Trump defiant

For those like me who have been around for awhile, the present Trump administration is truly remarkable in that it harks back to an old, very fundamental American military strategy established by Ulysses S. Grant: Never stop your offensive, not for one instant.

When Grant won a battle he didn’t rest on his laurels. He immediately pushed forward because he knew he had his enemy on the run and at its weakest. When he lost a battle (which almost never happened) he didn’t pull back to lick his wounds, but instead re-configured his forces to push forward nonetheless, knowing that his victorious enemy was likely unprepared for a new assault.

Eisenhower demonstrated his understanding of this strategy during the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944. The Germans had surprised the Allies with their offensive, and thus had successfully pushed a major westward prong splitting Eisenhower’s forces in two. Rather than retreat, however, Eisenhower immediately went on the offensive, moving to pinch off that salient from the north and south and thus trap the German army behind enemy lines. That strategy ended up defeating the Germans, forcing them either to surrender or retreat.

This Trump administration is different from all other Republican presidents, including Trump’s first term, in that he is following this basic winning military strategy, keeping the pressure up continuously, with an enthusiasm that is breath-taking. There has not been one day since the November election that the media has not been filled with new Trump actions. Before his inauguration on January 20th he announced new appointments daily, all radical in many ways because his picks did not routinely come from the Washington crowd. Since his inauguration not one day has gone by without new stories from those radical appointees of new layoffs, firings, contract cancellations, and discoveries of corruption.

Trump is simply not allowing his opponents — the Democrats, the administrative state, and the old propaganda media — to get a breath and organize a well-structured counter-attack. Trump recognizes they have few options, being out of power and lacking in any reasonable policy positions. Why let them get a breath?

Trump 47 is also not like Trump 45 or any other previous Republican president for maybe a century in that he has no loyalty to the old administration state in Washington. He simply wants it gone, or so neutered it will not have the power to hurt Americans for many decades.

Finally, and most important, Trump’s aggression is shaped by his recognition that he won’t win every battle. If anything, this is the most important take-away from what we have been witnessing in the past six weeks. Trump has realized that it will take a long time to turn this lumbering corrupt machine around. There will be setbacks, such as hostile court decisions, or an inability to get real budget cuts passed immediately.

The lion now is roaring, quite loudly.
Photo by Travis Jervey.

His response is simply to push harder, to make those setbacks mere pinpricks in the larger scale of the war.

For example, the court decisions against him have routinely been based on weak legal analysis. All of Trump’s actions have been very carefully crafted to follow the law, or to push it hard without breaking it in any fundamental way. Thus those losses have almost always be thrown out by higher courts upon appeal. Even in the few cases where he has lost in court, the losses have been of limited impact that they are going to be easily countered by his other larger actions.

We all must remember these facts when Trump’s effort does experience setbacks. Defeats are guaranteed to happen, but as long as Trump and his allies never stop pushing forward these defeats will merely be a retreating action by his opponents against his winning campaign.

Keep your eye to the larger target: A significantly smaller and less powerful federal government. It took almost a century to make it the ugly monster that it is today. It will likely take as long to either kill it or tame it into impotence. Freedom-loving Americans must all adopt Trump’s strategy. Don’t give up. Never surrender.

Or as a wise man said this past summer, “Fight! Fight! Fight!”