I endorsed Donald Trump for three big reasons. I believed him when he said that — because he was a billionaire and not dependent on special interests for campaign funding — he was not beholden to “the swamp.” I believed Donald Trump when he said that nation-building wars had failed, that diplomacy with Russia was preferable to NATO hostilities, and that our stalemated 16-year Afghanistan war should be ended. And I trusted him when he said he would reshape trade and immigration policies around the needs of American workers.
In my desperate search for an alternative to the corrupt Washington establishment and its parade of bought-and-paid-for mouthpiece candidates, I was willing to overlook Donald Trump’s checkered personal history and frat-house rhetorical style.
To his credit, President Trump has moved on renegotiating NAFTA and withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. By tightening up enforcement of existing immigration law, he has sharply reduced the inflow of illegal immigrants who drive down entry-level wages for American citizens.
I lost many political friends with my Trump endorsement. Now, I expect to lose more in withdrawing it.
Rather than draining Washington’s swamp of corruption, President Trump has outfitted his administration with wetsuits. His nominee for Health and Human Services, Alex Azar, is a poster child for the revolving door, coming off a 10-year stint as president of pharma company Eli Lilly’s U.S. operations. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross owns passive investments in ocean shipping companies that benefit from increased U.S. natural gas exports he now regulates. Early this year, Carl Icahn lobbied to save his refinery company tens of millions in ethanol fuel credits while acting as top adviser on regulatory reform.
A shock to populists, the president has surrounded himself with Goldman Sachs alums, including Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn. The Sunlight Foundation and Global Anti-Corruption Blog maintain listings of the literally hundreds of personal and business conflicts involving the president and his family. Just one: the president’s Secret Service detail has spent $145,000 of taxpayer money on golf cart rentals at his resorts. The golf cart conflict alone would generate an in-state firestorm if it involved a New Hampshire politician of either party.
Rather than prioritizing national security, President Trump has filled his administration with extreme pro-war hawks. He has re-upped on the Afghanistan war and appointed Nikki Haley as U.N. ambassador. Rumors from within the Trump Administration about uber-hawks Mike Pompeo for secretary of state and Tom Cotton for CIA have neutered Rex Tillerson’s attempts at diplomacy. Just like a Bush, the administration has cozied up to the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism, Saudi Arabia, approving (as did President Obama) $100 billion in weapons sales to the monarchy, some being used to wage its genocidal Yemen war. Rather than the promised military restraint, we hear talk of bombing campaigns and regime change in Iran and North Korea.
These hawks’ belligerence is matched only by their fiscal recklessness that I can only assume is driven by the military-industrial-Congressional complex donors to their campaigns and think tanks. President Trump has joined them, jumping in feet first behind rampant weapons- procurement pork, including the trillion dollar F-35 program and the trillion dollar nuclear triad rebuild. Smarter and saner would be to scrap land-based missiles, rapidly improve missile defense, properly fund military readiness and training, and avoid wars of choice.
Indeed, the greatest threat to U.S. national security is national debt. Current high and rapidly-growing debt weakens us in the eyes of our geopolitical rivals, displaces both public and private capital and infrastructure investment, and makes virtually certain a sudden and serious disruption in the lives of people depending on Social Security and Medicare. Both President Trump and the Republican-led Congress have now made the problem worse by championing tax cuts without spending cuts.
My final big beef is the failure by President Trump to lead by repealing and replacing Obamacare with something better. The American health care system is the world’s most expensive, yet delivers results ranking near the bottom among industrial nations. The president has failed even to articulate a workable alternative to fully-socialized and rationed health care. The conservative alternative is consumer choice among market-driven capitated care programs combined with incentives for Americans to make healthier lifestyle choices.
Where to turn? The remedy is the one our Constitution’s framers provided to a federal government gone unaccountable and corrupt. Help any or all of the three leading organizations reach the 34 states needed to convene a constitutional convention to propose amendments. These are the Balanced Budget Amendment Task Force, now at 28 states; the Convention of States, now at 12 states on board for a convention limited to fiscal restraint, term limits and restored federalism; and WolfPAC, now at five states agreeing to a convention limited to the subject of free and fair elections.
Jim Rubens has served as Republican state senator and chair of the New Hampshire GOP platform committee and ran for U.S. Senate in 2014 and 2016.