Power Grab - Jason Chaffetz Page 0,25

charged with criminal offenses. He didn’t use his authority to put a stop to the special counsel investigation, instead providing extensive access to privileged documents needed to reach an accurate conclusion. It’s possible we will yet see prosecutions and pardons, but given the level of evidence coming forward regarding the origins of the Russia collusion hoax, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) abuse, and disparate treatment of Clinton operatives and Trump operatives by the Justice Department, those investigations are warranted.

Far from feathering his own nest, President Trump has donated his salary each quarter, taking just one dollar a year in pay. He may be seeing an uptick in the number of people who patronize businesses that bear his name, much as President Obama saw an uptick in sales of his books during his administration. But there is no evidence to suggest Donald Trump has cashed in on his presidency.

Where is this fascism we were told to expect? If we use freedom and force as our metric, whose freedom has been restricted by this presidency? Perhaps drug cartels, human traffickers, and coyotes could make such an argument. But their increasing presence in this country impinges on the freedoms of every American. Too many of the people crossing our borders illegally have criminal histories or are engaged in criminal enterprises. Settling criminals in our communities does not make us more free.

The media continues to gleefully bash the man and his administration without restraint, so it’s difficult to make a case for suppression of speech unless you consider Trump’s insults and name-calling a serious threat to the First Amendment. Some people do. But where have those threats been followed up by any actual restriction of freedom or imposition of force?

There are disturbing threats to free speech in this country, but they are not coming from President Trump. They are being imposed by college faculties, social media giants, internet browsers, and activist mobs. They are even embedded in House-sponsored legislation promoted by Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

We are enjoying the strongest economy in decades, complete with record low unemployment and strong wage growth. Progressives may argue that presidents don’t get credit for good economies, but these are the same people who warned that Trump would be the one to crash the economy if we allowed him to be sworn in.

Perhaps the most obvious contrast between the predictions about a Trump presidency and the reality of it is in foreign policy. This president is extracting us from war zones, not entering them. Far from instigating new wars, Trump is preparing to exit Syria and Afghanistan, going to great lengths to facilitate peace with longtime enemy North Korea, and cutting off the Obama administration’s financial support of Iranian terror operations. Arguably there is potential for U.S. military involvement in Venezuela, but the administration’s support of grassroots regime change efforts in that country have thus far yielded more successes and fewer risks than President Obama’s failed Arab Spring strategy. That disastrous policy destabilized Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain.

I suppose one could argue that President Trump is taking advantage of centralized power—but he does so in the same way that President Obama did before him. And unlike the Obama administration, this administration has also restrained the power of the federal government through massive deregulation, federal income tax cuts, and policies empowering states. For example, President Obama’s Affordable Care Act used force to require states to expand Medicaid while giving them no flexibility to defend their budgets against proliferating health-care populations and costs. Fortunately a Supreme Court ruling restored freedom to states to opt out of the program. Recently the Trump administration approved a waiver for my state that will enable Utah to provide expanded health-care coverage and still maintain control of costs. Honoring the freedom of states to innovate and the flexibility to revise federal programs is not fascism. It is not force. It is an expansion of freedom that enables states to experiment with real solutions without risking their ability to educate their kids, invest in infrastructure, or provide other programs and services.

President Trump’s emphasis on border security has also been used to paint him as a fascist. His policies have been interpreted by leftists as some kind of nationalist bigotry, but the policies he has espoused would have had the full support of Democrats just ten years ago. No one thought them fascist back then, because these policies hardly fit the textbook definition of an authoritarian or fascist regime.

So where did people get the idea that