by Conrad Black
Donald Trump gave the greatest speech of his career on Friday night at Mount Rushmore, an address that will soon take on historic importance. The president has now forced his opponents out of their fetid hothouse of snobbery, humbug, and subversion. In the process he has forced the Bush Republicans, who led the party between the retirement of Ronald Reagan and the rise of Donald Trump, to show their colors.
George H. W. Bush became president because James Baker, his campaign manager in 1980 when he was running against Ronald Reagan for the Republican nomination, persuaded him to throw his lot in with Reagan after the former California governor’s nomination victory was assured, but while Bush could still win another primary. Not having strong views on the subject, Reagan gave Bush (as the distant runner-up for the nomination) the vice-presidential position. He was a dutiful vice president and competent president, but he never understood how or why Reagan had moved the Republican Party.
When Bush sought reelection in 1992, he lost 20 million mainly Republican votes to the political charlatan Ross Perot, thereby bringing the Clintons down upon America. President Clinton moved the Democratic Party closer to the center, away from the nostrums of Jimmy Carter and George McGovern. And the Bush-McCain-Romney Republicans were almost Clintonian political look-alikes.
It was OBushinton government for seven terms and, on balance, it was a disaster.
There was almost permanent entanglement in the Middle East after 2001, with the principal consequence that Iran gained a dominating influence over most Iraqis. International terrorism was skillfully fought and contained but Iraq, Syria, and Yemen disintegrated, an immense humanitarian disaster involving millions of pitiful refugees resulted; the greatest financial crisis in the world since the Great Depression occurred—traceable directly to President Clinton’s regulatory and legislative sponsorship of the housing bubble; 10 to 15 million unskilled people entered the U.S. illegally, and the working and middle classes of America experienced a prolonged period of no increase in their income as measured by purchasing power. Iran and North Korea were allowed to get to the edge of nuclear military power and China was challenging U.S. interests everywhere.
It was the most incompetent period of presidential government in American history, exceeding the decade prior to the Civil War and even the Prohibition, isolationism, and the crash of 1929 which led to the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Distinctions became blurred between Republicans and Democrats, and the mediocre performance of the United States in the world and the failure of scores of millions of hard-working Americans to better their lot created the discontent in which Donald Trump was able to win control of the Republican Party by sweeping the primaries in 2016.
At the same time, the Democratic Marxist Left led by journeyman socialist Bernie Sanders came close to defeating Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination in 2016. Sanders was on the way to winning the nomination this year when the party elders picked Joe Biden out of the ditch where the Democratic primary voters had put him and installed him as the candidate.
Embracing the Chaos
Since Trump led a revolution against all the established factions of both parties, they joined hands to deny him any honeymoon. The first three years of his presidency were consumed by the almost certainly criminal Trump-Russian collusion hoax and the spurious impeachment attempt.
By late January, Trump’s success in almost eliminating unemployment, oil imports, and illegal immigration, and his revival of economic growth, revision of trade agreements, and elevation of nearly 200 constitutionalist judges, had made his election appear almost inevitable.
The Democrats naturally shrieked with glee at the prospect of shutting down the economy to fight the COVID-19 virus, and have continually demanded an economically self-strangling shutdown for an indefinite period. The pandemic has had the additional blessing of giving Democrats an excuse to hide their candidate in his basement, as Joe Biden is obviously not up to the very tough process that a successful presidential candidacy requires.
The pandemic’s cumulative impact on the voters, the precipitation of more than 15 million people into unemployment in the resulting shutdown, and the severe urban violence that assaulted every principal tenet of American patriotism following the death of George Floyd, all combined to produce the astounding anomaly that Joe Biden appears to lead Donald Trump in pre-election polls by as much as eight or ten percent.
Emboldened by what they took to be the long-anticipated dissolution of the Trump political phenomenon, the NeverTrumpers (Republicans who had never rallied to this president) have come snorting out of the undergrowth in full fraternization with the Biden Democrats. This adherence to Biden, whom they had reviled or at least disdained for decades, occurred as the Democrats themselves waffled ambiguously in the face of urban guerrillas smashing up many of America’s greatest cities, and as the flaccid and corrupt Democratic governments of those cities abased themselves before Black Lives Matter and Antifa.
Nothing But the Truth
As the leadership of Black Lives Matter is professedly Marxist and rejects the proposition that all lives matter, it is an overtly and violently anti-white, racist institution of the far Left. Antifa are violent, racist fellow-travelers. In failing to condemn these groups unequivocally, the Democratic Party will soon discover that it has been mortally infected by cohabitation with them.
President Trump spoke nothing but the truth at Mount Rushmore on Friday when he said “Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children. Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities. Many of these people have no idea why they are doing this but some know exactly what they are doing.”
It is inconceivable that the FBI—particularly with the opprobrium it has rightly attracted for its antics in the Russian collusion canard—is not close to being able to indict the leadership of Black Lives Matter and Antifa for sedition and incitement to a range of violent crimes, including murder and arson. It is also inconceivable that the country could fail to choose the president’s championship of patriotic continuity with strong emphasis on racial equality and the highest standards of civilized law enforcement over the nihilism and Americo-phobic mob rule of the post-George Floyd rioters whom the Democrats in their decadent insipidity have appeased.
The almost inexpressibly contemptible Democratic de Blasio regime in New York City has reduced the police budget by $1 billion as violent crime has more than doubled. The president’s reopening of the economy brought back nearly 5 million workers out of unemployment in June and this process should continue. The fatality rates of the pandemic have declined by nearly 90 percent from their high, with spread of the virus now concentrated amongst those who can best resist it. The subject of pathetic Democratic hand-wringing, the surge in new cases is effectively irrelevant other than that it increases national immunity to it.
Former conservatives and pillars of the pre-Trump Republican Party are now facing the point of no return. If they confirm their support for the almost leaderless Democratic Party now closely allied with pestilence and racist mayhem, they will never have any political influence in any party again. The time to choose between irreconcilable opposites is almost at hand.
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Conrad Black has been one of Canada’s most prominent financiers for 40 years, and was one of the leading newspaper publishers in the world as owner of the British telegraph newspapers, the Fairfax newspapers in Australia, the Jerusalem Post, Chicago Sun-Times and scores of smaller newspapers in the U.S., and most of the daily newspapers in Canada. He is the author of authoritative biographies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, one-volume histories of the United States and Canada, and most recently of Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other. He is a member of the British House of Lords as Lord Black of Crossharbour.
Photo “Donald Trump” by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. CC BY 2.0.
