didn’t want to look weak, they had to show the base they had his back. In their interruptions and chaos-strewing they attempted to do some of what the Democrats did during the Kavanaugh hearings, only without the screaming meemies of Code Pink.

The Democrats were disciplined in their questioning and not bullying and theatrical, which was a surprise and unusual for them.

But the juxtaposition of the witnesses, the men of America’s diplomatic class, with the sullen, squirrelly, off-point Republicans, was what gave the hearing shape.

William B. Taylor Jr., acting ambassador to Ukraine, 72, was fifth in his class of 800 at West Point, where he was cadet battalion commander. Bronze Star, Vietnam, 82nd Airborne, 101st Airborne, 506th Infantry, Second Cavalry. After that, government work and diplomacy. He’s known for his modesty. You couldn’t be more impressive. Testifying along with him George P. Kent, younger and a different sort—studied Russian history and literature at Harvard and Johns Hopkins, speaks Ukrainian and Russian, 27 years in the foreign service.

They seemed to have capability and integrity. They weren’t deep state; they were old school, old style, not some big dope of a political donor, as all administrations have among their ambassadors, but the people who make it work, who maintain the standards, who keep it all up and running.

This is what I saw: the old America reasserting itself, under subpoena. They were American diplomats, with stature and command of their subject matter.

And the world was seeing it, and maybe thinking, “I remember them.” Older prime ministers and presidents in foreign capitals could be thinking, “I remember those pros, the bland Midwestern tough guys who knew their stuff. Good that they still exist.”

Quietly, smoothly, brick by brick, they gave their testimony and painted a picture that supports the charge that yes, Donald Trump muscled Ukraine.

To the week’s other attempt to make a case against the president:

I don’t like to beat up books, because they’re books; you can’t have enough data and argumentation and art; if you don’t like it, don’t read it. But “A Warning,” the White House insider exposé by “Anonymous,” is a poor piece of work, and something false at its heart shows a deep disrespect for the reader.

What we especially need in the political world now is guts, brains and sincerity. Anonymous does not offer them.

There’s nothing here that hasn’t already been said in a dozen books and a thousand articles. There is little first-person testimony telling us what the author saw, what was said, what happened, what it meant.

Halfway through I realized: Anonymous isn’t really hiding his identity, he’s hiding the major fact of that identity, which is that he is not a significant figure. The premise of the original article in the New York Times, of which this book is an expansion, was that he was a major player—a “senior official of the Trump administration”—who’s giving you what history needs, eyewitness testimony. But you get the impression the author wasn’t actually in the room where it happened, or not often. Not having new, first-person information he relies on high-class padding (thoughts on Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, the role of Congress) and style. The style is midlevel ad agency, clean but with no ballast. It is by the end irritating—shallow yet haughty, common yet pretentious, and full of clichés. His Trump “takes no prisoners” and “behind closed doors” damages “the fabric of our republic.” The president is historically and politically uninformed, inattentive in briefings, vengeful and dangerous, gets harebrained ideas, and says stupid things. Yes, we know. But you have to do more than assert.

Anonymous suggests he can’t be specific because it would blow his cover. But without specificity the work becomes contentless and devolves into mere rhetoric and polemic. And why not be specific and let people know who you are? It would make the truths you feel demand urgent expression more credible and concrete. There’s nothing dishonorable about thinking you are witnessing a catastrophe and telling the American people. But you have to look history in the face and take its punishments.

And in this case what punishments, anyway? You’ll be fired? You hate where you work! You’ll be insulted in tweets? So what? There are two Trump tweet lists in America, one with the names of those who’ve been attacked and the other with those who haven’t. The first is longer, and they’re still alive.

It is all so disguised, self-valorous and creepy.

Why was Anonymous there? He doesn’t really say. Since he saw the emptiness and danger early on, why didn’t he leave? “God knows,” he says, “it would have been easy.” He says he stayed because Mr. Trump is “a mess” and he wanted to help. But he gives no examples of how he helped. The fact is it’s hard to leave a White House. You’re unemployed, your office is gone, your old colleagues cool on you, and the neighbors are no longer impressed. Better to stay and simmer.

He claims “senior advisors and cabinet-level officials pondered a mass resignation, a ‘midnight self-massacre’ ” to draw the public’s attention to the White House disarray. But they didn’t go through with it. Why? “It would shake public confidence.” But diminishing public confidence in the administration was the point, no?

He refers to sensitive conversations that have not been declassified and vows not to speak of them—“such details have been omitted.” But it’s hard not to suspect he didn’t “omit” them, he didn’t know them.

“Trump wanted to use a domestic presidential power to do something absurd overseas, which for security reasons I cannot disclose.” Oh come on.