Trump’s madcap tweets and impulses are not impulsive, but calculated.  The truth to Trump is just one of the props in his bag of rhetorical tricks. This is because Trump is a performance artist, like Lady Gaga. His aim is to challenge, subvert, and alter the dominant political paradigm. This approach to charismatic Presidential leadership is the same as practiced by Lincoln, FDR, JFK, and Reagan. The truth to Trump is just one of the props in his bag of rhetorical tricks.

The command-and-control model of environmental regulation, as practiced by the Dem green extremists, is dead. The now lawless, or extra-legal, EPA will once again, under Scott Pruitt, adhere to the Constitution. Trump will do more for the environment than Obama ever did.

GOP state-level attempts to  oppose the Obama administration weren’t based on opposition to Obama’s policies, but to the usurpation of states’ right by the federal government.

Dems call anyone a climate change “denier”,  even if that person mainly disagrees with them on energy policy.

Obama didn’t care much about laws because he was unable to pass any. He turned the states into indentured servants, thus ignoring the federalist bedrock  of America. The EPA was not created to oppose growth and development.

Higher wages actually hurt workers. The Trump Labor Dept. will make sure that workers are protected by never raising the minimum wage, repealing mandated sick leave, reducing mandatory overtime pay guidelines, and eliminating minority hiring practices.

The political allocation of capital into housing was a root cause of the 2008 panic.

Waterboarding works.

1. Obama keeps poor children prisoners in failing schools so he can protect teachers’ unions
2. Obama ended the peace in Iraq, not the war.
3. What’s good for America is good for the Trump Organization. After all, isn’t one of Trump’s aims to help business in America.
4. free market philosophy made Google possible, so Google is hypocritical to insist on monopolistic business practices that hinder the free market.
5. Obama chose to try and build a political legacy rather than lead the country.

“The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink.” (Orwell, 1984)

1. There is no evidence that proprietary trading caused or even contributed to the 2008 financial crisis. It all comes down to what you mean by”evidence” and “contributed.” The phrase “or even contributed” further ups the rhetorical stakes. It’s as if The Big Short never existed.
2. Federal building and land use regulations have strangled the economy and need to be streamlined and repealed to unleash market forces. (Repealing Davis Bacon would be a good start.) Limiting liability awards and frivolous lawsuits will be a key factor in this streamlining.
3. Doctors across America are euphoric over the looming Obamacare repeal, paving the way for a fairer, more transparent and consumer-driven health care system. This health care Nirvana will be the final apotheosis of the free market. In anticipation of this oncoming privatization of health care, keep track of ominous and telltale buzzwords in the health care debate: competition, cost awareness, catastrophic coverage, high deductibles, high payments up front, government-run clinics, much higher premiums for patients with pre-existing conditions, major tort reform limiting malpractice suits, etc. Don’t say we haven’t been warned about what’s coming.
4. A prime culprit in the 2008 financial meltdown were affordable housing mandates forced on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In fact, Ben Carson, the designated new HUB Secretary, should privatize public housing, put time limits on how long tenants can stay in public housing, end affirmative  fair housing laws, etc. In the past, Carson has said that he opposes governmental efforts at desegregation, calling it failed socialism.
5. Labor unions are the primary obstacle in the way of worker freedom. Right-to-work laws are the wedge issue to use to destroy labor unions and somehow, paradoxically, increase workers’ rights.

1. Man-made climate change is in no way responsible for increases in natural disasters or world food shortages. Anyone who disagrees with the climate change police is subject to character assassination from the media, academia, and billionaires such as Tom Steyer.
2. Left-wing activists, such as George Soros, are funding anti-Trump rallies and campaigns. The American Left has made up a bogeyman named Donald Trump, and totally overreacted to his election. As Roger Kimball puts it,
   

   At least since the Sixties, the left-liberal consensus in America has worked to undermine traditional notions of decency, order, merit, and achievement. So monolithic was that consensus that a sudden reversion to normality came as a terrifying disillusionment. Hence the surreal, paranoid, and tantrum-filled response of the coddled beneficiaries of our society. We think of a mot often attributed to Teddy Roosevelt: “To anger a conservative, lie to him. To anger a liberal, tell him the truth.”

3. There is a morale crisis in the military because of Obama budget cuts that have decimated our military readiness.
4. boosting mileage requirements leads to more pollution, less auto safety, and economic ruin. Americans only want to buy huge trucks and SUVs.
5. Obama’s climate gestures were purely symbolic and had no discernible effect on climate. His smug obliviousness to the desires of Americans doomed his administration to failure. Fracking and pipeline jobs will save the American economy.

1.  Infrastructure spending in the Trump era will be unleashed if there is a new era of “regulatory clarity and predictability.” Relief from all regulations is the “clarity” the GOP has been seeking for the last forty years.

2. Trickle-down reborn: massive tax cuts for the top one percent are justified because high earners will create businesses and jobs, and thus “average” workers will see their incomes rise too. Never mind that these income gains never quite get to low- and middle-income Americans, or that the rich will get disproportionately massive tax cuts compared to the average.

3. Dodd-Frank turned banks into public utilities. To make this exaggerated claim  requires the belief that any regulation of the financial sector is destructive and robs banks of any choice or agency. Consumer protection is just another form of socialism.

4. “The Declaration of Independence states that our inalienable rights come from God. The failure of the people to honor this reality and to give power to the government instead has created our current problems.” (letter to the editor)

5. American health care is teetering because it relies too much on government coercion. A functioning marketplace can deliver high-quality care at lower cost.

1. The mythos of the Wisconsin economic miracle, based on a set of lies, false assumptions, and partial truths. As ground zero for union-busting “reform”, especially public service unions, Wisconsin has shown that mandatory collective bargaining makes the government the unions’ automatic dues collector. In right-to-work states,  where collective bargaining has been all but eliminated, economies are thriving. Unions, especially public workers’ unions,  are the worst thing that ever happened to workers, state finances, and economic growth. Cutting back public unions also guarantees that state taxes won’t rise every year. There is a nexus of of public-union donations and government officials. Public sector unions’ main job is to cripple state economies, and, in the case of teachers’ unions, insure that public schools continue to fail.
2. Donald Trump is slowly building credibility on national security as he appoints his senior team. After all, who has more credibility than Steve Bannon (a white nationalist), David Petraeus (criminal record for breaking national security laws), or Michael Flynn (certifiable wing-nut)?
3. Teachers and professors are “unionized, ivory-towered and marinated in leftist ideologies. These “educators” “work to indoctrinate their charges against the virtues of freedom, the work ethic, and self-reliance.” (letter to the editor)
4. Educational policies and standards should be entirely left to the states because in states where that happens schools are no longer failing and parents have true choice.
5. Jeff Sessions “hasn’t evinced an iota of racism.”  Accusing him of racism is itself a “smear.” How long before even mentioning racism itself becomes a hate crime?

1. Borrowers need and want payday lenders, and the federal government should completely deregulate the industry,  and eliminate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.  (editorial: “Consumer Financial Protection Rewrite”). Consumer “protection” distorts the free market and only protects the vested interests of progressives. The best protection for consumers is no protection at all because the market always sorts things out.

2. Castro, to the Dems, is a  heroic liberator for the ages, whereas he was  actually a brutal dictator who killed millions. Dems consider Gitmo the ultimate symbol of moral barbarity, but what Castro was doing in the rest of Cuba was far worse. Thus the Tea Party justifies and relativizes the torture and mass violation of human rights going on at Gitmo.

3. We are going back to war in Iraq, and may very soon get a second opportunity to win via the surge. David Patraeus is the architect of the Iraqi surge. Yet, one wonders, how successful  or sustainable was the surge if we need to start all over again?

4. Trump’s privatization of infrastructure spending via tax credits is the only way to stop an infrastructure -spending boondoggle. All progressive infrastructure plans are redistributionist, and amount to industrial policy. The private sector can be counted on to get it done if Trump runs interference for them in terms of “streamlined permitting and approval.”

1. The advent of fracking and new drilling techniques—the ability to tap untold reserves of oil and gas—represents a global paradigm shift that can reset America’s economy and foreign dealings. President Obama’s willful decision to ignore this was as if Bill Clinton had opted the country out of the internet revolution. (Kimberley Strassel, “Trump’s Environmental Reset”.)  This analogy is wrong on so many levels:
   in terms of environmental and energy policy:  environment-damaging fracking is completely different than the energy-efficient internet; you can’t build an entire foreign policy and economy around extraction industries; oil and gas reserves are a finite resource; even with energy from fracking, the US does not set energy prices and so is still enmeshed in the foreign oil markets; the US lacks the refining capacity to replace foreign oil imports with fracked oil and gas;
   in terms of overall impacts on human capital and possibility: the internet revolution is a change in fundamental social relations, in how we access and process information and form knowledge, in how we make political decisions, shop, hire people, plan our travel, and generally make our lives easier and more connected. Fracking and drilling represent the old world of competition, pollution, waste, sprawl, and economic nationalism. The internet is about a lot more than making money, consumption, or energy self-sufficiency.
2. The Dept. of Education is a “wholly-owned subsidiary of the teachers unions and cultural left.” (editorial, “Betsey DeVos’s School Mission). Vouchers are the only way to save failing schools.
3. The consequences of checks and balances are unbridled executive growth into every cranny of commerce and society, and a bystander Congress. We have lapsed into autopilot government, rife with corruption and seemingly immune to incremental electoral correction. (“A Trump-Ryan Constitutional Revival,” by Christopher DeMuth). Blaming the dysfunctional government on “unbridled executive growth”  overlooks or elides that, from the outset of the Obama administration, the GOP was not a “bystander” but an implacable obstacle to any change or any proposed Obama legislation. (For example, see comprehensive immigration reform, the 2011 Obama-Boehner debt reduction deal, more robust infrastructure spending, the nomination of Merrick Garland, etc.)
4.  An obsession with ethnic composition weakens America.  (letter to the editor). This a a startling claim because until the advent of the Tea Party, America’s ethnic diversity and welcoming embrace of immigrants was considered one of our greatest strengths.
5. Climate change is that it is part of a natural cycle, irrespective of human activity. Normal tidal variation explains current conditions–and the hard-core climate change theory is nothing more than the biggest fake news story ever. (“Shoreline Gentry Are Fake Climate Change Victims,” by Holman Jenkins.

1. The best way  to insure that President Trump doesn’t profit from government policies is not a blind trust or divestment, but to do nothing because the public and press will serve as watchdogs, barking at any conflicts of interest.  No regulation at all is the best guarantee of regulation (op-ed: “Living With Trump’s Conflicts,” by Holman  Jenkins).
2. Central bank interest rate manipulations have been solely aimed at preserving self-defeating  tax, regulatory, and welfare policy orthodoxies. In the Trump era, economics will no longer be politicized. (Jenkins)
3.  Obama paid terrorist-supporting Iranian mullahs billions of dollars. (letter to the editor). In fact, the money  consisted of frozen assets already belonged to the Iranians, and the US has no interest in financing terrorism.
4. Racial (racist) and identity politics are the Dems’ only organizing principle (op-ed, “Democrats Are Obsessed With Race. Trump Isn’t,” by Jason Riley).

1. The media abandoned all pretense of objectivity during the 2016 political campaign. (William McGurn, “Anti-Trumpers Channel Their Inner Donald”).
2. Anti-Trump protestors are acting like hooligans, brownshirts, and anarchists,  and refuse to accept the election results (McGurn).
3. Drug approvals are being needlessly delayed at the FDA because of the agency’s  insistence on the efficacy of long-term effects.  (Op ed: “A Trumpian Cure for the FDA’s Chronic Lethargy”). This is a distortion rather than a lie: It is axiomatic that drug approval takes longer when the gold standard is establishing positive long-term effects,not short term safety and efficacy, but considering long-term effects is an ethical norm, so can’t be measured in terms of market efficiency. Ignoring long-term outcomes will only put the public at risk even as it boosts corporate profits.
4. Without bold world leadership–a Pax Americana– the Putin-Iran axis will assume world domination (editorial: “The Syrian Charnel House”). Are we headed for a new Cold War?
5. The Iran nuclear deal is nothing short of an outright disaster, and will do nothing to deter Iranian nuclear development. (editorial: Mike Pompeo’s Iran File).