We Can't Restore America By Obsessing Over Foreigners

Frank thoughts on the MAGA cult and the second Trump Administration.

About half of what I post here at Twilight Patriot consists of articles written for a website called the American Thinker. On the one hand, I will always be grateful to the Thinker for providing me with a much larger readership than I could have gotten on my own.

But there are two big limitations to writing for the Thinker. First, I can’t go much longer than 2000 words; second, it’s very hard to get away with speaking ill of Republicans in general, or Donald Trump in particular. (The one time I got an outright rejection from the Thinker was for my 2021 article Drafting Women, or How America is Ruled by Moderate Republicans, in which I claimed that people like George W. Bush, John McCain, and John Roberts were the real gatekeepers who usually decided how much of the leftist agenda became law.)

Since I intend to violate both these limits today, I have decided to post this article directly to my Substack. You, dear readers, are the first people who get to see it – the first people who get to read my first big criticism of Trump 2.0. Because Trump and MAGA aren’t immune to the dumb scapegoating habits that often afflict populist movements, and because we can’t restore American greatness by obsessing over foreigners.

The Liberation Day That Wasn’t

As I write this, America is dealing with the second week of fallout from Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs. Speculation abounded – could the economy withstand a $835 billion tax hike? Why are countries like Switzerland, which does not have protective tariffs against the US, getting hit with a “reciprocal tariff”? Why did that big, beautiful list of impacted countries – you know, the one that Trump waved above his head in the Rose Garden – include uninhabited penguin islands? Is Trump really trying to eliminate not just the overall trade deficit, but the deficit with every single country? Why would anyone do that? Does he even know what a “reciprocal tariff” is? Did he calculate the rates with a formula provided by ChatGPT? And so forth.

Then, one week later, the President signed another executive order suspending all of the tariffs for the next ninety days – except for the tariffs on China: “Based on the lack of respect that China has shown to the World’s Markets, I am hereby raising the Tariff charged to China by the United States of America to 125%, effective immediately.”

The NASDAQ, which had fallen about 13 percent since 2 April, climbed up to just 2.8 percent short of its pre-Liberation Day value. Trump’s supporters are now lauding him for a successful show of strength that got other countries to respect him again, while his enemies still believe that he’s an unhinged egotistical chaos agent and that the stock market will probably crash many more times before he’s done whatever he’s doing.

Notice, however, what is being overlooked while Trump flails about with his tariffs. The United States ranked second-worst (Zambia was in last place) in this recent S&P500 survey on development time for new mines in various countries. This is due in large part to procedural environmental laws: instead of simply putting a statutory limit on the amount of pollution that a mine can produce and giving government agencies the power to enforce the limit (as most countries in Europe and Asia do) US laws allow anyone and everyone to sue to halt construction on mines until the mining company proves in court that it’s not harming the environment, or violating indigenous people’s rights, or violating… well, it’s got to be violating something; there is no presumption of innocence here.

Since there are 829 federal judges, any one of whom can halt work on any mine at any stage of construction, with the burden being on the mine’s owners to prove their own innocence, few new mines get opened. The long wait times and the uncertainty make them a bad investment, so investors take their money to other countries instead, which is why Australia and Canada, despite their much smaller populations compared to the US, have the world’s two largest mine industries.

Similar legal hurdles have scuppered numerous attempts to build pipelines, powerlines, transit systems, ferries, and powerplants (fossil and nuclear and even wind and solar), as well as every American project to build high speed rail (remember when California approved high speed rail in a 2008 referendum, and spent $28.2 Billion over the next 16 years without a single mile of track being laid? Meanwhile Morocco, for about $5.4 billion, managed to lay 201 miles of track between 2010 and 2018 and has plans to keep building more.)

Then there is the matter of housing: why do American renters in the bottom income quintile spend an average of 74.8% of their income on rent, compared to 54.9% in Italy and just 31.1% in France? It’s mostly zoning laws that ban multifamily housing from large portions of cities, plus lengthy drawn-out permitting processes, plus (in the bluer states) private lawsuits against real estate developers.

And Donald Trump, despite his outward appearance as a radical, has no concrete plans to change any of this.

Populists and Scapegoats

Who is responsible for the dismal housing situation? A mixture of liberal activists and lawyers, who just hate capitalism and claim that letting rich people build things will ipso facto make the poor poorer, plus middle class people who already own homes, and whose desire to see their home’s value go up for the rest of their life is seen by local governments as some sort of basic human right, which must if necessary be preserved by forcing poor people to pay two or three times the market rate for rent.

Notice who I am not blaming for the housing shortage: immigrants. Notice who I am not blaming for the decline in America’s physical infrastructure and manufacturing plant: foreign competitors.

And in that regard I differ from a lot of Trump supporters, who think that the main cause of the housing shortage is that there are too many Latin American immigrants in the country, and the main cause of the bad job prospects for Americans who work with their hands is that firms from other countries are ripping us off by selling stuff to us.

Despite having some genuine virtues, Donald Trump is ultimately a lowbrow populist. And lowbrow populists know that their audiences want simple stories and convenient villains. The Left likes to blame complex problems on billionaires or bigoted rural hicks. For the Right, it’s foreigners. Immigrants steal our jobs and drive up rents and eat our dogs and cats. Asians manipulate the currency and undercut American manufacturers and create dangerous bat viruses in their labs. Ukrainians siphon off the defence money that should be going to our southern border. And so forth.

(Yes, there really are people in the Trump coalition who were stupid enough to claim that the reason the US-Mexico border was wide open during the Biden years was that the money that should have been spent policing it was going to Ukraine instead. They really expected us to forget, goldfish-like, that the border was open for a long time before Ukraine was invaded, which is no surprise when you remember that the dominant faction within the US government wanted it to be open.)

But anyone who wants a place in Donald Trump’s orbit has to suck up to him by pretending to believe these things – and often the pretence is kept up long enough that the mask grows into the face.

In real life, where our problems aren’t caused primarily by foreigners, this is a very bad thing. After all, if foreigners aren’t the problem, then no amount of emotion directed at foreigners is going to fix the problem – indeed it will just make the problem worse, by diverting attention away from its real causes, and by making the Republican Party (which is still the lesser of two evils) seem odious to people who are intelligent enough to see through the stream of populist balderdash.

Victimhood Culture, Victimhood Nation

Most of the time, it’s liberals who indulge in victimhood culture, and conservatives who understand that victimhood culture is bad. It’s liberals who call for lenience when a youth with abusive or absent parents is caught committing a petty theft, liberals who insist that we have to make up for past racism by bending school discipline standards until black and white students get punished at equal rates, liberals who have implemented the “zero-tolerance policies” toward schoolyard violence that, in practice, allow feral youths to batter and torment girls and smaller boys whenever adults are absent or distracted, since resistance by the other boys would be treated like a common assault.

Now of course the end result of that is the “school-to-prison-pipeline,” in which the sacred victims who are supposed to benefit from all this just grow up to be layabouts and gangbangers and have much worse lives than they would have had if society had expected discipline from them when they were young. (My 2023 essay Clarence Thomas Gets It attacks the racial angle of this problem. It is unfortunate that, these days, more and more people on the Right are so fed up with the Left’s lies about race that they jump to the other extreme, ignore everything that Clarence Thomas and Thomas Sowell have to say about black crime, and instead blame it on genetics – an explanation that is obviously bunk when you recollect that the African slaves brought to America are nearly the same genetic stock as the inhabitants of the Gold Coast aka Ghana, and that Ghanaian blacks, at present, have about half the homicide rate of American whites.)

And yet, when it comes to international relations, Donald Trump has claimed victimhood culture as his own. If America is manufacturing fewer goods than it used to, then it’s because foreigners are ripping us off. They’re manipulating their currency. They’re using subsidies from their own governments to dump their products on us at prices we can’t compete with. They’re not allowing American merchants equal access to their own markets. They’re stealing our intellectual property. They’re using slave labor. Some of these accusations are true, some of the time (the last two apply especially to China). But none of them are the primary reasons that American manufacturing is uncompetitive.

Think, for a moment, about the mathematical realities behind the trade deficit. If America is importing more stuff than it exports, then it has to be exporting more currency than it imports. This (1) is only possible under a fiat money system, since countries with gold and silver money can’t sustain a prolonged trade deficit, (2) is only possible when the central bank wants it to happen, and emits the proper financial instruments to make it happen, and (3) is required as long as the dollar is the world’s reserve currency and is thus in high demand everywhere – a situation which Donald Trump is upholding via tariff threats, since letting the dollar weaken would fly in the face of his image of American greatness. (Curiously, JD Vance has a much more complete understanding of how all this works, and in earlier years he was on record saying that reviving American manufacturing required a weaker dollar. Unfortunately, becoming Trump’s running mate came at the price of having to hide his light under a bushel.)

In essence, what we see is Donald Trump applying victimhood culture to America as a whole, while his eager base laps it up and begs for more. But the plain truth is that America is still far too strong to be dominated by any foreign country. The problems for American industry in which foreigners have a hand are (1) smaller than the domestically-caused problem and (2) are only possible because interest groups within America benefit from them and lobby for them. (For instance, the finance titans who have actually been setting America’s monetary policy since 1913 benefit greatly from being able to export US currency and financial services all over the globe, even while American manufacturers suffer from low demand due to the same unbalanced cashflows.)

The same is true for problems related to immigration. Housing, for instance, isn’t in short supply because there are too many immigrants (Japan, for instance, is way more densely populated than the US; also, apartments there are cheap because of its simple and predictable zoning and permitting laws.) The main reason housing is expensive is that most middle-class Americans believe themselves entitled to make money simply by owning a house, and will lobby local governments to restrict new construction to the point that rents and home prices steadily rise with time. But the idea that, by doing so, the middle class is mooching off the poor is a political non-starter in America, so (depending on whether you’re on the Left or the Right) the blame goes to either landlords or immigrants.

Also, even when immigrant labourers are here illegally, it’s not because they defied the full force of the American government to get here – it’s because there are factions within America who want them here. And part of the reason they want them here is that there are a lot of essential jobs in agriculture and construction work that most native-born Americans are just too lazy to do.

Americans also like to view the drug trade as another case of foreigners victimizing Americans. But in Mexico (which has suffered much more violence from the cartels) it’s the Americans who are seen as the villains, since it’s American money that provides the cartels with the means and the motivation to do their evil.

In short, the United States is not the kind of country that has anything to gain by adopting a victim mentality. We’re still too powerful to be pushed around from outside. While foreigners can and do take advantage of our weaknesses, the prime movers – banks, environmental lawyers, zoning boards, drug addicts, etc. – are Americans. And without admitting that, we can’t make real progress toward restoring American greatness.

Otherwise, we might well wake up one of these days to find the American flag planted in Greenland… only for its much-talked-about minerals to be even more off-limits than before, due to millions of American lawyers suddenly being empowered to file frivolous lawsuits against anyone who wants to mine them.

What About China?

While Donald Trump suspended most of his Liberation Day tariffs on 9 April, one country just got hit harder – China. Trump’s supporters are generally happy about this, as they view China as America’s biggest adversary, more responsible than anyone else for the pitiful state of our manufacturing plant – and that’s before you remember what happened at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

I certainly have my criticisms of America’s relationship with the People’s Republic of China. Indeed I think that this relationship was rotten and lopsided from the beginning – when Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon travelled to China, met with Chairman Mao in Mao’s own gardens (not on neutral ground, as is appropriate for equals) and then signed the 1972 Shanghai Communiqué which stated (among other things) that “the United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China….”

Forget for a moment about the diplomatic context of that statement, and just look at the plain meaning of the words. It’s one thing to say that the governments of both the PRC and the Republic of China claim to be the rightful government of all China, of which Taiwan is one province. It’s another thing to say that every last person there – all 878 million of them, including the Taiwanese who were content under Japanese rule and launched a failed uprising after the handover of their island to Chiang Kai-Shek at the end of World War II – believes that. And the idea that it is somehow the responsibility of the US President to speak for “all Chinese” is preposterously ridiculous.

The response of Nixon’s apologists is to simply remind everyone that the One China Principle has been a non-negotiable part of China’s foreign relations since 1949, and is accepted in one way or another by the United Nations and by every nation state more populous than Guatemala.

To which my response is: So what? The actual text of the statement that Nixon signed is a ludicrous falsehood. People repeat it anyway for the same reason that the total state in George Orwell’s 1984 makes people say “Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.” It’s not about convincing anyone of its objective truth – it’s about showing everyone who’s boss. Your willingness to say that O’Brian is holding up five fingers, even though you can only see four, is how you show Big Brother that you’re a safe and reliable subject.

And the fact that so many influential people have submitted to the CCP’s humiliation ritual – that they have stated with the utmost formality that there is only one sovereign country called “China” when in real life there are clearly two – doesn’t mean that it’s something other than a humiliation ritual. It just means that it’s a successful humiliation ritual.

What, then, have been the downstream effects of this gesture of submissiveness? Of America’s willingness to say: Having China as a diplomatic and trading partner is just so important that we will toss aside all of our principles in order to make it happen – such as by breaking off diplomatic relations with the Taiwanese even though they have done nothing to deserve this? And we will do this even though China, which has far more to gain economically from this relationship than we do, is making no similar concessions to America?

Well, one consequence was that the Chinese Communists reacted to America’s willingness to accept a relationship where China was the head, and America was the tail, by continuing to act like China was the head, and America was the tail.

This, for instance, explains China’s cavalier attitude toward intellectual property theft. This is no small matter – back in 2018, the US Trade Representative estimated that “Chinese theft of American IP currently costs between $225 billion and $600 billion annually.” (This is roughly the same as the entire value of Chinese goods imported by the US.) As a high-wage, high-innovation country, the United States can’t let itself be treated this way and still prosper. And yet, American firms continue to let their patents get infringed and their trade secrets stolen while the Chinese government winks, since the alternative is to not do business with China at all, and the short-term gains are too big to pass up.

Remember what I said about the consensus that most of the world has reached, that Chinese participation is just so important that principle must be cast aside in order to get it? Well, it didn’t stop with throwing Taiwan out of the UN and banning its athletes from flying their flag at the Olympics.

Another consequence of America’s lopsided relationship with China is that Pakistan and North Korea now have nuclear weapons. Basically, the US and China both signed onto the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NNPT), in which they agreed not to assist countries other than the “Big Five” in getting the bomb; the Americans went beyond their duties by not just refusing to assist Taiwan’s nuclear program but actively sabotaging it, while the Chinese repaid this by supplying plutonium, nuclear blueprints, and missile technology to Pakistan and North Korea. The other NNPT countries did nothing to retaliate, since they knew that China, if called out, would just withdraw from the treaty. After all, one has got to remember the basic rule here: China must participate even if every principle is cast aside.

The Covid breakout was hardly any different. Clear-headed scientists and diplomats had been criticizing lax Chinese lab safety protocols for years before things came to a head in Wuhan. China’s mixture of secrecy and a preference for quantity over quality in scientific research – including dangerous gain-of-function research – was quite often recognized as a disaster waiting to happen, and the 2019 Wuhan incident wasn’t even that country’s first deadly lab leak. Meanwhile, the Party had a history of brutally enforced coverups during previous disease outbreaks (Jiang Yanyong, the doctor who warned western authorities about the SARS epidemic in 2003, spent most of his last two decades of life under house arrest.)

Had all of this been happening in a small or medium-sized country, the response of entities like the WHO and CDC would have been to loudly sanction that country and refuse to fund or otherwise have dealings with labs that did hazardous research there. But because China is special (China must participate even if every principle is cast aside) nothing decisive was done, and American virologists continued to collaborate closely with their Chinese counterparts, since there were lucrative careers to be built doing research that was illegal in their own country.

And now, between 18 and 33 million dead people later, prestigious entities like the CIA, FBI, and New York Times are finally admitting that the lab leak is the most likely origin of Covid-19. (But not admitting that close scientific cooperation with China was a mistake all along: China must participate and all that.)

So, after cataloguing all of the ways that Chinese Communists have exploited and humiliated and lied to their American dupes, am I agreed with the typical Trump narrative of China as big bad villain and the United States as innocent victim? Not quite.

Because the key thing to remember is that China has never been strong enough to force any of this on America. (Do you remember that time when Chinese marines landed on Waikiki Beach and demanded that the US relax its patent laws and send more money to the Wuhan labs? Neither do I.)

In short, America’s long history of being a pushover with respect to China is a history of American interest groups sucking up to Beijing in the hopes of getting some short-term reward for their bootlicking. The Shanghai Communiqué happened because Tricky Dick Nixon wanted to take credit for the Sino-Soviet Split after it had already happened, and he wrongly believed that his quasi-alliance with Mao would help him win the Vietnam War.

Even with Nixon gone and Saigon fallen, the US under Carter followed through on Nixon’s plans because, at that point, there were too many “China-hands” in the State Department whose jobs depended on it, and who were now claiming that being friendly with China would cause China to liberalize. (There was also a race angle: right-wing racists were willing to overlook the massacres carried out by the PRC and its Khmer clients because they didn’t view their victims as morally equal to the white victims of Russian communism, while left-wing racists overlooked the same massacres because they couldn’t take non-white people seriously as oppressors.)

When the hoped-for liberalization didn’t happen – when it was the USSR and its satellites, i.e. the bloc that the US had kept resisting, that liberalized in 1989, while China massacred its protestors instead – did the Americans re-evaluate their theory? Did they admit that Deng Xiaoping might have actually meant what he said when he told the Party, over and over again, that “reform and opening up” meant temporarily easing restrictions on entrepreneurship and trade, while keeping the other elements of the totalitarian system firmly in place, until the country had “modernized” and was strong enough to return to a purer form of socialism while also dominating its rivals in international affairs?

Surely you jest. What actually happened was that America’s monied elites, who by this time had major business connections with China, kept up the charade that every surrender to China on a matter of principle was somehow bringing China into the West’s cultural orbit. And what were the fruits of this? America losing $225 to $600 billion each year in stolen IP, formerly prosperous towns in the Midwest rusting away while their inhabitants died by suicide or overdose because they couldn’t compete with Chinese slave labor, and then, to top it all off, Covid-19.

But at no point was America truly victimized from without. The American business executives who knew that putting their factories in China would mean getting their trade secrets stolen, but did it anyone, were not acting with a gun to their heads – they just weren’t thinking past the next quarterly earnings report. Likewise, a lot of American scientists, for whom professional success meant publishing lots of virology papers, had realized that this could be done faster and cheaper if they partnered up with a country that didn’t value human life as much as their own.

At every point, America – or, to speak properly, elite factions within America – had most of the agency. All of the concessions that they made to China also served their own short-term political, economic, or professional interests. These are the interest groups toward which right-wing Americans should be directing their ire. After all, the US Congress never had the power to impeach Xi Jinping, but its failure to impeach NIAID director Anthony Fauci for lying under oath about gain-of-function research is inexcusable.

What It All Means

At the moment I’m writing this, Donald Trump is more firmly in control of the Republican Party than ever. No matter what he does, the great bulk of Republicans, from the grass-roots on up, will cheer it on, and shun anyone who criticizes it.

Is Trump putting tariffs on China alone? Good – we need to crack down on our number one rival! Is he tariffing democracies like Germany and Japan too? Good – we pay for those countries’ defense, and we can’t put up with any more freeloading. Is he removing the tariffs? Good – it means they’ve fulfilled their purpose and other countries respect us now. Did all of this make the stock market crash? So be it – Americans who love their country should be willing to live with less baubles if that’s what it takes to restore domestic industry. Did the stock market do a quick turnaround? Good – that means that Trump’s critics are blowing smoke when they say that he’s bad for the economy.

Now, I am fully aware of the good things that President Trump has done. I have written repeatedly about how, if you judge him by his actions rather than his words, he is (among other things) the most anti-war president since Carter, and the only pro-life president we’ve actually had since abortion became a political issue. I voted for him all three times that he ran, and I wrote a Fourth-of-July post last year about how picking Trump, the chaos agent, over Biden/Harris and the slow but certain slide into despotism, was the only way to be true to the moral example that the Founding Fathers left for us.

And yet, despite all this, there’s no getting around the fact that, since 20 January of this year, America’s executive branch has been run by an old, venal reality-TV star surrounded by a crazed personality cult. All things considered, I would much rather have Rand Paul as president, and indeed if he runs in the 2028 primaries I will gladly campaign and vote for him.

Rand Paul, after all, has been standing up for all the good parts of Trumpistry much longer and more consistently than Trump himself. Paul has always wanted less US involvement in the Middle East; with Trump it has been two-steps-forward, one-step-back. Paul attacked the covid lockdowns from the beginning and has tried to get Congress to actually investigate and punish the dishonesty around gain-of-function research; Trump flailed about helplessly during the first year of the pandemic, and let Anthony Fauci and his associates wield power under his watch. Paul wants to bring back the gold standard because he understands the relationship between monetary policy and trade deficits; Trump seems to think that tariffs are a hammer and every economic problem is a nail; Paul refuses to blame foreigners for our economic woes, and he actually wants to shrink the burdens of environmental laws and labour laws and zoning laws and private litigation that have made American housing scarce and American industry uncompetitive; Trump seems to think that tariffs are… well, you get the idea.

Unfortunately, the crowds are still with Trump, for now. They like the simple stories where Americans are being victimized by foreign scapegoats. And the popularity of these simple stories puts hard limits on how much the MAGA movement can accomplish in the real world.

Hence my declinist worldview, and my lack of enthusiasm (compared to many of the people that I know) for Trump, MAGA, DOGE, the National Conservativism movement, and most of the other components of the New Right. There are reasons to be happy that Trump won in November, but in the long run, anything really good that happens will start with forward-thinking Americans taking more responsibility for their own families and communities, knowing full well that America as a whole is in for dark days ahead, no matter who wins in partisan politics.