Making America truly great again

Late in April, The New York Times headlined its lead editorial: "Mr. Trump's Strange World View." It was printed the day after the dominating candidate's much-touted foreign policy speech.

Some of the Times' criticisms were most insightful. "When one has a hammer," it opined, "everything looks like a nail. And when one's experience is limited to real estate deals, everything looks like a lease negotiation."

Thus, "one imagines a group of nations sitting at a table with him at its head ... And if he doesn't get what he wants? 'In negotiation, you must be willing to walk,' Mr. Trump said."

So - and wouldn't it be fun? - we would have President Trump walking in and out, and around and about all the palaces and drawing rooms of the power lords of the world, with his sulky and beautiful wife to soothe him when he's exhausted by all those rotters.

Yet I disagree fervently on one major point. Trump's foreign policy speech may have been many things, but it was certainly not strange.

If "strange" means "unfamiliar, unknown, unsettling or hard to understand," then the paper is saying that black is white and Dom Pérignon is Gallo wine. For everything the man said is most familiar, knowable and, to enter for a moment into his world, perfectly accessible to "a deal."

Immigration? I have been writing in considerable detail about this important issue since 1975, and many policymakers have struggled over it. A fence on the Mexican border? There already IS a fence along a good part of the border, but no one ever mentions that. Banning all Muslims from daring to set foot on our precious soil, sanctified by the Pilgrims for religious freedom? That idea is palpably absurd, yet many sober Americans have at least some minimal knowledge that Islam does not separate church and state.

Many of the supposedly Trumpian (or perhaps Trumpish or Trumptian?) issues have been talked about in political waiting rooms for some time, but most have not made it to the formal dining rooms - and therein lies the problem.

In the 1960s and early '70s, I was a board member of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations. While I was a happy, hardworking and ill-paid print journalist with the Chicago Daily News, my fellow board members included many leading officers of big Chicago corporations. They enthusiastically supported civic-minded groups like this, and worked at it.

Then many of them went to China and lost the "Protestant ethic" that built this country. No Carnegies or Rockefellers or Fords, these! Once, in the '90s in China, I asked an American business leader where I could go to talk to someone in the Chinese lobby to Washington. He pointed to himself, and I naively thought he was joking.

He wasn't. American businessmen had become so enamored with the constantly repeated "Chinese market of 1.2 billion people," they lost their souls - and their purses, and our technology, which the Chinese Communists gleefully fleeced, as well. This is one of the things Trump is talking about.

I also remember, many times during the last 20 years, attending sessions on globalization at think-tanks here in Washington and listening to bright, avid young American intellectuals go on about the benefits of globalization. They never mentioned how this would cut off jobs and hope to working-class Americans. And it is THIS class today that leads the support for Trump.

Now, none of this came out of nowhere - nothing ever does. In fact, the anger one sees released daily by good, practical Americans of the working and middle classes is a rage I believe has its roots way back, indeed after World War II.

After that noble cause, writes war correspondent and conflict critic Charles Glass, there was a "loyal cadre of intellectuals and pundits favoring war after war, laying the moral ground for invasions and excusing them when they go wrong."

Until we arrive where we are today - with trillions of dollars of unpayable debts, our military and political leadership suspect across the world, our own corporations treating us like we are the foreign beggars, our policies having destroyed country after country, our institutions only barely functioning and our civic culture as vulgar as Babylon's at its most feral.

These are the angers Donald Trump gives voice to within many Americans. He is as vulgar as what they dislike and as dangerous as what they fear, but right now, all that has no meaning.

The answer, then, is not to criticize Donald Trump's words as being strange, but to listen to what he is saying and absorb it. The answer is to understand what those words are awakening in Americans - and then use them to create a cultured and dignified America again.

Email Georgie Anne Geyer at gigi_geyer@juno.com.

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