No president has ever made me rethink reality like Donald Trump.
Observing the way the president thinks is a new revelation every day. By the time I stretch my mind around what he is envisioning, he is already lightyears ahead, well into manifesting the next thing or things. He sees all of this all at once, too. He is bringing a lifetime of thinking and envisioning to his current job.
When I was a child, lamenting the loss of my beloved woods and dunes to real estate developers, my mother challenged one of them who had built a McMansion on a plot we had been told was a protected zone. He told her, “You just don’t know how to get things done.”
I spent most of my life despising developers after that. But then, people like me who think inside the lines — rule-followers — don’t change the Manhattan skyline.
This way of thinking is not instinctive to us conservatives. It’s like turning a battleship around, as they say. But once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Ayn Rand created a wonderful metaphor in her seminal novel, Atlas Shrugged:
The great oak tree had stood on a hill over the Hudson, in a lonely spot of the Taggert estate. Eddie Willers, aged seven, liked to come and look at that tree. It had stood there for hundreds of years, and he thought it would always stand there. Its roots clutched the hill like a fist with fingers stuck into the soil, and he thought if a giant were to seize it by the top, he would not be able to uproot it, but would swing the hill and the whole of the earth with it, like a ball at the end of a string. He felt safe in the oak tree's presence; it was a thing that nothing could change or threaten; it was his greatest symbol of strength.
One night, lightning struck the oak tree. Eddie saw it the next morning. It lay broken in half, and he looked into its trunk as into the mouth of a black tunnel. The trunk was only an empty shell; its heart had rotted away long ago; there was nothing inside - just a thin gray dust that was being dispersed by the whim of the faintest wind. The living power had gone, and the shape of it left had not been able to stand without it.
And now, thanks to President Trump’s visionary leadership, that’s (sadly) how I feel about the national and global order I grew up with. It's already gone; I just didn't see that before.
Trump’s penchant for renaming places on the map seemed at first to be an amusing distraction, an FU to the name-changing zealots on the left. You change Mt. McKinley to Denali? Bam! Now you’ve got the Gulf of America.
But what if it was just an hors d’oeuvre, and the main course is yet to come?
I remember being horrified when President Barack Obama snubbed England. Like most good Northeasterners, I had been raised securely within America's European ancestry. I learned the Western canon and the romance languages, and summered visiting ancient cities and family and friends on the Continent. Culturally, I was a true Anglophile. Then Obama removed the bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office, and he gave the UK the cold diplomatic shoulder. “That’s our closest ally, our predecessor!” I fumed at the time.
Since then, there’s been a decade of communism-fication and transformation in the UK, and I have long since realized that the old saying, “There will always be an England,” may not turn out to be true after all. The Old World that I have always considered America’s next of kin no longer exists. What are we even clinging to anymore?
Even as this sad reality dawns on me, Trump is already a year into creating the future. He has resurrected and supercharged the Monroe Doctrine and cast our lot within our own hemisphere. At the same time, he is seemingly rupturing our connection to Europe. And while I have long seethed at the EU’s antipathy towards its native population, hostility to liberties such as free speech, and self-obliterating importation of third-world planters, it never occurred to me that we could just jettison those losers.
Can we even do that?
Trump doesn’t just think so — he’s doing it. No more favored status for our wayward cousins. From making them pay their own way for defense, pharmaceuticals, and more, to tariffing them just as he would any other country that opposes his policy, the president has zero sentimentality for the civilization that Europe once was. He sees it as it is and as it will be.
And why stop there? Maybe we really can’t live with these people anywhere anymore. I even see it locally, in neighboring towns and civic organizations. These people show up in any place that works well, eventually seize power, and then make it suck. Americans have been muttering about a national divorce, even a new civil war, since Obama began his “fundamental transformation” of our country. His unprecedented expansion of executive branch powers set off a 17-year (and counting) bout of the nation careening from one extreme to the other every four years. How long can it hold together under these profound lurches from side to side?
Is the Trumpian upending of established political bonds and creation of new ones a truly fluid situation? How far ahead is he looking? Do we have a once-in-centuries opportunity here? What else is possible? Just off the top of my head, how about this for a national divorce:
Of course, the conservative in me is howling now. The silhouette of the United States altered! We would have to change the flag!
But as everyone keeps saying, Trump isn't a conservative. The conservatives today are the leftists howling for a return to the days of unfettered illegal immigrant invasion, taxpayer money lavished on Marxist transformation, and Christianity and traditionalism obliterated under an avalanche of newly invented LGBTQetc. "rights."
It's hard to say if President Trump is creating the future or simply realigning the system to what he already sees. At any rate, he continues to be the most visionary leader of my lifetime, and likely all of modern history.
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