This probably has less to do with China than with the tragedy of its particular form of government. When a country has been run by a communist dictatorship for seventy years, where expressions of faith are routinely and sometimes brutally suppressed and independent thought can result in prison time, it’s a culture in deep need of repair. In observing the long struggle of Cubans living under another communist regime, Cuban exiles often express both a passionate love for their homeland as well as an ambivalence about returning to live there, even in the event the dictatorship finally collapses. Many fear that the great Cuban culture has been broken by six decades of Marxist tyranny.
The tragedy of Chinese political oppression, despite the country’s phenomenal economic rise in recent decades, is perhaps the greatest reason why a prosperous America is a moral necessity. Whether the American constitutional republic or the communist dictatorship based in Beijing ends up sitting on top of the world’s largest economy has profound moral implications for the entire world. “America First” is a controversial slogan in the United States. But what many people around the world truly fear is the prospect of living under the influence of China first. The country is ruled by an unelected regime which denies its people the most basic liberties, including free speech, freedom of the press, and due process of law.
This means Americans have a job to do as we seek to rebuild our economy and ensure the success of open markets and free societies. The ranking Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee, Representative Kevin Brady of Texas, says that as America bounces back from the virus, the playbook for growth hasn’t changed: “The key is to make sure temporary job losses don’t become permanent ones—that’s what Congress ought to be focused on. We ought to follow those same elements that created the Trump economic boom: keeping taxes low, incentivizing businesses, making sure that work pays for our workers.”25
He’s talking about policies that created the rare and wonderful occurrence of many more job openings in the United States than unemployed people.26 There’s nothing immoral about that. And who should feel guilty about ensuring that Americans and people everywhere can enjoy the pleasures of liberty and prosperity?
2
The Coup That Failed
This should never happen to another president,” said Donald Trump in 2019, “because most presidents wouldn’t be able to take it.”1 He was talking about the Russian collusion fraud that haunted his presidency—the evidence-free claim that he had somehow worked with Russia to rig the 2016 election. Trump has been known to say outlandish things, but in this case voters should take him both seriously and literally. The American republic cannot survive if government officials are routinely able to mislead judges into approving surveillance campaigns against political opponents.
In the old days before media organizations sanctioned just about any effort to take down Donald Trump, the FBI’s activities in this era would have been fodder for a dark Hollywood thriller. The federal government used wiretaps, informants, and even doctored evidence against Trump associates—while hiding the real exculpatory evidence for years. If such outrages become a regular part of U.S. politics, the cost to political freedom will be severe. In this case the heavy cost was not just to Trump associates who had their most basic liberties violated; the cost to the people’s business was also significant. We’ll discuss other challenges of the Trump era in the chapters ahead, but what’s clear is that collusion claims dominated public debate for more than two years of his presidency.
The collusion investigation was not an economic event. But America’s free economy and world-leading financial markets, which have created wealth and opportunity for people around the world, can exist only under a predictable rule of law. The unprecedented campaign by senior government officials against an opposition candidate and then a duly elected president was a fundamental assault on our rule of law. Destructive claims of Russian collusion poisoned our public discourse for years.
It’s impossible to understand the Trump presidency or provide a fair accounting of Trump governance without noting the extraordinary obstacles he faced. Attorney General Bill Barr told Maria in June 2020 that it was “the closest we have come to an organized effort to push a president out of office since Lincoln’s assassination.”2
It’s also worth noting the message of the markets in this era. While many of our colleagues in the media industry ran with bogus conspiracy claims and cast Trump as an existential threat to our way of life, investors clearly never bought that story. The era of Russian collusion hysteria in the press was an era of rising wealth in stocks. Investors tuned out the anti-Trump circus, focused on Trump tax and regulatory reform, and then confidently made bigger and bigger bets on American business. When markets tumbled in recent years, it was usually due to a reaction to Trump trade policy, or, most dramatically, when a virus from China and the overreaction of state and local politicians shut down much of the U.S. economy.
The average investor figured out pretty quickly that Trump was actually not a traitorous authoritarian bent on destroying our republic. But all Americans should understand the threat his adversaries posed to the rule of law on which our liberty and prosperity depend.
We can now see that, for many proponents of the collusion theory, the purpose of the investigation wasn’t really to search for evidence of Trump conspiring with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin; there wasn’t any. The point was to create headlines about the investigation and use this flow of controversy and suspicion to destroy a presidency.
As Trump took office in January of 2017, a historic flood of deceptive leaks by government employees kept the new president on the defensive. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wis.)
