Pat Buchanan shows Trump how to win on history's battlefield

As President Trump marches forward on the energy-economic-terror front, he would've relished a recent highlight at the Nixon Library last May 22.

To a packed East Room replica in Yorba Linda, Calif., President Nixon's former speechwriter Pat Buchanan spoke about his latest book, Nixon's White House Wars, and the dramatic six years of it that fill the book.

A great president leaves pillars, Buchanan said, citing the thinking of  Nixon's top foreign strategist, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.  Those are exactly what stand after Kissinger's boss, which, in Nixon's case, Buchanan argued, meant:

  • Left Vietnam in what promised to be Korea-like peace, until Congress's treachery.
  • Killed the draft, setting the course for an Army bulging with musclemen doing America's heavy lifting.
  • Opened China, sparking commerce and stopping starvation for millions of citizens.
  • Cleaned America's air and water as a true environmentalist versus libs who put the "con" in "conservation" with their weather scam.
  • Lowered the voting age to 18 from 21.
  • Oversaw all six moon landings from 1969 to '72.
  • Desegregated schools, answering a Supreme Court ruling in 1969 by steering buses through a political maze.
  • Cooled the country that suffered five terror bombings a day in the thick of his first term.

What did those pillars produce for Nixon?  According to Buchanan, a landslide re-election in 1972.  He won by 18 million votes, besting the re-election counts of Ronald Reagan in 1984 and Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

That kept Nixon in office long enough to come through at, to steal his phrase, nut-cuttin' time.  With Israel diving amid the Yom Kippur War in 1973, he yanked back the yoke, shipping every aircraft in sight to the Israelis' defense.  It turned out to be a bigger airlift than the Berlin version of 1948-49 – and saved our ally in the desert.

Here was a man who had plunged from vice president to humiliation in his 1962 run for California governor, then produced a presidency for the ages.

"How he got through it is a remarkable tribute," said Buchanan in his speech.

Trump could've taken that line to heart.  He already has proved his mettle against the pols, polls, and press.  If he can make the same kind of bold moves Nixon made, he's on track to success.  So it's time to boost the same sort of towers that lift the spirit.

Try these four:

  1. Build the barrier. The Great Wall of Trump will save our sovereignty and stop the drug inflow cold.  This is the foundation of his America First focus.
  2. Make ISIS past tense.  The terror scum had better be terrified.  Trump promises to target what counts: the black flag's oil supply.  No oil, no money, no bombs to slaughter civilization.  When it's broke, the Islamic State will look like Iowa State smothered on a football Saturday.
  3. Unite Korea.  President Eisenhower ended the Korean War with 1953's armistice.  President Trump can solidify the process with One Korea.
  4. Mars.  President Kennedy had the longest aim in history.  "This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth," he said in May 1961.  America came through something fierce, pulling off the feat in July 1969.  Enter the 45th president.  Moon?  Heck, he can Trump that.

Then another author will laud him at the Trump Library, with book in hand: Trump's White House Hits: America First, Planet Second, Universe Third.

Bucky Fox is an author and editor in Southern California.

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