World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland.  Team Trump stormed the fortress of the global elites on their first day (1/24) in Davos, defiantly accusing foes of blinding the world with free trade humbug and abusing the international trade system.  Their boss arrives tomorrow (1/25) and delivers his keynote speech Friday (1/26).

The US economic cabinet – Steve Mnuchin at Treasury, Wilbur Ross at Commerce, Rick Perry at Energy – said America has long been the victim of daily guerrilla warfare by trade hypocrites and is at last drawing its own sword in response, no longer willing to tolerate what it deems to be systematic gouging of the open US market.

“Trade wars are fought every single day: every single day there are always parties violating the rules and trying to take unfair advantage of things,” said Mr. Ross. “So a trade war has been in place for quite a little while. The difference is, US troops are now coming to the ramparts."

Mr. Ross denied that President Donald Trump is retreating into commercial isolation, insisting that the blizzard of 84 separate trade measures, probes and sanctions over the last year are a response to mercantilist abuses that have been tolerated for far too long.

“What has provoked a lot of the trade actions is inappropriate behavior on the part of our trading counter-parties.  Many countries are good at the rhetoric of free trade but actually practice extreme protectionism, and that is a problem the president is quite determined to deal with."

My Leftist friends (as well as many ardent #NeverTrumpers) constantly ask me if I’m not bothered by Donald Trump’s lack of decorum.  They ask if I don’t think his tweets and utterances are “beneath the dignity of the office.”  Here’s my answer:

We Right-thinking people have tried dignity.  There could not have been a man of more quiet dignity than George W. Bush as he suffered the outrageous lies and politically motivated hatreds that undermined his presidency.

We tried statesmanship.  Could there be another human being on this earth who so desperately prized “collegiality” as John McCain?

We tried propriety – has there been a nicer human being ever than Mitt Romney?  And the results were always the same.

This is because, while we were playing by the rules of dignity, collegiality and propriety, the Left has been, for the past 60 years, engaged in a knife fight where the only rules are those of Saul Alinsky and the Chicago mob.

It has been a war they’ve fought with violence, the threat of violence, demagoguery and lies from day one – and through these years, the Left has been the only side fighting this war.

With Donald Trump, this all has come to an end.  Donald Trump is America’s first wartime president in the Culture War.

Trump is commonsensically undoing, piece by piece, the main components of Obama’s legacy.

Donald Trump continues to baffle. Contrary to popular supposition, the Left loathes Trump not just for what he has done. (It is often too consumed with fury to calibrate carefully the particulars of the Trump agenda.)

Rather, it despises him mostly for what he superficially represents.   Trump’s very essence wars with everything that long ago was proven to be noble, just, and correct by Vanity Fair, NPR, The New Yorker, Google, the Upper West Side, and The Daily Show.

Yet one way of understanding Trump — particularly the momentum of his first year — is through recollection of the last eight years of the Obama administration.

In reductionist terms, Trump is the un-Obama, the Nobama. Surprisingly, that is saying quite a lot more than simple reductive negativism. It is an accomplishment that he alone could have achieved.

Did Trump misspeak…use a slur to make a point…and thereby arouse all those dainty Liberals into a snit?

Not far from where I’m writing this in Manhattan, the kosher butcher shop is long gone; across the street, the church that once stood tall is now boarded up.

But next to it stands a mosque newly built and freshly painted. English in the neighborhood is a foreign tongue and nobody knows Frank Sinatra.

The boys don’t play stickball. The girls in their veils don’t play hopscotch and all the cabs are driven by men from Somalia and Afghanistan.

Strangers are not greeted warmly.

That’s a snapshot of what troubles President Trump…not the mosque, but the culture shift,

Call him chauvinistic…call him profane…he doesn’t care.  Our President is fighting for America’s soul – for America’s very existence.

I read as much of Michael Wolff’s "Fire and Fury" as my stomach lining could stand, and then I watched Donald Trump’s last rally of the 2016 presidential election. Groucho Marx’s old line came to mind — “Who are you going to believe; me, or your own eyes?”

He spoke in Michigan, a swing state where Hillary Clinton didn’t bother to campaign, and he hammered on the issues that decided the vote: more jobs, no Obamacare, Washington corruption. Trump was focused, confident, and ruthless.

“Hillary Clinton is the most corrupt person ever to seek the office of the Presidency of the United States…. We are finally going to close the history books on the Clintons, and their lies, schemes and corruption…. My contract with the American voter begins with a plan to end government corruption and to take our country back from the special interests…. We’re going to win today and we’re going to Washington D.C. to drain the swamp.”  

The crowd of 18,000 chanted “Drain the swamp!” back at him.

That’s the man who neither expected nor wanted to win, according to Wolff. There stood Donald Trump on the day before the election, declaring that he would win, in the middle of the state whose votes would make him win, talking about the issues on which he would win.