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The president invoked Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System, the greatest public works project of the 20th century, as a model.
Yet Ike was opposed by the Taft wing of his party and Ike’s republicanism gave birth to the modern conservative movement.
Yet, in leading Republicans away from globalism to economic nationalism, Trump is not writing a new gospel. He is leading a lost party away from a modernist heresy — back to the Old-Time Religion.
In restating his commitment to the issues that separated him from the other Republicans and won him Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, however, Trump reaffirmed aspects of conservatism dear to his audience.
He committed himself to regulatory reform, freeing up the private sector, rolling back the administrative state. The Keystone and Dakota Access pipelines are on the way to completion. And Trump is all behind school choice.
While the speech was unifying and aspirational, the president set goals and laid down markers by which his presidency will be judged.
And none will be easy of attainment.
“Dying industries will come roaring back to life. … Crumbling infrastructure will be replaced with new roads, bridges, tunnels, airports and railways … Our terrible drug epidemic will slow down and, ultimately, stop. … Our neglected inner cities will see a rebirth of hope, safety and opportunity.”
As some of these domestic crises are rooted in the character, or lack of it, of people, they have proven, since Great Society days, to be beyond the capacity of government to solve.
Ronald Reagan was not wrong when he said, “Government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem.”
And while the president’s speech astonished critics as much as it reassured friends, it leaves large questions unanswered.
How does one leave Social Security and Medicare untouched, grow defense by more than $50 billion, slash taxes, launch a $1 trillion infrastructure program — and not explode the deficit and national debt?
Now that we are ensnared in wars all over the Middle East, how do we extricate ourselves and come home without our enemies filling the vacuum?
How does the GOP repeal and replace Obamacare without cutting the benefits upon which millions of Americans have come to rely?
How do you eliminate an $800 billion merchandise trade deficit without tariffs that raise the price of cheap imports from abroad — on which Trump’s working-class voters have come to depend?
The Republican establishment today bends the knee to Caesar.
But how long before K Street lobbyists for transnational cartels persuade the GOP elite, with campaign contributions, to slow-walk the president’s America First agenda?
Tuesday’s speech established Trump as the man in charge.
But how loyal to him and his program will be the “deep state,” which dominates this city that gave Trump only 4 percent of its votes and, paranoically, believes him to be an agent of Vladimir Putin?
The Trump-Beltway wars have only just begun.
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