Trump Must Go, But the Disruption Must Stay

This article first appeared at The Orange County Register.

The great disrupter is rapidly becoming a great disaster — for the country, his party and even his own political base. In order to save anything from his landmark 2016 victory, President Donald Trump must go — the sooner, the better.

Trump is leading us into a political climate that more resembles Lebanon or Weimar Germany or the United States in the run-up to the Civil War. Not all blame for the current lunacy belongs to The Donald, however. Much of it stems from an increasingly unhinged progressive culture. Yet, even granting that, Trump has made bad things worse, as even some of his supporters note, with unconsidered utterances, poorly masked appeals to xenophobes — and even racists — and his churlish persona.

With declining ratings, most critically among independents, Trump has squandered, as the Chinese would put it, “the mandate of heaven,” and should be nudged out, hopefully under his own power. Impeachment, in contrast, would seem to his supporters to be something of a coup d’état, as former President Barack Obama’s political consigliere, David Axelrod, has suggested.

A Necessary Disruption

Although I always thought him too thin-skinned and profoundly ignorant to be president, Trump successfully disrupted a dysfunctional political system that needed to be disrupted. Before Trump, politicians might appeal to populist sentiments, but they remained the prisoners of K Street lobbyists. Like Sen. Bernie Sanders, Trump ran — and won — against the D.C. oligarchy, creating a populist standard that could well spell the demise of the neoliberal era.

Trump’s election represented a necessary challenge to the coastal-dominated Democratic Party, as well as to the establishment GOP, who regard his “Made in America” program as too banal for their sophisticated, and well-compensated, tastes. These people, as liberal journalist Thomas Frank has noted, flourished under both Obama and George W. Bush, while the middle class and minorities saw little improvement in their incomes or quality of life.

Trump’s challenge to various neoliberal policies — open borders, “free trade,” and ever more intrusive managerial rule from Washington — has threatened those who, to be frank, needed to be called to account. It is critical to recall that both the political and corporate establishments, including Wall Street, largely opposed Trump’s populist nationalism as much as they hated Sanders’ socialist politics.

Read the entire piece at The Orange County Register.

Joel Kotkin is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, was published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He is executive director of NewGeography.com and lives in Orange County, CA.

Photo: By Michael Vadon (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons