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President Donald Trump has been in office for eight months now. What has changed?
To listen to the media, a whole lot has changed - we're now living under a near-fascist AmeriKKKan dictatorship where women are chattel and blacks are in chains.
Oddly, though, at one and the same time, the media castigates the "do-nothing" Republican Congress and chortles that President Trump has managed to fill so few nominations while our leftists say that his appointees are destroying government agencies.
Donald Trump has accomplished one objective of significance: he placed a thoroughgoing conservative on the Supreme Court. But Justice Gorsuch replaced thoroughgoing conservative Antonin Scalia, so that's not a change so much as a restoration of the judicial status quo.
He has also managed to deep-six a fair number of new Obama regulations, but those were new regulations about to go into effect, which now won't - in other words, regulations are staying the same as they were before. Again, not really a change.
How about illegal immigration? Statistics appear to indicate that arrests are up but deportations are down which seems kind of like a wash.
The Trump administration has talked about many legislative actions, and attempted several, but so far to no avail. There has been no immigration reform, no tax reform, famously no Obamacare repeal, no defunding of Planned Parenthood, not even defunding Big Bird.
Yet the media wants us to think that the world is well on its way to ending. And despite the hard facts to the contrary, it certainly seems as if something profound has changed in America since the arrival of Donald Trump in the Oval Office.
That's because something has: By his very presence in power and his dogged persistence in saying the unsayable, President Trump is building the confidence of forgotten sectors of America who thought they were alone.
This shouldn't be a surprise, because the story of the Tea Party is the story of the same sort of awakening. The modern Tea Party movement is considered to have begun on February 19, 2009, when Rick Santelli used his CNBC for a rant in opposition to Barack Obama's attempts to bail out mortgage foreclosures. Santelli argued that it was morally wrong to use taxpayers' money to “subsidize the losers’ mortgages,” and proposed a Tea Party protest in Chicago.
In the wake of billion-dollar bailouts of financial firms, many Americans were disgusted with government overreach, but thanks to leftist dominance of the mass media, most thought they were alone in that opinion. Then along came a nationally-known journalist visibly furious about the same thing that outraged them, demonstrating that a) they were not alone and b) that opinion was OK.
Over the following months and years, fiscal conservatives crawled out of the woodwork they'd been hiding in since the Reagan years and began to make their presence felt - first on city streets, then on the National Mall, and eventually by electing a Republican Congress.
As almost always happens to conservatives, they were betrayed by the Republicans they worked so hard to elect - neither spending nor government size have shrunk one iota - but at least they managed to slow Mr. Obama's desired growth trajectory somewhat. Far more importantly, though, the Tea Party had a liberating effect on conservative individuals by making it possible to talk about things the media leftists had attempted to ban.
Then along came Mr. Trump, saying what has been banned from public discourse for a generation.
Having total victory in war as the objective, or letting benighted places fend for themselves, and quitting the thankless task of nation-building? Trump said what many Americans have wanted but which most thought was impossible.
Actually attempting to keep blue-collar jobs in America for people without college degrees, rather than just shrugging and considering them an unavoidable cost of globalization? Trump instead argued that something could and should be done about it, and actually did save a few jobs even before being elected.
Putting America first by enforcing immigration law and deporting those who violate it? At first the media assumed he couldn't be serious, then that he couldn't be elected, then that it couldn't be done, and then that it was so racist that he'd surely be howled from office. Now, for the first time since the 1960s, there is a legislative proposal to completely reform our immigration system with the goal of only letting in people with skills we need - no more illiterates, barbarians, or welfare sponges.
None of this was seriously talked about before Mr. Trump; most of it was not even tolerated in public conversation. Today, while most of his changes have not yet actually taken place, they are being discussed constantly.
But not by our leaders! Ordinary Americans are talking out these issues, but the only time our media and most politicians mention them is to castigate or ridicule them. Except, of course, for Mr. Trump.
Which is why the media is so desperate to cast Mr. Trump as an evil
racist and throw him into outer darkness: by the mere fact that he
exists and won't shut up, he makes the
unsayable sayable. And when that
happens, the impossible becomes possible, as the Left learned to its
sorrow last November.
What has President Trump accomplished? Very little that is concrete, as of yet. But he has created a sea change in our political discourse, by moving the Overton Window so as to make room for some urgently needed conversations.
And even if the Trump administration is unable to deliver on most, some, or even any of its promises, now that they can be talked about, others will try, knowing they are not alone. Despite the avalanche of the harshest imaginable anti-Trump criticism from every media source and even most Republicans for the past two weeks, when it comes to actual voters... his ratings rose. Sooner or later, other politicians will ignore the din from the left, look at the hard numbers, and follow where their constituents are going. As Mahatma Gandhi used to say, "There goes my people. I must follow them, for I am their leader."