by Roger Kimball
Trump’s whirlwind week: pushing peace abroad, restoring order in D.C., boosting markets with tariffs, and scoring a CBO win—all while critics scramble to keep up.
A week ago, I was writing about Donald Trump’s summit meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska to talk about ending Russia’s war with Ukraine. A few days before that, I wrote about the Trump administration’s announcement that it would conduct a thorough “internal review” of the Smithsonian Institution and its vast network of museums, research centers, and related activities. It turns out that when Trump ordered the elimination of DEI initiatives, he meant it. In recent years, the Smithsonian has gradually morphed from an institution for the “increase & diffusion of knowledge among men” into a woke repository of progressive, anti-American shibboleths. Among other things, the colonoscopy-like review will counter the pervasive assumption that the history of the United States is tantamount to a history of oppression.
Last Monday, Trump quickly made good on his promise in Alaska to meet with Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, when he assembled the heads of Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the European Union, and NATO at the White House to talk with Zelensky. It was an extraordinary event. Alas, “intransigence” seems to be Putin’s—or is it Zelensky’s?—middle name, so peace in that deadly conflict (total casualties have topped one million) continues to be elusive, despite Trump’s heroic efforts.
That disappointment has not stymied Trump. Instead, he took his peace agenda to Washington, D.C., putting the city under federal control—it had withered under home rule since 1973—and calling in the National Guard to help the Metropolitan Police reestablish order, aesthetic as well as legal. Homeless encampments were disassembled, grass is being replanted, and the law is being enforced. The results were nearly instantaneous. CNN put it this way: “Trump’s DC takeover produces moderate drop in crime—and huge spike in immigration arrests.”
A reporter for Fox was more forthright. “DC just had a murder-free week, and yes, Dems, Trump did that.” “As of Wednesday afternoon,” we read, “the nation’s capital has had no murders for seven days, something that had not been achieved since March and something I can find no recent record of in summer months when the murder rate is typically at its highest.”
And it’s not just murder, according to the local police union. Robbery dropped 46% in the week after the takeover, carjackings were down a whopping 83%, and violent crime was down 22%. Who could possibly argue against that?
Ask CNN.
Tariffs were supposed to be the stupid Trump idea that was going to eviscerate the stock market and crash the U.S. economy. A couple of days ago, Canada joined the long list of countries to drop its retaliatory tariffs in order to curry favor with Trump. Friday, the DOW logged an 840-point gain, closing above 45,600.
Meanwhile, in the continuing saga of “no one is above the law,” John Bolton, National Security Advisor (for a while) in Trump’s first term, was awakened early Friday morning by an FBI raid. What were they looking for? Classified documents, perhaps those containing the sensitive information that showed up in his anti-Trump book, The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir. Back in August 2022, after Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s Palm Beach home, was raided by the FBI, Bolton tsk-tsked that “There is no evidence there is a partisan motive here. I think everybody just ought to calm down, whether you’re pro-Trump or anti-Trump, and let the process work its way through.” I hope some high-minded mouthpiece from the fourth estate will ask Bolton if he stands by that advice.
Friday was a busy day. The Department of Justice released a lightly redacted transcript of the interview that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche recently conducted with Ghislaine Maxwell, former confidante of Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted (and dead) sex trafficker. The Dems have been baying for “the Epstein files”—whatever they are—to be released, hoping against hope that they would somehow implicate Donald Trump, who knew Epstein casually and broke with him decades back.
That was always preposterous on its face since had there been anything that incriminated Trump in those files, you can be sure that the revelations would have been leaked and celebrated in blaring headlines before the 2024 presidential election. Reporting on the transcript of the interview with Maxwell, The New York Times imparted the startling news that Maxwell would like to have her twenty-year sentence reduced, commuted, or expunged with a pardon. You don’t say? The paper also reported, grudgingly, that Maxwell, who was speaking under oath, insisted that in her interactions with Trump, he was “a gentleman in all respects.” “I never witnessed the president in any inappropriate setting in any way,” she said. It must have pained the Times to report that, but they partially made up for it by larding their several stories about the interview with a truckload of innuendo about Maxwell’s probable bad faith, conniving nature, and general untrustworthiness.
What else? Well, just as I sat down to write this column, the news came from the Congressional Budget Office that Trump’s tariffs are projected to “reduce total deficits by $4.0 trillion altogether.” As the commentator Hugh Hewitt observed, “Wherever you are on the ‘Trump Spectrum,’ the CBO analysis not only validates the president’s belief in tariffs as an essential tool of economic renewal and statecraft, but it also exposes the fundamental misapprehension of the topic by pretty much everyone on the left and the right.” I think this is correct. And Hewitt is also correct that “The fact that the report is an enormous political win for President Trump will distort coverage of it, of course, but the best economists will be indifferent to that.”
This little collection of snapshots from the whirlwind that is Donald Trump could have been much longer and more detailed. I offer the collage merely as a reminder of the beneficent energy that Trump brings and attracts to his activities as President of the United States. He wants peace, prosperity, and social comity. He has done—and continues to do—more than any president in my lifetime to realize those desiderata.
Roger Kimball is editor and publisher of The New Criterion and the president and publisher of Encounter Books. He is the author and editor of many books, including The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (St. Augustine's Press), The Rape of the Masters (Encounter), Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse (Ivan R. Dee), and Art's Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity (Ivan R. Dee). Most recently, he edited and contributed to Where Next? Western Civilization at the Crossroads (Encounter) and contributed to Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order (Bombardier).
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2025/08/24/trumps-whirlwind-week-peace-talks-d-c-cleanup-and-a-cbo-win/
No comments:
Post a Comment