How President Trump Stopped Democrats’ Plan for Permanent Power

(Daily Signal)—It was not very long ago that liberal writers would rhapsodize about how America’s changing demographics would spell Republicans’ doom. A 2012 headline from The New York Times read, “Demographic Shift Brings New Worry for Republicans.” By 2014, the corporate media was already writing the GOP’s obituary: “Republicans have a major demographic problem. And it’s only going to get worse,” one Washington Post headline claimed.

Then conservatives committed the crime of noticing—noticing that mass migration followed by mass amnesty was Democrats’ play for political power. The Left labeled them peddlers of the “Great Replacement Theory.”

Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo, joined “The Signal Sitdown” to discuss how President Donald Trump upended Democrat plans for permanent control in Washington.

For Schmitt, it all starts with one crucial realization: The American nation is “not just an idea.”

This is a real nation with real people,” the Missouri senator said, and the GOP should be “fighting for them.”

“When Joe Biden is letting 15 million people here illegally, people don’t understand. How could the president of our country allow this? And the answer is that he bought into and was captured by this worldview that there wasn’t anything particularly unique [about America], that America was just some economic zone with an airport attached to it,” Schmitt continued. “We can have our jobs shipped overseas, all those good-paying jobs, and we get cheap Chinese T-shirts in return and everything is going to be great.”

In fairness, Schmitt says some of these policies were justifiable prior to the end of the Cold War. In the aftermath of World War II, America’s trade and foreign policy focused on “rebuild[ing] our European allies and Japan, to bring them into the fold, and defeat Soviet communism. That defined our foreign policy in the sense that we had this security umbrella for our friends and allies. We had trade deals that weren’t really good for us, but that allowed them to get back on their feet.”

Once the Cold War ended, Schmitt told The Daily Signal, “this is when the mistakes were made because the people in charge, the elites, they never really adjusted. They never adjusted trade policy. They never really adjusted foreign policy.”

“You sort of had this globalist view,” Schmitt said, “the end of history. And that fueled this mass migration. It fueled a wandering, aimless, Wilsonian kind of foreign policy that was based on these abstract ideas of global democracy.”

It was far from a Democrat-only problem. “Republicans were a part of this problem, too,” Schmitt added. Republicans of the post-Cold War era pursued trade policies “that shipped our jobs overseas,” but promised ‘creative destruction’ would leave Americans better off. The destruction came, but the creativity did not.

“We’ve seen devastation in our communities, factories that are desolate now, and they’ve been replaced with, in many ways, despair and death,” Schmitt said.

Long before Trump was president, he was one of the first to recognize the need for change. Since taking American politics by storm, he has vigorously reasserted the sovereignty of the American nation. Republicans of yesteryear hesitated to embrace this view, afraid of pejoratives like racist or xenophobic. But the Republicans of today have caught up to the party’s frontman.

America is “much more” than idea, Schmitt told The Daily Signal. “It’s our home.”

“We’re a people and we believe in things and that we ought to be fighting for the dignity of the guy that doesn’t have a PhD, but who wants to work and he wants to be able to raise a family and he wants his kids to have a better life,” Schmitt said. “He shouldn’t have to compete with foreign labor for that.”

“Work is important for people. It gives them meaning,” Schmitt continued. “And I think if we’re honoring the dignity of every individual, which we should, that’s a big part of what we should be fighting for. And President Trump tapped into that in a way that no political figure in my lifetime has ever really tapped into because he met the American people really where they were.”

In doing so, Trump reversed what The Washington Post and The New York Times seemed to think was inevitable.

“The Left understands they were playing a game of getting a permanent majority and total control,” Schmitt said. “It’s important, I think, to remember how close we were to maybe losing all of this.”

“If they had the House and they had the Senate and [Joe] Biden or [Kamala] Harris or somebody else was in the White House,” Schmitt continued, “they would eliminate the filibuster in the Senate. They’d add states to the union. They would pack the United States Supreme Court. They would get mass amnesty. They’d add a bunch of new voters and they very well could have been in the majority for a very, very long time.”

“Trump is a unique political figure in that way,” Schmitt claimed. “He was able to break through, and that’s why they came at him so hard.” But the task for the next generation of Republican leaders like Schmitt will be not to squander the inheritance they will receive from Trump.