Trumpism Can Make America Great Again Michael Johns Cornell University February 14, 2017 Thanks very much. We have quite a full room, which makes me wonder: Don’t you guys have dates? It’s Valentine’s Day! If you are here with a date, I hope it won’t be your last one. Well, in the spirit of Valentine’s Day, I am here with love and affection too—and even pulled out one of my pink ties. Hey, it’s Valentine’s Day. My own love tonight is this: Last time I was here was over a year ago when my son Michael was looking at Cornell. He loves this school and this organization—and anything he loves, I do too. So thanks to all of you for the work you do, the discussion you facilitate, and the important contribution you make to this great institution. Cornell is one of the world’s premier universities, and your intellectual curiosity and search for answers to our world and nation’s problems are a big contribution to that greatness. On the drive up here tonight, I happened to see how this university describes itself on its Twitter feed. It’s a great description: “Teach tomorrow’s thought leaders to think otherwise and create knowledge with a public purpose.” Tonight I’m going to do exactly
that: I’m going to try to get you to think a little differently—to see what over 60 million voting Americans saw when they voted for Trump, and we’ll do all of this with the spirit that we’ll use this knowledge to serve the higher purpose of enhancing the greatness of our nation, which relies on each subsequent generation to defend this nation and to continually improve it for all Americans. We have just undergone the closest thing to a revolution in American politics as one can have in our Constitutional Republic, and tonight I will attempt to explain it objectively. I will speak tonight not to the few of you here who may already support Trump, or those who consider yourselves conservatives or Republicans, but to the vast majority here tonight I’m sure do not. These are the facts and sentiments that led to an electoral outcome you no doubt did not want and did not predict—but I’m convinced need to understand. I come tonight not to defend Trumpism, even though you will find no more passionate advocate for it. Literally since his announcement on June 16, 2015, I defended him consistently on television, radio and in many forums—and I sought to defend or at least explain him to those prone not to hear or process his important message. So I come to Cornell not to defend Trumpism but to explain it. For eight years and maybe longer—for most of your adult lives in fact, this nation was headed in a decidedly left of center and globalist direction. Under this recent administration, we saw the problems of other countries as inherently ones we were obligated to solve. In many cases, we even wrongly blamed ourselves for these problems. We entered into trade agreements that worked well for other nations but failed the
American worker. We opened our nation to legal and illegal immigrants—and bent over backwards to accommodate their needs, desires and cultures but never considered the impact we were having on our citizens. This created what Trump correctly labeled in his Republican Convention acceptance speech “the forgotten man and woman”—the working American whose economic plight worsened on the watch of Obama and whose country became less identifiable to him and her. And this past November 8, the “forgotten man and woman” had seen enough—and their voice was heard loudly. What inspired all this passion in these forgotten men and women. Let me deal tonight with facts: **Employment: All of you have probably heard and followed the employment trends announced each quarter by the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. You heard, for instance, that unemployment under Obama seemed to be stagnant, or even reduced. And it was always reported in single digits. In the final month of Obama’s presidency—December 2016—it was reportedly 4.9 percent, which seems not unreasonable. But these numbers excluded the biggest story of American unemployment—the long-term unemployed and those who’d simply given up looking for work. While the short-term unemployment came down, it was only because many of those short-term unemployed Americans moved into the long-term category and ceased being reported in the primary BLS monthly number.