America’s Dual Reality: Celebration at Home, Challenges Abroad
Two White House moments this week showcased contrasting realities: America's promise at home and her challenges abroad.
As our nation celebrated its birthday—and we hope everyone has had a great three-day weekend—President Trump had two key moments, one domestic and the other on the global stage These contrasting moments underscored both the promise that lies in the current American moment along with some hard truths about our position in world.
A FESTIVE FOURTH
It was a festive occasion at the White House on the Fourth of July. President Trump, after a rally in Iowa that kicked off what will be a year-long buildup to the celebration of our country’s 250th birthday next year, came back to D.C. to sign his signature legislation, the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill” (OBBB). While OBBB had its flaws, it was the best that could be done under the Congress as currently composed, and contained the following:
Tax Relief for the Middle and Working Class
· Income earned from tips will now be deductible, a fulfillment of the president’s “No Tax on Tips” campaign promise.
· Income earned from overtime hours will also be deductible, the fulfillment of another key campaign promise.
· The per-child tax exemption was increased
· The standard deduction amount was increased
· A $1,000 “Trump bonus” for all babies born in 2025 or hereafter, coming in the form of a federal deposit into a tax-advantaged savings account
· There are tax breaks for Social Security recipients
· If you buy an American-made car, the loan interest is deductible
· There are increased tax breaks for creating school choice scholarships
· An increase in the deduction for state and local taxes
This bullet-list summation is the most comprehensive program of tax relief I can recall being given to middle-class and working-class people. It didn’t come easy—nothing for ordinary citizens ever does in Washington D.C.-- and the president was on the phone at 2:30 AM the morning of final passage, still “whipping” the necessary votes in line.
The mechanics of how it will all work will be something we learn as we go between now and next April 15, but anyone who works hard to make their budget line up and plan for the future (which I assume is everyone reading this e-mail) stands to benefit.
Business Incentives for Economic Growth
The OBBB also contained important tax incentives for businesses, namely the ability to more quickly write off their investment in new equipment—the kind of business activity that leads directly to more and better jobs.
Strengthening Borders and Reforming Medicaid
Furthermore, the OBBB had more:
*An increase in officers for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to handle the unprecedented level of deportations needed to clean up the mess the previous White House left by opening up the border. There is also funding for the border Wall—more money than Trump ever had available to him in his first term.
*Good reforms for Medicaid—able-bodied people will have to work 20 hours per week (including community service) to qualify, and migrants who came here illegally will no longer be eligible. The Democratic talking point that the OBBB “cuts” Medicaid is at best misleading—our own citizens who are truly needy can still get the healthcare they need and a Stabilization Fund has been put in place to protect rural hospitals.
Avoiding a Tax Hike Crisis
All of these changes are new items. But perhaps the most important—and the reason that passage of the OBBB was so important, in spite of the legitimate concerns raised over spending issues—is that without it, the 2017 Trump tax cuts would have expired. The American economy would have been hit with a de facto tax hike, an event that would have almost certainly bankrupted quite a few small businesses and triggered a recession.
As always, there’s more work to be done. There may well be a showdown coming between the White House and Congress over a president’s authority to “impound” money that’s being wasted, and the Administration is also likely to propose several spending reductions along these lines in the months ahead.
But for today, there’s good reason to celebrate. Trump was right to be in a festive mood at the bill-signing ceremony and subsequent picnic on the White House lawn. The OBBB was as close to an “America First” program as we’ve seen in Washington. It made the needs of regular, legal citizens, right here in the United States the priority.
THE CONTRAST ON THE GLOBAL STAGE
Looking beyond our borders later that same evening, the president had less reason for exuberance. The Pentagon announced that the weapons Joe Biden (or whomever was in charge) had shipped to Ukraine—including huge shipments sent between the presidential election in November and Trump’s inauguration in January—had left the United States’ own supply dangerously depleted.
The Limits of American Power
Alexander Mercouris, the excellent analyst at The Duran, said in a video on his Locals feed (it’s subscriber-only, otherwise I’d share the video) that this was the first instance he could think of where the United States was having to back away from a foreign policy objective because of a lack of resources. While we’ve had more than a few occasions in the post-WW2 era to turn tail, it’s never been because we literally ran out of weapons.
Mercouris rightly noted that this candid admission by Trump’s Defense Department and echoed by the president himself, is a signature moment in geopolitical history.
Furthermore, a phone call between Trump and Putin did not go as the president hoped. Putin declined to agree to a ceasefire as Trump requested. As we’ve celebrated the Fourth of July, Kiev is being pounded by an array of Russian drones and missiles.
Trump made no effort to hide his disappointment in the call. Nor is it likely, given the limitations his own Administration acknowledged, that the U.S. will do anything more than provide Ukraine with some limited ability to shoot down incoming missiles. Trump himself rightly said “It’s Biden’s War, I don’t want to get involved.” But it’s clear his own hopes of negotiating a peaceful resolution before Kiev collapses are dwindling rapidly.
A World Pulled Back from the Brink
The inability to resolve the Russia-Ukraine War stands in contrast to Trump’s ability to end the India-Pakistan war (between two countries that have nuclear weapons), the Rwanda-Congo War (an extraordinarily bloody battle in Africa), a civil war in Kosovo, and to get out of the Israel-Iran situation without getting bogged down.
Trump has still had successes in the Russia-Ukraine War. At the time of the presidential election, this was escalating dangerously, with the real possibility of going nuclear. That’s not me saying it—the Biden White House’s own intelligence told them there was a 50/50 chance of nuclear weapons being used, due to the aggressive posture adopted by Biden (and supported by Kamala Harris).
If you felt like the world was on a knife’s edge when you went to the polls on November 3…well, our own intelligence services confirmed you were right to feel that way. Thanks to Trump’s win, we’ve pulled back from the aggressive posturing and the long-range missile strikes into Russia itself. The world has pulled back from the brink.
That’s no small thing and something to be grateful for. But the ultimate resolution the president thought he could get remains elusive.
As regular readers know, Corned Beef Catholicism has been squarely in the camp of just cutting off weapons and money to Ukraine and letting the chips fall where they may. That’s the action I wanted the president to take on January 20. I wondered how he could possibly resolve it.
After all, if Russia is winning a war, what incentive is there Putin to halt it? If Zelensky can only stay in power in Ukraine by continuing a war that allows him to ban elections, what incentive does he have to halt it? If the elites of the West, both in Europe and the United States are making a fortune by laundering money through Ukraine’s notoriously corrupt system, what incentive do they have to stop it?
If Trump tried to exert pressure and gain leverage on any involved party through increased involvement, his own domestic political base (yours truly included) would blow a gasket. To use Trump’s own words from his now-famous Oval Office blowup with Zelensky in February—what cards did a peace-seeking American president have to play?
But Trump has done things on the global stage that I would not have considered possible. In his first term, I didn’t think he could wipe out ISIS without getting us bogged down in the Middle East even further—but he did. I hoped he could do something similar here.
In the end though, the president is confronting a problem that goes much deeper than the 3 ½ year-old Russia-Ukraine War, and well beyond the geographic scope of that conflict. It goes to the limits of American power—something the political leadership of both parties have repeatedly ignored for decades.
The Day of Reckoning
There have been more than a few warnings that the type of situation Trump faces in Russia-Ukraine—the prospect of a humiliating defeat for the West—was prophesied. In 1999, Pat Buchanan wrote the following in A Republic Not an Empire:
“The day is coming when America’s global hegemony is going to be challenged, and our leaders will discover they lack the resources to make good on all the war guarantees they have handed out so frivolously, and the American people…will declare themselves unwilling to pay the price of empire.” A day of reckoning is approaching…
That day of reckoning is here.
Donald Trump didn’t cause it—in fact, in that summer and fall of 1999, he was in the same political circles as Buchanan when it came to foreign policy—but Trump is the one who will have to deal with the consequences.
AN AMERICA FIRST FUTURE
What then, should Trump do? I hope the president just thinks about all the events of this Fourth of July weekend in context.
Start with the excitement of fulfilling his domestic agenda and protecting the interests of the middle-class and working-class people that elected him. Everything about that celebration was America First, and it can set the stage for a year-long celebration that goes until our country’s 250th birthday.
Then contrast that with the frustration of resolving this war abroad—a war that only impacts American interests to the extent that we let it. I hope he remembers that while he’s absolutely right in saying it’s not his war, that only applies so long as he steers clear of returning to the escalatory policy pursued by whomever his predecessor was.
It will be Trump’s job to accept that he’s the one Divine Providence placed as president in this time of reckoning on the global stage—to be the president who lets go of our imagined ability to orchestrate events everywhere in the world.
And what of those of us who advocate him pursuing this course? If he follows through, it will be our job to have his back when he’s blamed for every Ukraine-style collapse that happens abroad. It will be our job to say we expect an American president to watch out for his own people first. The Fourth of July weekend is as good a time as any to re-emphasize that.
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