The Trucker Newspaper - April 15, 2018

Thetrucker.com
b Fleischer from page 12 b
vention, he said, to explain how Donald Trump
managed to get elected president and how the
administration is doing so far.
“American politics is going through a massive,
massive change,” he said. “Huge trends
that we accepted as the norm for decades are in
flux and are likely to shatter.”
The 2016 election was the first time the
country elected a president who had neither a
political nor a military background.
“We have never elected a pure outsider to
the presidency and that in and of itself tells
you something about the mood of America,”
he said.
Trump’s path to victory confounded so
many of the experts, Fleischer said, because it
was strewn with so many controversial statements,
any one of which would have derailed
most campaigns. “Those statements didn’t
doom him,” Flescher said. “In many ways it
propelled him forward.”
That’s what the sophisticated, educated experts
refused to accept, Fleischer said. “Most
Americans just plain don’t like or trust Washington,
and that, ladies and gentlemen, is why
Donald Trump’s statements, particularly the
most politically incorrect statements that he
made, actually define him as just what people
were looking for.”
Americans were willing to elect an outsider,
even if he came with obvious, glaring flaws.
Even if his mouth often gets him in trouble.
“Think about this, Fleischer added. “The
two Republican candidates who did the best
in the Republican primaries are the ones that
experts hated the most, Donald Trump and Ted
Cruz.”
This has tremendous implications for the
future of the Republican Party, Fleischer said.
Likewise, in the general election, Trump
beat Hillary Clinton by chipping away at almost
every demographic group that had helped
push Barack Obama over the top in 2008 and
2012. The largest inroads were with people
who make less than $30,000 a year.
“These are the people who typically succumb
to the notion that Republicans are the
party of the rich, that Republicans don’t care
about you,” Fleischer said.
This points to a sea change occurring in
American politics. The two major parties
seem to be slowly trading their electoral bases,
Fleischer said. “Where previously the Republicans
always, always, always won college
graduates, Democrats are starting to increasingly
become the party that represents college
graduates. Where typically Democrats have
cleaned the clocks of Republicans among the
lower income, blue-collar working people, particularly
those with high school degrees, those
voters are increasingly becoming Republican.”
But now that Trump is president, Fleischer
said, he’s finding out how difficult it can be to
govern. His favorable rating is almost as high
as when he took office, but his unfavorable rating
has shot up by 10 points.
“The intensity of the opposition to Donald
Trump among the Democratic base is fierce,”
Fleischer said. And to be honest, he added,
Trump brings a lot of that on himself.
“If Trump were a balance sheet, the deficit
side would lead off with his tweets,” Fleischer
said. “There are the meanspirited attacks he’s
made on people, his firing of James Comey, his
failure to immediately denounce the Ku Klux
Klan and Nazis in Charlottesville. The White
House staff situation is a mess, and continues
to be a mess, and that’s disappointing.”
But there are many plusses, Fleischer said.
The markets are up, as are consumer confidence
and job growth. “At long last he’s freed
up the military to fight and to win, which is
why ISIS has been largely destroyed.”
He has stood up to China about intellectual
property rights and other issues. At home he’s
letting the business community know that they
no longer have to fear additional regulations and
additional tax hikes. His appointment of Neil
Gorsuch to the Supreme Court and conservative
judges throughout the judiciary is powerfully
Nation April 15-30, 2018 • 13
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important to the future, Fleischer said.
There have been ups and downs, he said,
but success for the Trump presidency is going
to boil down to the economy, and particularly
whether or not blue-collar, working Americans
start to see yearly pay raises again.
If that happens, “Donald Trump can have
a powerful, successful presidency,” Fleischer
said. But there are a couple of caveats.
One is the Mueller investigation into possible
collusion between the Trump campaign
and Russia and what comes of that. The other
is Trump himself — if he’s made himself so
personally unpopular that he may not get credit
for the positive things that are happening.
“If I were a White House aide today, that
would be my biggest worry,” he said. “They
don’t need to shake things up. They need to
calm things down.”
Fleischer pointed out that when the tax reform
bill went through, Trump’s popularity and
that of congressional Republicans all went up.
“There is a clue and a lesson there. Get things
done.”
Fleischer ended his speech with a final
point. In the last election, he said, young voters
preferred Clinton, older voters voted for
Trump. Single voters went for Clinton, married
voters preferred Trump.
“So, for my absolutely unbiased, nonideological
point of view, I hope that everybody
in this room who is young, may you get older.
And anybody here who is single, may you find
someone at this meeting.” 8
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