The Catholic Case for Trump

Austin Ruse

• Publisher: Regnery
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781684510979
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Konservatismus & Liberalismus

In his compelling new book, The Catholic Case for Trump, Austin Ruse cuts through leftist lies aimed at squashing the Catholic vote and offers his audience – broken down into three categories of Liberal, Faithful, and Generic Catholics – a guide as to why all Catholics should not only vote for President Trump, but do so enthusiastically with confidence that he is the only moral choice. This book examines more than a dozen issues and makes the case that a Faithful Catholic can find not just a reason, but a Catholic reason, to vote for Trump. This is a must-read book for all Catholic voters.

CHAPTER ONE Trump the Man

Donald Trump is an acquired taste. He is not for everyone, and no one can be talked into him. While some took to Trump right away, others resisted and then came around later. Many will never support Trump, no matter how convincing an argument you present to them. Trump is a journey you take alone.

For a politician, Trump’s character is uniquely polarizing. We’re used to sweet-talking, suave politicos who twist themselves in knots in their efforts to win over voters. Trump is certainly not of that variety. He is a larger-than-life personality whose manner and style often loom larger than his policy agenda. Some voters love that personality, while others hate it. So, while any voter, and especially Catholic voters, can appreciate Trump’s policy accomplishments, his perceived character is often a sticking point. That’s why it’s essential to start with Trump the man before addressing his considerable policy accomplishments.

Trump voters—whether Catholic or not—have already dealt with the more flawed aspects of his life story. Those who were reluctant to vote for him because of those imperfections now have nearly four years of his accomplishments that may help them overcome that reluctance. But despite his flaws, which we will address in due course, Trump’s character has considerable virtues.

Donald Trump is a different kind of politician, and that has served him well in the current political climate. American politics is as divided today as ever. Partisan polarization did not start with Trump; it didn’t even start with Obama. An argument can be made that the great polarization began as far back as 1987, when Senators Teddy Kennedy and Joe Biden borked Judge Robert H. Bork before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Conservative voters certainly remember how genteel Republican leadership barely fought back against the slander and invective Democrats launched at Judge Bork. Most elected Republicans considered it ungentlemanly to fight back, not realizing that the attacks against Bork were an attack against their constituents.

After the success of the Bork smear campaign, Democrats started to play by a new set of rules. By weaponizing the media, they tried to pressure their colleagues across the aisle into submission. Republican officials didn’t get the memo, but conservative citizens saw the new state of play. Conservatives remember how the Democrats tried to lynch Clarence Thomas. We remember how the Left burned George W. Bush in effigy, calling him a fascist and Hitler, while he remained “presidential” and above the fray. Some may have been proud of him for taking the high road, but many wished he would fight back. That was all the more true when Democrats used the same playbook against the gentleman Mitt Romney, who likewise responded by refusing to defend himself. When they accused him of giving people cancer and of pushing granny in a wheelchair off a cliff, he said nothing.

After nearly three decades of lost political battles, a rather plainspoken, gruff, and often hilarious non-politician came along who knew the enemy, never gave an inch, and always gave back ten times more than he got. As Lincoln said about Grant, here was a man who fights. And in most glaring contrast to previous Republicans, Donald Trump recognized that the press, the Democrats, and the elites in his own party were often willing to work together to oppose conservative causes. He knew from the beginning that he was in a three-front war that previous “gentleman presidents” and candidates had refused to acknowledge.

Did Trump sometimes fight in ungentlemanly ways? Sure. Did he call names? All the time. Did he call names too much? Maybe, but the fact that he fought back was more important than the way he did it. God Almighty, his fans love that he fights. Sure, sometimes he shoots himself in the foot, but fighting back against slander meant that he stood up for conservatives whom establishment politicians repeatedly threw under the bus.

By the time Trump showed up, conservative Republicans were convinced that we lived under different rules than everyone else. While some sob sisters on the Right try to enforce this different set of rules, most conservatives are focused on achieving policy victories. As professional conservatives worried about decorum and appeasing leftists, Trump joked about how his supporters would stand with him even if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue.

In his masterful The Case for Trump, the great Victor Davis Hanson compares Trump to a fictional character in the movie High Noon, Shane, a mysterious gunfighter who is hired by a settler as a farmhand and then called upon to save the town from a ruthless cattle baron. Pushed to the limit, Shane is forced to gun down three of the cattle baron’s men, delivering the town from the cattle baron’s clutches. Thanks to Shane’s heroism, the town can develop into a respectable place. But for that very reason, Shane himself is no longer welcome. Shane is a barbarian, and there is no room for a man like him in this civilizing place.

Hanson argues that someone like Trump is destined to do his job only to be rejected by the people he saved, to die in ignominy, never to be invited to those chummy group photos with previous presidents, the ones that grate on us so much: photos of George Bush grinning ear to ear with Bill Clinton, whom he now calls a “brother from another mother”; grinning even with Barack Obama and his wife Michelle, both of whom hold us in utter contempt. Trump will never be accepted by the elite cabal. But he will be remembered by those of us whom Obama called “bitter clingers” and Hillary called “deplorables.” We are Joey shouting, “Come back, Shane.”

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New York City is a big place, where every neighborhood and borough is filled with different characters. To understand how a big-talking New York real estate mogul was able to win over conservatives across the country, you have to know a little bit of New York geography.

Donald Trump made his name in Manhattan, but he had to take a bridge or tunnel to get there. He was born in Queens, making him a “bridge-and-tunnel” person, as the Manhattan upper crust dismissively refer to people from the outer boroughs. Today, the outer boroughs are populated by trendy hipsters and millennials, but when Trump came up, high society viewed bridge-and-tunnel folk as crude and uncouth. They made fun of their accent, likening their “deez” and “doze” to cartoon mobsters.

Trump’s dad started building single family homes and apartment buildings in Queens. Aside from Staten Island, Manhattan elites held Queens in the lowest regard. Brooklyn had a kind of mythos, as did the Bronx. But Queens? That was a backwater that might as well be flyover country for all the cosmopolitans cared.

That’s where Trump came from, and he had big plans to conquer Manhattan even if he had to take a tunnel or a bridge to get there. He brought his accent with him (interesting that he appears never to have tried to lose it). And he brought along a chip on his shoulder, a feeling he was better than the white-shoe fops of Manhattan who couldn’t help but look down on him.

The late Governor Mario Cuomo had a similar experience. Cuomo attended a Catholic law school in Queens, but when he crossed into Manhattan, the upper-crust law firms refused to give him a second look. Rumor has it he applied for jobs at fifty of them and never got a nibble. Cuomo wasn’t just a Catholic, he was a wop, a dago. The WASPs who went to tonier schools looked down on Cuomo in the same way they looked down on Trump. When Cuomo landed at a small Brooklyn law firm, he would go on to represent Trump’s dad, Fred.

Trump grew up on construction sites with rough men who spoke Queens English, not the Queen’s English. They didn’t have genteel manners and, in typical New Yorker fashion, didn’t hesitate to speak their minds. As it turns out, bridge-and-tunnel people had a lot in common with working Americans across the country. That’s why Trump resonates so well with working men and women, even though he’s always wearing a suit and tie. He does not pander to them by wearing jeans and plaid shirts like a Romney would have done. He understands them because he knows them. They know him, too. They recognize him. In a very clear way, he is one of their own, even though he is a boss.

So many aspects of Trump’s character can be traced to the Queens in which he grew up and the cutthroat world of New York real estate that he made his name in.

Consider Trump’s skepticism of “expert advice,” which has aggravated journalists and Washington insiders to no end. In the real estate world, if you give bad advice, you better not expect people to take you seriously the next time you chip in. Making mistakes has consequences in the real world, and the people whom Trump trusted for advice were expected to deliver results. Trump promised to do the same thing in our nation’s capital.

Washington experts aren’t used to being judged by the fruits of their labor. Instead of being held responsible for their actions, politicians and bureaucrats often fail up the organizational chart to leadership roles. Donald Trump was elected to end the failed policies of the political establishment. And yet, even after Trump’s resounding win, the establishment kept carting out “experts” to defend those policies. Remember the famous “Tank Meeting,” where a gaggle of policy elites ambushed Trump in a secure Pentagon room to teach him how the world works? Imagine the hubris it takes to talk down to the duly elected president of the United States. Trump was furious and let them know.

From the point of view of a real estate mogul, everyone is a vendor. Trump brought that attitude to politics. For Trump, the various experts are simply vendors offering him a product. As the lead on his governing project, he is free to “purchase” their advice if he thinks it’s sound, but he’s also free to walk away if he thinks they’re offering him a bad deal. It doesn’t matter whether they are selling foreign policy advice, legal advice, or political advice; none of them better lord their special knowledge over him. He is responsible for considering all of the domains together when he makes a decision. When a vendor pretends that he knows better than the client, the client has every right to get angry.

Trump’s eagerness to take people to court is also a product of his Queens real estate background. Trump is widely criticized for what many see as his litigious nature. He has been sued multiple time. He has sued and often threatens to sue his adversaries. But in real estate, suing vendors is par for the course. Litigation is a fact of the building trades. Builders sue vendors, and vendors sue builders. A longtime Queens born and bred banker explains it this way: “There’s a crack in this foundation, you need to reduce your invoice by 50 percent or I’ll sue.” Now, was there a crack? Was it big enough for a 50 percent reduction in price? Maybe, maybe not. But you might get something knocked off the price by negotiating with a threat. And don’t forget, there’s a good chance the other guy padded his invoice because he knew it was going to be renegotiated. And he probably knew you knew it. It’s a tough business. That’s just the way it is.

But right away, this puts Trump at odds with our idealized vision of how business should be done. The New York real estate world is different from the corporate office culture many Americans are used to. It is a very tough business, where you are always looking for a way to make more money, often by sticking it to the other guy. Plus, the usual rules governing how people should behave often don’t apply. As a developer, Trump had to negotiate with white collar professionals as well as union bosses, local politicians, and presumably criminal organizations. He had to work with many different types of people and learned the importance of projecting strength. He is far from the only tough-guy New York developer. They’re all tough.

Those skills and characteristics are often at odds with how we view our politicians, particularly at the presidential level. We want our world neat and tidy and to reflect the professional world many of us inhabit or aspire to. We want our presidential politicians smooth like John Kennedy and avuncular like Ronald Reagan. Remember how the poor kid Nixon was treated when he was up against the smooth, unflappable, Ivy League Kennedy? He was the ultra-cool Kennedy, while Nixon was the sweaty, striving newcomer.

Trump was more Nixon than Kennedy, and his rival, the smooth Barack Obama, treated him to serving after serving of Ivy League mockery. Obama viewed Trump with utter contempt—with derision and laughter. Even during the 2020 Democratic primary season, billionaire candidate Michael Bloomberg tweeted at Trump, “We know many of the same people in NY. Behind your back they laugh at you and call you a carnival barking clown. They know you inherited a fortune & squandered it with stupid deals and incompetence.”

Trump has been the butt of these kinds of insults from his earliest days in Manhattan. There was no hipper publication in those days than Spy, a humor magazine run by Graydon Carter, who went on to edit Vanity Fair, and his editorial partner, Kurt Andersen. You never met a snottier, more condescending pair. In the pages of Spy, they repeatedly referred to Trump as a “short-fingered vulgarian.” According to Carter, Trump regularly sends him photos of his fingers with notes like, “See, not so short.” Carter says the moniker still gives Trump fits, but like a lot of lefties, he does not understand Trump’s humor.

Trump moved to Manhattan to conquer the building trades and get rich. In his twenties, he no longer wanted to be one of the biggest apartment developers in Queens and Brooklyn; he wanted to build landmark buildings in Manhattan. He came with his Queens accent, a chip on his shoulder, a mammoth work ethic, and he always lawyered up. Making it in Manhattan wasn’t so easy. He had to wade through a massive and often hostile city bureaucracy, cutthroat competition, and elitist prejudice against a guy from Queens. But despite all the opposition, Trump worked tirelessly to make deals with people who may have hated his guts. He lives for deals and pressed hard to come out of every deal on top. In The Art of the Deal, Trump explains that he uses every advantage he can muster. Back then, he was often going up against bigger and richer competitors and, like today, often faced a hostile press and an even more hostile city bureaucracy. We used to celebrate men like that, men who wanted to better themselves and take on the giants. Men like that built America.

Trump made it because he was tough and relentlessly persistent. When he moved to Manhattan, his first apartment was a studio on the East Side with a view of a water tower—hardly the lap of luxury. As soon as he arrived, he promptly called up an establishment called Le Club, a members only restaurant, bar, and nightclub, to request membership. At that time, Le Club boasted a very flashy membership of movie stars, high rollers, and European royalty. They predictably rejected young Trump, who possessed little money and no status. He didn’t give up. He became a gadfly to Le Club’s management, calling over and over again. They kept rejecting him. He even asked for the membership rolls to “see if there is anyone I know.” Finally, Trump lured the head of the club out for drinks at 21 Club, whereupon the head of the club got seriously loaded. (According to Trump, the experience made him realize that his teetotaling would give him an advantage in heavy-drinking New York.) Trump was finally admitted to the club with the proviso that he not hit on any of the young women attached to older men. Trump agreed.

It was at Le Club that Trump met one of his mentors, the legendary attorney Roy Cohn, the bête noire of many fevered left-wing nightmares. Cohn famously worked with Senator Joseph McCarthy to go after communists in the U.S. government. Liberals like to forget that Cohn worked closely with Robert Kennedy on the same project. Trump hired Cohn to help him in the government’s lawsuit against him for allegedly refusing to rent to blacks in one of his Queens apartment buildings. In what can perfectly sum up Trump’s approach to pretty much everything, he told Cohn that he didn’t like lawyers because they always want to settle and they never want to fight. Trump always wants to fight and never to give in. He and Cohn sued the government for $100 million. They lost, but the deal they cut—which required Trump to alert the National Urban League of vacancies—was a minor hiccup for Trump.

So much of who Trump is and why some folks don’t like him springs from where he came from, how he came up, and how he succeeded in that kind of business environment. Consider his political incorrectness. He referred to a judge hearing the case against Trump University as a Mexican. He told a Senate committee that the owners of an Indian casino “don’t look like Indians.” He spoke in a vulgar fashion about women on the Access Hollywood tape. To the Left, these incidents are prima facie evidence that Trump is a misogynist, a racist, a bigot. People forget that this was how men, especially men in business, talked as recently as the 1980s. They also forget that while the educated classes may have changed their tone, working-class people still speak frankly about topics liberals have declared off-limits.

William Manchester’s seminal memoir of his World War II service in the South Pacific gives a good portrait of how things were in the 1980s when it was published. Goodbye, Darkness was first published in 1980, forty years ago, when Trump was making his rapid ascent through the New York business world and into our national consciousness. A contemporary reader is shocked at the stark political incorrectness of those times. Goodbye, Darkness was an undisputed bestseller published by a major publishing house, and its author was a noted liberal. Still, the book’s unabashed use of “offensive” words and phrases would cancel a career today. For Manchester, the Japanese are always “Japs” or “Nips.” He writes about a guy looking “like an Arab” and devotes half a page to how the first man in his unit to die “didn’t look Jewish.” He does a fair amount of “slut shaming,” calling loose women “whores.” He even refers to Koreans as “termites,” a name given them by their Japanese masters. None of these things would stand today, but they were quite common not so long ago. Back then, casual descriptions like those that Manchester threw around did not indicate some underlying racism. Today, we are oversensitive to these terms. So, when Trump said Indians applying for a casino license “don’t look Indian to me,” liberals took it as proof that Trump is racist.

The racist label is almost always a cudgel used by the Left against its political enemies on the Right. Sometimes leftists call each other racist, sure, like when Elizabeth Warren gleefully called Mike Bloomberg a racist for his successful stop-and-frisk policy. But for the most part, it is an epithet used by the Left against the Right. The Left tends to forget all the statements made by Democrats which would have been labeled racist had they been uttered by Republicans. Joe Biden once referred to Obama as “clean and articulate,” and the Left didn’t bat an eye. He even said one can’t go to a “Dunkin’ Donuts or a 7-11 without having a slight Indian accent” before adding, “I am not joking, man.” Biden even said black folks “ain’t black” if they don’t vote for him. Nobody on the Left tried to cancel Joe Biden over those remarks. And when it was reported that Bill Clinton once told Teddy Kennedy that Obama “would be getting us coffee” a few years ago, the media stepped up to defend Clinton.

Trump spent his life on construction sites and has dealt with tough guys all his life (including mobsters). He grew up in a time when there were no “Irish Americans.” An Irish guy was simply...