THE PROBLEM WITH AMERICA IS NOT DONALD TRUMP:

The 45th president’s first year has in fact been a very good year for the country. By the time those 12 months were up, the unemployment rate was the lowest the country had seen in 18 years, and the number of new filings for unemployment benefits was at a 45-year record low. Even black Americans were doing better under Trump than they did under the first black president: by the start of 2018 the black unemployment rate was the lowest it had been since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started keeping count. For all that his enemies insist that Trump’s electoral appeal was really about race, in 2016 Trump made jobs the centrepiece of campaign. And now Americans are working again in numbers not seen since the tail end of the booming 1990s.

Wall Street has also enjoyed a sustained rally since Trump became president. . . .

Donald Trump is only the beginning of a populist retrenchment, one that faces great adversity from a well-entrenched globalist political class.

And that, rather than anything to do with Trump’s presidency, is what has gone horribly wrong in America. The broader ruling class in the country, the wealthy and politically connected, the best educated and most widely heard, have abandoned their countrymen. The very concept of citizenship, to say nothing of placing one’s fellow citizens above those whose loyalties are to other states and cultures, has fallen out of vogue among America’s most privileged. The nation and the citizen have been the core of Donald Trump’s appeal-the common denominator in his emphasis on immigration, jobs, industry, and America First in foreign policy—yet even within his own party, the globalist ideology of the 1990s staggers on. This, and not Donald Trump’s temperament or tweets, is the real menace to the country: an elite that has lost the trust of the people because the people knows what the elite will not admit—namely, that it despises them.

Yes, America — and the West in general — has been ruled by people who, at core, don’t very much like the countries they rule. But they do like ruling them, and will do anything they can to keep doing it.