After eight years of treasonous subversion by Barack Obama’s radical administration to fundamentally transform the United States, Donald Trump’s election victory is galvanizing a revival of American exceptionalism. But Trump and his team face formidable opponents as they begin the Herculean task of reversing the course of Obama’s failed presidency: not only a vengefully determined left but an entrenched Republican establishment in Washington D.C. and a stubborn contingent of Never Trumper politicians and pundits.
David Horowitz’s new book, Big Agenda: President’s Trump’s Plan to Save America – the first major book to be released on Trump’s presidency – lays out a strategy for combating those opponents of the President-elect’s conservative restoration.
The founder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, the left’s most hated apostate, and the right’s most aggressive strategist, Horowitz reveals major components of Trump’s plan for his first 100 days and his first-term agenda in the slim but essential Big Agenda (available Tuesday, January 17 from Humanix Books). The book has earned unqualified support from the likes of Dinesh D’Souza, gay conservative firebrand Milo Yiannopoulos, Clinton Cash author Peter Schweizer, Rush Limbaugh (who calls the book “a road map for a winning agenda that conservatives will embrace”), and Ann Coulter, who recommends it as a “brilliant battle plan.”
Horowitz begins by profiling the adversaries. “[T]he first concern of Americans disturbed by the radicalism of the Obama years,” he declares, is the division within the Republican party itself. For eight years the Republican Party mustered only tepid opposition to President Obama. This was a party made feckless by its incomprehension of the nature of the left, by a failure of nerve, and by a lack of the will to win. Then Trump barreled onto the scene with a readiness to “disregard the politically correct restraints on public discourse” and to “relentlessly attack” Democrats who could dish it out but were unaccustomed to having it thrown back at them. As a result, the “passions Trump aroused in the electorate sparked a revolt in the Republican Party” and thrust the political outsider ahead of his 16 rivals in the primaries and then on to election victory against Hillary Clinton.
Beyond the sharp division that still remains in his own party, Trump and his supporters face the power-mad zealots of an ideology fueled by ugly, dehumanizing hatred for anyone who stands in the way of their utopian vision – a hatred exemplified in Hillary’s demonization of conservatives as “irredeemable deplorables”: racists, sexists, Islamophobes, homophobes, xenophobes – “you name it,” she said on the campaign trail.
Trump fearlessly identified that hatred during the second presidential debate when he told the audience that “Hillary has tremendous hatred in her heart.” Republicans have been playing defense for so long that Trump’s willingness to publicly characterize progressives for what they are, Horowitz notes with admiration, “was probably unprecedented in the annals of modern presidential politics.” Horowitz realized correctly that Trump was the only Republican who had a chance against Hillary.
In Part Two of the book Horowitz identifies the leftist agenda, the overarching goal behind the issues, that Trump and the right must understand and counter. He points to Saul Alinsky-influenced progressives like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton as evidence that the Democratic Party “has moved so far to the left in recent decades that it now operates on the sixties’ principle that the issues it advances are mere stepping stones on the way to more radical changes.” Those changes mean the dismantling of individual freedom and the consolidation of power in the hands of the state.
That explains the left’s drive to establish a totalitarian infrastructure through their obsessive push for the passage of Obamacare, their religious devotion to save the planet from man-made “climate change” (which they deem a greater threat to national security than terrorism), their social justice solutions to what they insist against all evidence is America’s “systemic racism,” and their globalist pursuits, which include lawless Sanctuary Cities, open borders policies, and a willful blindness toward our Islamic fundamentalist enemy. Horowitz breaks down all of these issues to demonstrate how they are central to the left’s power-aggrandizing agenda.
Part Three, approximately half the book, presents Horowitz’s strategy for the way forward. “The goal,” he begins, “is to put Democrats on the offensive… to expose their hypocrisy and turn their firepower against them… The strategy is to go for the jugular.” Conservatives generally are uncomfortable with the idea of political brawling, even when on the ropes as they have been throughout the Obama years. But Horowitz stresses that if your first response to, say, the left’s kneejerk use of the race card is to go on the defensive, then you are losing. “To turn around the political battles conservatives have been losing for so long, they must begin every confrontation by punching progressives in the mouth,” he declares, referring to boxer Mike Tyson’s famous observation that “everybody has a game plan until you punch them in the mouth.” Donald Trump is better suited to pursuing such a strategy than any Republican leader in recent memory.
Horowitz goes on to note that the right must attack the left with equal moral force, particularly at the Democrats’ Achilles heel: their atrocious record on race as exemplified in their monopoly control of America’s inner cities and the suffering and misery they have wrought there.
Conservatives must also attack progressives for what Horowitz calls their wars on men and women, their leftist indoctrination in our schools, their politicized tax-exempt institutions such as the progressive Ford Foundation, their powerful, thuggish government unions, and their corruption and foreign influence peddling. And the right must destroy the false narrative that the Democratic Party is the party of the people.
In short, the right must, as one chapter title puts it, “go on the attack and stay on it.” We must be as willing to morally stigmatize the left as they are us. We must fight fire with fire. And then we must take things a step further “and create a unifying theme that has a moral resonance” with which we can level the political playing field. “That theme is individual freedom”:
The New Republicanism must be a movement opposed to the progressives’ sellout of American sovereignty, of America’s historical uniqueness. It must be unapologetic in its patriotism and in its commitment to rebuilding America economically and militarily. Third, the New Republicanism must show its contempt for a political correctness that denies the virtues of America’s culture, which is founded on individual rights and equality before the law. It must oppose progressive “multiculturalism,” which seeks to replace this culture with anti-American hierarchies of gender, class, and race.
“This is the moral language Republicans need to use if they are going to defeat the progressive agenda,” Horowitz insists.
He concludes the book with a battle plan for the first 100 days that includes such recommendations as restoring Guantanamo, moving our embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, defunding sanctuary cities, promoting energy independence, nixing illegal immigration amnesty, attacking IRS malfeasance, dismantling Obamacare, and following through on Trump’s promise of a New Deal for black America.
“No president since FDR and his famed ‘100 Days’ has the chance Donald Trump has,” David Horowitz has said, to reshape the American political landscape at home and abroad – if conservatives understand the nature of the enemy we face and how to engage them successfully.
Big Agenda succinctly educates the right about that enemy and maps a clear way forward to victory and restoration.
Mark Tapson is the editor of TruthRevolt.org and a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.