Why the U.S. Will Bitterly Regret Not Reelecting Donald Trump

Already, many who voted for Joe Biden for President of the United States are exhibiting buyer’s remorse. Some in the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party regret supporting Biden’s nomination. This is because he shows signs of stiffing the Left on his pledges in the Biden-Sanders “Unity Agreement.” In addition, a Media Research Center poll in late November shows that about 17 percent of Biden voters would not have voted for him had they known about the shady dealings Biden’s son had with both Russia and China. At the same time, a very large fraction of Republicans believes Democrats stole the presidential election. A recent Quinnipiac poll shows 77 percent of Republicans believe the vote counting was fraudulent. Some 60 percent of the electorate overall thought Biden’s victory was legitimate. Ninty-seven percent of Democrats said there was no widespread election fraud, but 35 percent of independents thought there was. The purpose of this essay is to look at why we might expect a growing fraction of Americans to regret the election of Biden.

These social conditions promise increasing, and increasingly bitter, regrets that Trump was not reelected. Even on the Democratic Left, many might finally decide a Trump reelection would have been better for them. Trump might be Satan for them, with the mark of the beast engraved on his forehead. However, he at least united the Democratic Party. With the schism between the progressive Left and less leftist Democrats, a Biden administration will preside over a growing Democratic Party civil war. This will be true no matter whether Biden embraces the Left or betrays them.

Among independents and Republicans, and among some Democrats who do not hear the siren song of socialism, their growing remorse will have three sources. The first is the undeniable accomplishments of the Trump administration. If the new Biden administration destroys many of these accomplishments with their policies, remorse will transform into outright panic. Also, as many begin to realize that most of the news media allied to the Democratic Party lied to them about Trump’s nature and accomplishments, they will recoil from their decision to vote for Biden. Finally, as the consequences of Biden’s policies become more clear, most Americans will become appalled.

The Accomplishments of the Trump Administration

President Trump was indeed a populist. He was elected to correct some of the more egregious errors of our progressive elites. Dirigiste elites in general (of which American progressives are a particular example) have alienated many of their people in the West with their emphasis on multiculturalism and increasing state regulation of the economy.

In his four years in office, President Trump has done much to reverse economic decay and illegal immigration in the United States. Yet, even though progressives and the news media that back them are not willing to acknowledge any Trump accomplishments whatsoever, he has done far, far more. What follows is a list of his more notable accomplishments.

1. Reviving the U.S. Economy

One of Trump’s most important accomplishments was to demonstrate our economy could be rescued by reducing the government’s influence on it. He did this in two ways: First, by a judicious deconstruction of the regulatory state; and second, by a business and middle-class tax reform. The tax reform included both a tax cut and a transition from a world-wide tax regime to a territorial one for businesses.

What both these types of reforms did was to make it easier for companies to invest in new productive capabilities. The previous Obama administration went in exactly the opposite direction, increasing both economic regulations and taxes on the middle-class. As a result, both business investment in production and long-term GDP growth rates fell. Trump reversed this trend, as shown in the two graphs below.

As both of these graphs demonstrate, corporate investments in new capital goods and durable goods fell in the last three years of Obama’s regime, yet rose in the first two years of Trump’s. Corporations, of course, usually need to hire more labor to produce a lot more. (Increases in productive efficiency can decrease this effect to some degree.) We can see this in changes in real personal income and the unemployment rate as shown below.

The economy’s health became more unsure in the last half of 2018 due to the threat of trade war, particularly with China. However, national security considerations made that trade war unavoidable. Then, as we all know, the economy went into a tail-spin because of COVID-19 and state shutdowns. That was an economic catastrophe created not by economic policies, but by the mendacity of the Chinese Communist Party.

2. Limiting the Damage of Chinese COVID-19

Progressive Democrats have tried to assert that the economic problems we have had over the past year are due to Trump’s incompetence in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet Trump has reacted considerably better to the pandemic than most (if not all) Western leaders. This can be demonstrated with several observations.

When the pandemic started in late 2019, China assured the world the virus could not be transmitted from person-to-person. This claim was then corroborated by the World Health Organization (WHO). With both China and WHO swearing the growing pandemic was no big deal, the entire West was lulled to sleep over the coming disaster.

Trump was the first Western leader to realize something was terribly amiss. In late January, President Trump ordered that all travel from China to the United States be halted. As a result, the growth of the virus in the U.S. was greatly slowed. As Chinese who would have fled the virus to the U.S. travelled instead to Europe, Trump extended the travel ban to Europe. As a reward for his foresight, Joe Biden and Democrats in general howled the travel bans proved Trump’s xenophobia. If the Democrats truly would not have instituted these travel bans, they would have performed far worse than Donald Trump.

Then came the scandals over cases of COVID overwhelming hospitals and over the lack of ventilators and personal protective equipment (PPE). Trump’s administration reacted to the problem by contracting companies to build the needed PPE and ventilators. Trump also made available mobile army hospitals and U.S. Navy hospital ships to insure civilian hospitals would not be overrun.

Finally, Trump initiated and funded his magnificent “Operation Warp Speed” project to develop a COVID-19 vaccine by the end of 2020. What would have taken at least four years with old ways of doing things required less than a year with Operation Warp Speed. By the middle of 2021, the vaccines developed should give us herd immunity and the catastrophe will be substantially over.

3. Uniting the Middle East against Iran

Before Trump’s administration, the common wisdom was that peace in the Middle East could only be ensured by reconciling Palestinians with Israel. Attempts to accomplish this reconciliation, the Camp David Accords in 1978 and the Oslo Accords in 1993, both failed for fundamentally the same reason: A refusal by Arabs to accept the existence of Israel. (The Camp David Accords’ primary purpose was to effect peace between Egypt and Isreal. However, they also included codicils that limited Palestinians’ right of return to Israel and the institution of an international fund to remunerate Palestinians’ property losses.) For decades, the problems thwarting Palestinian-Israeli reconciliation were insurmountable.

However, in the process of opposing Iran’s imperial ambitions, Trump found another way to create Middle East unity between Israel and the Arab states. In the process of seeking an empire, Iran desires to dominate the Middle East, the Persian Gulf states in particular. Back in January 2016, I wrote an essay entitled Saudi Arabia and Israel: A Match Made in Heaven?. In it, I speculated on a growing entente between Saudi Arabia and Israel created by the mutual threat to both of them from Iran.

Using this common existential threat to the Middle Eastern States, Trump persuaded them to recognize each other and cooperate to deter Iran. The result was the Abraham Accords, named after the forefather of Jews and Arabs. This agreement now unites Israel with Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates. It is widely anticipated that Saudi Arabia will eventually join. In recognition of his role in birthing the Abraham Accords, Trump received nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize from prominent citizens of Australia, Norway, and Sweden.

4. Rallying the West against China’s Imperialism

In December of 1978, China’s leader Deng Xiaoping started economic reforms that would move China towards free-market capitalism. With those reforms, China began a period of meteoric economic growth.

Also ignited by those reforms were the hopes of Western nations that with continued exposure to the West, both economically and culturally, China would eventually evolve into a democratic, human rights observing, prosperous nation. Those hopes caused member nations of the World Trade Organization (WTO) to accede to China’s WTO membership.

However, as time passed, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regretted they had relinquished so much power to private companies. They began to reassert control over capital investments through state banks and regulation. At the same time, they began to develop plans for international economic, military, and political hegemony. To administer these changes, the CCP installed Xi Jinping as the Party’s leader for life. Not since Mao Zedong has China had a more totalitarian leader.

President Trump was the very first Western leader to vigorously resist Chinese imperialism. His trade war on China is designed to decouple the American economy from China’s. Resistance to China’s imperialist project has become one of the very few things upon which Democrats and Republicans can agree.

5. Limiting Illegal Immigration

One of the major reasons for Donald Trump’s election in 2016 was his pledge to limit illegal immigration. For more than half a century, American economic and political elites championed a policy of of open or quasi-open borders. With jobs for unskilled labor becoming more scarce, this policy threatened the livelihood of many Americans. Other problems such as drug and human trafficking also were exacerbated.

In addition, the problem was far larger than Democrats were willing to acknowledge, as demonstrated by a Yale University study in 2018. Homelessness in sanctuary states and cities were made worse, along with an increase in disease.

Unfortunately, this is one of Trump’s unfinished accomplishments. However, he has made progress in several ways. By executive order, Trump prohibited federal contractors from replacing American workers with temporary foreign workers. In addition, his administration had completed 452 miles of new border wall as of January 5, 2021. Below is a map showing the status of the new border wall system.

Unfortunately, reforms to immigration law have been stymied by Democratic legislators. Also, since most of the progress has been made by executive order, the incoming Biden administration can easily reverse it.

6. Destroying the ISIS Caliphate

The policies of the Obama administration to reduce U.S. armed forces coupled with a withdrawal from Iraq led directly to the birth of the ISIS caliphate. By reversing Obama’s policy mistakes, Trump’s administration substantially destroyed the caliphate in Syria and Iraq. However, like any cancer, the remnants of ISIS might well resurge. Trump’s claim that ISIS was “100% destroyed” might well be an example of Trump’s well-known penchant for hyperbole. Nevertheless, the attrition of the caliphate to almost nothing is a significant achievement that leaves everyone in the West safer.

Almost all of these accomplishments of the Trump administration are vulnerable to elimination by the Biden administration and the Democrat-controlled Congress. The results from Trump’s policies compared with the results of Democrats’ progressive policies will almost certainly increase voters’ regrets over Joe Biden’s election. More about that later.

How Democrats and Most of the News Media Have Lied about Trump and Republicans

Many people who voted for Biden, especially among independents, will be appalled about how much they were deceived by Democrats and the news media. For example, most news media (excluding Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times, and a few others) suppressed or belittled news that Biden’s son Hunter Biden was seriously corrupt. The only reason China and Russia had to give Hunter Biden plum positions with very large salaries was to buy influence with his father. In addition, despite Joe Biden’s denials, there is convincing evidence that the President-elect knew all about these deals.

The fact that 17% of Biden voters would not have voted for him had they known all this has already been mentioned. Of those who voted for Biden, 45% said they had not known about these deals prior to the election. Voters of all persuasions can be forgiven if they believe news media allied to the Democratic Party aided Joe Biden in stealing the election.

Because voters — particularly independents and Democrats — were gullible enough to believe the progressive media, they also bought into the media and Democratic slanders about Trump and Republicans. Among the most scurrilous of these slanders was that Trump and Republicans were fascists and racists.

As the extent of their deception becomes more apparent and therefore less believable, Biden voters can only become more embittered. As the destructiveness on society of Democrats’ leftist policies and Biden’s limitations as a leader become clear, the bitter regret of having voted for Biden can only grow.

What Democrats and the Coming Biden Administration Promise

Progressive Democrats have repeatedly promised to undo virtually everything that Trump has achieved. However, precisely how government policies will evolve under the Democrats is not at all certain. Much will depend upon which side of the incipient Democratic Party Civil War Joe Biden will take. How much will Biden be faithful to the Biden-Sanders unity agreement? Will he propose the destruction of our oil industries by banning fracking? In the past, Biden has said he will ban fracking only on public lands. Will he adopt most of Sanders’ proposals for Medicare for All and a Green New Deal? Will he adopt the progressive Left’s passions for defunding the police and reverting whites to second-class citizenship? Will he agree with the Left that the United States is fundamentally a racist nation?

So far, Biden’s picks for his future cabinet appear to belong more to his party’s center-left than to Sander’s leftist coalition. However, even the Democratic Party’s center-left is pretty far left and has been growing more so since the year 2000. This is shown in the Pew Research Center plots below.

Note that Whites and those with college educations are far more to the left than Blacks, Hispanics, and those with education levels below college. Most of the political, academic, and cultural elites in the Democratic Party belong to the progressive Left. Yet, the bulk of the Democratic Party electorate, although moving slightly to the left over the years, would appear not to sympathize with leftist views.

Biden might desire not to adopt more leftist policies. However, he is damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. If he caters to the Left, he will alienate a large fraction of the Democratic Party electorate. On the other hand, if he does not further the goals of Bernie Sanders and his followers, he will enrage the progressive Left. Either way, a schism will widen that will increase the polarization, not just of the American people, but within the Democratic Party itself. Given his nature, I suspect Biden will try to straddle the divide. If that happens, he will anger everyone.

Even if Biden takes the most moderate position possible within the Democratic Party, he will be frustrated in his desire to solve economic and social problems. This frustration is guaranteed by mistaken progressive views of social reality. In particular, Democrats believe government is both competent and capable of solving, or at least ameliorating, all social and economic problems. This is manifestly not true.

Suppose government programs were in fact usually capable of solving economic problems. Then if we look statistically at all the developed nations on Earth, we would expect countries to have generally larger GDP growth rates as their governments spent more as a fraction of their GDP to support government programs. The very opposite is shown to be true in the scatter plot below. Each red cross in the plot shows a single country’s GDP growth rate as a function of government expenditures as a percent of GDP.

The blue arrow is the linear trend, which obviously has negative slope. The fact that the data points are scattered about the trend line indicates there are other factors (almost certainly a great many of them) other than government expenditures that help determine GDP growth. The fact any trend line at all with nonzero slope can be found is a testament to how strong a negative factor increasing government expenditures are. The trend line in the graph above is the declining branch of Rahn’s curve.

Ultimately, almost all social policies are limited by the amount of capital that government can allocate to sustain them. As a government expends a larger fraction of GDP, GDP growth rates will decline. Eventually they would become negative, and government programs will have destroyed themselves by destroying the economy.

What does all this portend for the new Biden administration? President-Elect Biden and most Democratic members of Congress have sworn to repeal the Republicans’ Tax Cut and Jobs Act of December 2017. If they repealed the entire act or retained only the tax cuts for the middle class and repealed the tax cuts for companies and high-income individuals, Democrats would create instant recession. This is especially true given the weakened condition of our economy due to COVID-19 and state economic lockdowns.

With the advent of a recession in our current weakened state, many companies, especially the small and medium sized ones, would go bankrupt. The employees of those companies would then lose their livelihoods. If those employees also had voted for Biden, would they not be extremely regretful of their 2020 vote?

Three major factors will generate a rising tide of bitter regrets among Biden voters for having put Joseph Biden into the Oval Office. First and foremost will be Biden’s destruction of many of Donald Trump’s undeniable accomplishments. Second will be the realization that Democrats and their allied media have lied about the nature and accomplishments of Trump and the Republican Party. Third and finally, because progressive Democrats have a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of social reality, their policies can only be destructive to society. Voters will find the contrast between Trump’s successes with Biden’s failures bitter gall indeed.

May God save these increasingly not United States.

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