Opinion
If we’re to believe the mainstream media — well, more fool us. Still, if we did, then we’d believe that the 2024 presidential election is a disappointing low-point in American politics: two venal old men with no real policies. The boor versus the dotard.
Most especially, we’d believe that Donald Trump has no real policies, apart from not being Joe Biden, and pandering to the America’s lowest common denominators. Not only is this a re-run of Hillary Clinton’s disastrous “basket of deplorables” sneer, it completely ignores Trump’s bold, even wild, futuristic policy agenda.
In the lead-up to the October election, President Trump has put forward what is undoubtedly one of the most unique policy agendas in recent memory.
Leave it to Trump, of course, to not miss an opportunity to cock a snook at the globalists.
It’s called Agenda47, and its policies range from – literally – flying cars, to entirely new cities, to, ahem, mass deportations.
Think less techno-optimism and more techno-nationalism.
So, a Wakanda for Americans, minus the black racism.
Whatever else you may say about it, Trump’s agenda is bold and future-looking.
In a moment where the peak of progress is hormone replacement therapy and getting stabbed on the train, it’s nice to be offered a different vision of the future. One that isn’t anchored around some corrupted form of leftist ‘social equality’, but instead real technological pioneering that changes lives for the better.
One of the key planks of the agenda is building 10 new American cities from the ground up, on federal land.
‘We’ll actually build new cities in our country again… These Freedom Cities will reopen the frontier, reignite American imagination, and give hundreds of thousands of young people and other people, all hardworking families, a new shot at home ownership and in fact, the American Dream.’
Building new cities from scratch is not so wild an idea as you might think. From Abu Dhabi to Saudi Arabia, South Korea to India, many countries are building entirely new cities from nothing. Consider how Dubai has emerged from the desert sands.
It’s nothing new, either. Global metropolises like Mumbai, Calcutta, and Singapore, all began as purpose-built trading cities.
As Trump points out, nearly one-third of the United States is federal land. Trump is touting using just a tiny fraction of that land to build a new frontier.
“We should hold a contest to charter up to ten new cities and award them to the best proposals for development. In other words, we’ll actually build new cities in our country again. These Freedom Cities will reopen the frontier, reignite American imagination, and give hundreds of thousands of young people and other people – all hard-working families – a new shot at homeownership and in fact the American dream.”
Those are powerful words for the American psyche. Notably, Trump is pitching the Freedom Cities as places for young Americans to own a home and raise a family: a dream which the current generation has long lamented as out of their reach.
And, yes, they will have flying cars at last.
‘Just as the United States led the automotive revolution in the last century, I want to ensure that America, not China, leads this revolution in air mobility,’ Trump announced.
‘These breakthroughs can transform commerce, bring a giant infusion of wealth into rural America, and connect families and our country in new ways.’
Trump also appears to have learned from both his first term, where the Washington swamp conspired en masse to subvert the peoples’ expressed will at the ballot box, and from the bold agenda of Javier Milei in Argentina.
It’s promising: Trump learned from his first term, and won’t be swamped by the bureaucratic state again.
This includes a document called, somewhat ominously, ‘Schedule F’, which legislatively lays out the red carpet for the firing of up to 50,000 civil servants, replacing them with ‘political appointees’.
‘Get F’d!’, the Murdoch-press headlines will read. This move is obviously about smashing the Deep State and replacing it with the Trump State. In times of chaos – if chaos is indeed what the USA is looking at – then executive power is paramount in order to move nimbly, to not succumb to sclerosis and decay, to put out fires, and to leap forward, not fall. This is step one on how to get there.
Trump is also targeting the red-hot, electric issue of Biden’s egregious failure at the southern border.
Another red hot item on the list is deportations. While Biden is bringing in more migrants than any other time in America’s history (roughly 2.5 million ‘migrant encounters’ at the southern border last year alone) Trump’s plan is to send ‘record numbers’ right back.
‘To help speed mass deportations, Mr Trump is preparing an enormous expansion of a form of removal that does not require due process hearings,’ the New York Times reported.
And to further facilitate this process of mass deportation of illegal migrants, there’s talk of Trump deploying Troops at the southern border. The precedent is very simple. In the same way that executive power is utilised in times of national emergency, so too is the military – and this is without doubt an emergency: consider the continued killings, crime sprees, and enormous costs resulting from the latest migrant surge. Troops at the border are by no means an unusual prospect to anybody who is normal and has balanced hormones.
The left-media are, of course, screaming and gibbering. So what? They’d do the same if Trump promised to put two illegals in every job and two Muslims in every street.
But that doesn’t matter to Trump, because Republican voters have declared him the best possible person to lead their party into the election, gifting him incredibly high polling, sold-out events, and now the Republican nomination.
Spectator Australia
Trump knows what spineless “conservatives” like Rishi Sunak, Scott Morrison, and Christopher Luxon have utterly failed to take note of: the left-media are not their friends and never will be. Pandering to them only encourages them, while pissing off the people who might otherwise vote for you.
Perhaps Trump’s Agenda47 is three-quarters pie-in-the-sky — so what? At least he’s offering something apart from what’s already failed since at least the 90s. And if even a quarter of it comes to pass, it will be most revolutionary leap forward in decades.