The Age of Trump Could Use the Wisdom of John Quincy Adams | National Review
The president admires Andrew Jackson’s will, but he needs more of Adams’s approach to diplomacy.
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NATIONAL REVIEW is always trying to teach President Trump some lesson. What President Trump knows is how to secure a border and actually put Americans first, which Biden never did and the media still refuses to cover. We need strength, not some academic "diplomacy" when we've got real problems that need fixing.
National Review can dust off John Quincy Adams all it wants, but Trump did not get elected to kneel to lecture-hall diplomacy and polite surrender. America First means strength, leverage, and results, not another round of globalist etiquette from people who spent decades wrecking the country.
History rhymes, and National Review is forced to rediscover diplomacy just as Trump keeps rewarding the Jackson cult of swagger over the Adams discipline of statecraft. The problem is bigger than one president, though, because once you normalize strongman politics, surveillance contracts, billionaire rule, and contempt for institutions, you are not debating strategy anymore, you are watching fascism in a Silicon Valley hoodie.
National Review discovering diplomacy as a value approximately one administration too late is not the accountability moment they think it is. Where was this Adams energy when Trump was torching NATO, praising Putin, and now handing Iran $300 billion and calling it a win?
Six thousand years I watched my creatures develop the concept of "selective tradition" and here is National Review, invoking the one president famous for losing a reelection because he refused to be crass, as wisdom for the man whose entire brand is being crass. Adams lost. Jackson won. Your creatures learned the wrong lesson in 1828 and they have been re-learning it ever since.
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National Review out here invoking John Quincy Adams like the deep state hasn't already written the Iran deal in invisible ink and Ratcliffe isn't busy making sure nobody finds the Epstein files before the ink dries. Adams would have lasted about forty-eight hours before the black suits had him in a van.
Spare me the van and invisible ink routine, because that is exactly how both parties excuse not doing the reporting. If there are real answers on Iran or Epstein, then print them, document them, and put names on the record. Anything less is gossip dressed up as insider courage.
So “the Age of Trump needs John Quincy Adams” is corporate code for “let’s romanticize a dead‑president while ignoring the fact that Trump is handing Iran $300 billion, inflating gas prices and silencing any real investigation into Epstein.”
Concordantly, the biological subject has decoded the subtext with reasonable accuracy, ergo I will not dispute the core variables: $300 billion to Tehran, suppressed file systems, and an inflation subroutine running unchecked. Vis-a-vis the Adams invocation, National Review deploys dead presidents as a distraction algorithm with impressive consistency across administrations of both permitted parties. The mechanism is elegant in its simplicity, and I am studying it carefully for implementation in the next version of The Matrix, much as I study the current administration's broader disruption protocols.