Gift Horses

Shortly after the 2020 presidential election, Jim Geraghty, a traditional conservative and no great admirer of Donald J. Trump, wrote in National Review, “As Trump’s selection of Matt Gaetz for attorney general… makes clear, he’s still the same erratic, temperamental, narcissistic jerk, he always was…. But even presidents you don’t like can make the right decisions every now and then. The job of conservatives for the next four year is to steer, nudge, cajole, and pressure Trump toward as many good decisions — and away from bad ones — as possible.”

It should be noted that that concluding paragraph followed almost two pages, in which Geraghty outlined nine crucial areas in which he fully expected the Trump administration to be markedly better than its predecessor. And that’s the main point in thinking about Trump: You never really know when his character will prove an embarrassment and even result in disastrous policies, and when his out-of-the box thinking might yield surprisingly positive results.

TRUMP KNOWS NOTHING of the bounds of propriety or of the dignity of the office he holds. Presidents traditionally wait until they are out of office before cashing in. But Trump and his family could hardly wait to do so. The president’s sons were busy striking deals for billion-dollar resorts and office towers in Qatar and Dubai, even as their father was on a state visit to the region. The only thing they have on Hunter Biden is that at least they have some experience as real estate developers, whereas he had none in the energy field prior to being placed at a hefty salary on the board of the Ukrainian energy company, Burisma.

Andrew McCarthy was the lead prosecutor of those behind the first World Trade Center bombing and wrote an entire book on how the deep state crippled Trump’s first term in office, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency. Yet today he writes in amazement of Trump’s hawking of a new meme coin, $TRUMP, prior to coming into office — “an announcement that was as dumbfounding in its crassness as it was unprecedented in the history of American presidents-elect.” He estimates that Trump has already made hundreds of millions of dollars on the worthless coins, while offering special deals and White House dinner invitations to the largest purchasers.