OPINION:
Whatever you think of Donald Trump, he is a smart businessman, and he is perhaps the shrewdest political observer of our time.
Sure, he’s had business failures. But one thing is true about all successful businessmen: They can tell you all night long about all their failures.
They just don’t dwell on them.
Sure, Mr. Trump has endured his political setbacks. But that is the burden of being a Party of One. He is willing to talk about things and pursue a popular agenda that threatens and terrifies the entire established political power structure.
Anyway, show me one politician anywhere in the world who spent his first seven decades as a businessman and then decides to become a politician in his 70s and right away wins the presidency. Better yet, go back to all the interviews Mr. Trump did 10, 20, 30 years ago talking about politics.
The dude is clairvoyant when it comes to politics. The dude has a sixth sense. It’s why the powerful political set hates him so much.
Go back and listen to the interviews former shock jock radio host Howard Stern conducted with Mr. Trump before Mr. Stern became a toothless corporate lapdog of the Democratic Party. Mr. Trump’s criticism of foreign trade, the Iraq War and illegal immigration was the same 20 years ago as it is today.
Even back then — as today — Mr. Trump was just as conservative as he was willing to attack the Republican Party. Again, this is why they despise him.
Mr. Trump’s interview earlier this week with Tucker Carlson was Mr. Trump at his very best. He was the shrewd, wise, fearless visionary in a land of dangerous, infantile, ideological lunatics. As Mr. Carlson said, Mr. Trump is once again talking about things no other politicians are talking about.
Just like in 2016.
Specifically, Mr. Trump sounded the alarm on the grave and gathering threats around the world that threaten the very existence of our country. Grave and gathering threats entirely — and perhaps intentionally — created or invited by the Biden administration.
In two short years, President Biden has managed to undermine American energy production, turned the Taliban into the largest arms dealer the world has ever seen, started a war in Ukraine, aligned our two biggest enemies into a confederacy against us, wrecked the U.S. dollar as the world’s currency, and brought us closer to a nuclear war with Russia than at any point in history.
None of these things happened during Mr. Trump’s presidency because of his lucid, statesmanlike approach to our allies and our enemies around the world. Most importantly, none of these things happened under Mr. Trump’s presidency because Mr. Trump was guided by a clear, forceful “American First” agenda.
If the Trump Doctrine was “America First,” the Biden Doctrine is “America Last.” Or perhaps “Hunter First” or “Biden Family First.” After all, Mr. Biden — aka “the Big Guy” — is the kingpin of a sprawling political corruption syndicate that stretches from China to Ukraine and all points in between.
What is particularly amazing about this is that Mr. Trump just fell off the turnip truck in terms of his Washington foreign policy chops. He just arrived on the scene and, after witnessing 40 years of failure at the border, thought it might be a good idea to engage the government of Mexico and threaten to cut off foreign aid if they didn’t stop the flow of illegals coming across the border into the United States.
It worked, of course. Yet nobody in Washington ever thought to try that. Or, if they did, they did not implement it because they were afraid it might work. After all, Democrats need their indentured voters, Republicans want their indentured workers, and everybody in Washington is afraid to lose a powerful issue that makes them lots of money.
But Mr. Biden is the supreme foreign policy expert in all of Washington. He is — and this is not an exaggeration — an even greater foreign policy expert than John Kerry himself.
Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Global mastermind. Mr. Biden has been on every war council of every war since Vietnam. President Barack Obama picked him as vice president because he was such an expert on foreign policy.
Yet no president in history has done more to wreck the world — and America’s standing in it — than Mr. Biden. And he managed to do it in just two years.
The only silver lining here is that Mr. Biden’s disastrous handling of world affairs has highlighted for those clinging to a reality that Donald Trump really was the wisest, most stable statesman to be president in the past 40 years.
• Charles Hurt is the opinion editor at The Washington Times.
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