It has been exactly one year since I stood on the National Mall on January 20, 2017 and watched the inauguration of President Donald Trump.
I’ve made no secret of the fact that I believe my skepticism was entirely justified. If anything is true, I look back on my old posts and see that I wasn’t skeptical enough. Of all the voices in the Alt-Right, I can at least claim that I was one of the very first to stop drinking the Trump koolaid. I became sharply critical of Trump during the transition when I saw the nature of the Cabinet, the agenda that was taking shape and the attitude of the Alt-Lite which telegraphed what soon followed.
At the end of Year One, this is where we are now:
- Confederate monuments have been torn down throughout the South as the backlash against the Trump administration has been channeled into erasing history. There has been little pushback from the Republican Party outside of a heritage preservation law in Alabama and a few tweets.
- Doug Jones occupies Jeff Sessions’s old Senate seat which is a political feat that I considered impossible but which has been realized due to Mitch McConnell’s intervention in Republican primaries.
- The Alt-Right has been banned from every major crowdfunding platform.
- The Alt-Right has been censored on mainstream social media platforms (Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, YouTube).
- The Antifa violence at the Trump inauguration augured a massive uptick in leftwing political violence in the streets, not a crackdown or the return of “law and order.”
- The Overton Window moved as homosexuality was mainstreamed on the Right.
- The Alt-Right was unanimously condemned by the Republican Congress for the violence in Charlottesville.
- The Trump administration attacked the Syrian government. We have begun an indefinite occupation of parts of Syria because our aim is to oust Bashar al-Assad.
- The Trump administration has attempted incite a revolution against the Iranian government.
- The Trump administration has armed Ukraine.
- The Republican Congress voted to impose sanctions on Russia.
- Montenegro has joined NATO which has been declared “no longer obsolete.”
- Jerusalem has been recognized as the capital of Israel. Congress also voted to spend $770 million on Israel’s missile defense programs and defund the Palestinian Authority and United Nations over anti-Israel bias.
- Sholom Rubashkin has been released from prison after his sentence was commuted.
- President Trump’s signature legislative accomplishment is Larry Kudlow’s tax cuts which preserved the carried interest loophole and didn’t add a border tax.
- Most of the year was squandered on healthcare reform that went nowhere. Although the Obamacare individual mandate was gutted, the issue remains a political quagmire with expensive rates.
- There is no border wall.
- Deportations are down from a year ago.
- The trade deficit is up.
- Congress hasn’t passed an infrastructure bill.
- Congress passed a $700 billion NDAA which further bloated the military and set aside a $65 billion dollar slush fund for future overseas wars.
- Steve Bannon was removed from the White House and lost his perch at Breitbart.
- Jared Kushner and Gary Cohn won the power struggle in the West Wing.
If you think I am being overly negative here, I will grant you the following:
- ISIS has been destroyed. This was mainly due to Russia and Iran’s intervention in Syria, but it was also wiped out in Iraq which is something to celebrate.
- The Trans-Pacific Partnership is dead.
- Wall Street has been on a roll since the election.
- We pulled out of the Paris climate agreement.
- It appears there have been massive cuts to the refugee program. We’re on track to admit significantly fewer refugees in FY 2018.
- The US economy has heated up. Unemployment is down. More people believe the economy is doing well.
- There has been significant action on the energy front: ANWR has been opened up, the Keystone Pipeline was approved, the outer continental shelf was opened up to drilling.
- Neil Gorsuch was confirmed to the Supreme Court. President Trump has appointed a record number of federal judges. There is still a question mark on how these judges will rule.
- The Muslim ban is now in effect in a limited form. Unfortunately, it applies to North Korea, Venezuela, Chad and Iran which aren’t known for producing terrorists.
- Fewer illegal aliens are crossing into the United States. There was a big dip in the first half of 2017. It has bounced back since then, but illegal immigration isn’t as big a problem as it was in the 2000s.
- President Trump has slashed regulations in a number of areas.
- In spite of all the bellicose rhetoric and aggressive posturing abroad, we have managed to avoid getting embroiled in a war in Iran, Syria and North Korea.
The overall picture that emerged in Year One of the Trump administration was a sharp pullback from the revolutionary nationalist populist rhetoric of the campaign and a sharp turn back toward the policies of mainstream conservatism. The MAGA agenda was shelved aside from the few moves that were made at the very beginning of the Trump administration when Steve Bannon was still in power – killing the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Muslim ban, cutting the refugee program.
After all the talk about the big uprising against globalism and political correctness, the Trump administration celebrated every politically correct holiday on the multiculturalist calendar and recommitted itself to all the existing globalist institutions from the UN to NATO to the WTO. Instead of huge tariffs and rightwing deportation squads, Chinese imports and immigration enforcement on the Mexican border hasn’t changed much under the Trump administration.
Basically, we haven’t gotten much of what we wanted, but things could be worse. The economy could have plunged into a recession. We could have stumbled into a war in Syria. Year Two begins with significantly less political capital in Washington as we hurtle toward the 2018 midterm elections. Year Two also opens in a defining moment for the Trump administration with ZOG’s Shutdown over DACA.
Note: OD is going to do a much better job covering every twist and turn of the Trump administration in Year Two.
A magesterial analysis HW, albeit a sobering one.
A good article; this is my first visit to the site overall, and I’m generally impressed. However those “regulation cuts” Trump made, served only his billionaire corporate buddies; our national parks are now open to oil-drillers and the like. Teddy Roosevelt must be spinning in his grave. Trump’s “policies” seem to change every afternoon, after he talks to his daughter. As I’ve said for many years, If It Looks Like A Rich Capitalist, Don’t Vote For It. Not that elections really mean all that much; the REAL bastards in power, behind the scenes, remain there. Not all will agree with the modern Fascist view, but for anyone interested, check out “The New Fascism: An Idea Whose Time Has Come,” on Lulu.com. So much for the free plug, thank you. … After watching the video from Sweden, it seems to me that those guys are gonna have to realize that they must FIGHT. Cops are not sacred; they are the fist of the state. Let them stand with us, or stand out of our way.
I am disappointed. True, Trump has some important accomplishments, but my two main issues in 2016 were foreign policy and immigration, legal and illegal.
On foreign policy we got Jorge W Bush, part two (regime change, even greater subservience to Israel) and a big dose of Obama (increased hostility to Russia– lethal weapons to Ukraine, seizing and searching diplomatic property, which is a huge violation of the Vienna Convention).
Nothing much in the way of curbing and reversing illegal immigration.
I would vote Trump if I had it to do over again because the alternative was so f***ing bad. It would be a vote against Clinton rather than an enthusiastic vote for Trump.
Just goes to prove-politicians are never to be admired or trusted until they’ve actually earned it by delivering what was promised.
Election campaigns and actually holding office are two different things. Perhaps it wasn’t all Trumps fault, but to the average citizens, none of that matters. He was voted in based on what he said, and they rightly expected results.
Democracy is a farce. Don’t waste your time voting anymore. It will do nothing.
@john
Ironically Democrats always do what they say and usually a lot more.
@Professional,
Yes, thats right. The Jews and elites behind the
scenes do allow change, so long as its the right kind of change….and that usually means changes that benefit minorities, never us.
Democaracy is not a farce… it is a RELIGION, John. Andrew Fraser (a Canadian, living in OZ) in his follow-up to ‘The WASP Question’, has written very well on this COMPETING FAITH, in his book “Dissident Dispatches- An Alt0Right Guide to Christian Theology” the following in the chapter titled, ‘The Lost Soul of WASP America”
– “the excitement generated by (he wrote ‘the Tea Partiers, but MAGA-ites works just as well) resembles a corporate media-savvy revival of the old-time religious fervor for which America is famous.”
– This salvation by ballot box is ‘…another episode in the long history of evangelical enthusiasm… a potent mixture of politics and religion.”
– “Do not be deceived, however. American Protestantism is now far removed from orthodox Christianity.”
-” The American nation-state is a SECULAR PARODY of the Church… America’s established RELIGION resolutely refuses to incarnate the spirit of a particular people, least of all, the descendants of British colonists- the long-since forgotten ‘founding race’ of the ‘first new nation.’
-“The spiritual core of America’s constitutional faith is a COSMOPOLITAN CONCEPTION OF REVOLUTIONARY UNIVERSALISM…”
And just (((who))) would it be, that would: a) cause us to turn from our ancestral Christian trinitarian faith, by b) appealing to a secular faith, and c) cosmopolitan conception of ‘universalism.’
ONE Guess.
Call me naive but I don’t think Trump realized the presidency was only ceremonial. I think he is basically under house arrest until the (((bankers))) figure out how to dispose of him without causing civil unrest.
I knew there wouldn’t be a Wall because both sectors of the Ruling Party oppose it.
“we have managed to avoid getting embroiled in a war in Iran, Syria and North Korea.”
This is exactly why I voted for Trump. And to keep the Clinton’s out of the Whitehouse.
but “muh tax cut.”
great overview of the positives & the negatives.
trump got our hopes up a little too much.
that makes the reality that much worse.
Turkey has begun a military operation in Northern Syria to crush the Kurdish attempt to create an autonomous state in Syria, another defeat for ZOG.
yeah, a disappointment in many ways, but have you seen the new trump ad called ‘complicit’? You should watch it…it relates to illegal immigration….it’s dynamite!…trump is a propaganda weapon for whites…and even if that is all he ever is, then he is the best president for whites since eisenhower…and he was a good one…
Look – it’s up to US to push our agendas. We should have had all of our own media and crowd funding platforms in the FIRST place Did we ever think ZOG was going to go away quietly? This is going to be a bitter, ugly, deranged fight. We cannot be QUITTERS. I’ve made remarks about my displeasure with Trump – but we’d all be in a FEMA camp under HRC. The Trump Admin is quietly getting rid of HBI Visa Dothead invaders, and has just shown every-one that the Dems couldn’t care less about Americans, and will do anything for illegal mestizo invaders. The mess that is the JEWSA has been in the works for decades. We must dig IN. Stop quitting, White Man!
I read OD now like I watch CNN: just to see what kind of crazy spin the editors have to put on things to make them line up with the pre-selected anti-Trump narrative.