I’ve become thoroughly fed up with blather from Democrats, progressives & etc. that Donald Trump is unfit to be president. It’s not that I don’t share their opinion to a certain extent—I do. But their complaints about Trump are a bit much, coming as they do from people who, as we now see, have done so much to assist with his political rehabilitation.
The Left’s long campaign to destroy Donald Trump not only failed in its objective, but produced a backlash that has benefitted the former president. With the passage of time, his claim to be the victim of an orchestrated campaign to destroy him and his presidency appeared increasingly plausible, even to people who, like me, weren’t among his avid fans. Trump has been fortunate in his enemies. Their bad faith, mendacity, conspiracy theorizing, and over-the-top Hitler shouting does them no credit. Trump may be a bad man, he may be unfit to serve as president, but he’s not some fascist monster of evil, plotting to make himself dictator. That’s just ridiculous.
Still, Trump remained unpopular and that ought to have limited to his chances of being restored to the White House. But the Democratic Party has so arranged matters that the Prince of the Golden Escalator is now poised to win big in November.
When Joe Biden was running for president in 2020, the narrative went that he was Mr. Normalcy, a political moderate, who would restore regular order and exert a calming influence on American politics. It was even intimated that in view of his age—seventy-eight at the time—Biden would be a transitional figure, serving but one term, preparing the ground for a new generation of Democrats.
But no sooner had he bested Trump than a cabal of progressives, appealing to the President’s vanity and pride, began whispering that he was much more: the savior of “our democracy,” the second coming of FDR. Biden being Biden, he willingly gave himself over to the progressive wing of his party, with disastrous results.
The Biden Administration’s irresponsible spending spree touched off the runaway inflationary spiral whose lingering aftereffects still sour the American people’s economic outlook. Its policy on border security—basically, whatever Trump did, we’ll do the opposite—generated a tidal wave of illegal immigration that washed across the nation. And its disorderly, shameful abandonment of Afghanistan revealed to all the world that President Biden and his top foreign policy advisers were incompetent fools. Afghanistan in particular inflicted a wound on the Biden presidency from which it never recovered.
But that was not the worst of it. Behind the scenes, carefully concealed from the public, an elderly President Biden was slowly but surely going to pieces. None of us escape the ravages of age in the end; the process was probably accelerated for Biden by the extraordinary stress that’s inseparable from the high office he occupies.
It must have been obvious to those closest to him that the President was in decline, and that he should not run for a second term. But instead of helping Biden to that conclusion, his inner circle propped him up. Appealing once more to his pride and vanity, they encouraged him in the belief that he and he alone stood between Donald Trump and the White House. Only he could save “our democracy” from MAGA fascism. And the inner circle intensified its efforts to keep the truth from the American people.
In that effort they had plenty of help. There were many outside the Biden inner circle—White House staff, Democratic members of Congress, cabinet officers, journalists—who saw enough to raise doubts about the President’s fitness for office. But they remained silent or, as in the case of the legacy media, actively colluded with those in the know to suppress the truth. This was a fool’s errand, and it ended with a big bang in the first few minutes of the June 27 presidential debate.
Now the truth is out, and the Democratic Party finds itself stuck with a presidential candidate who ought to be relieved of the keys to his treasured Corvette. Joe Biden is too addled and infirm to continue as president, everybody knows it, and if he stays in the race, he’ll go down to defeat—taking many other Democrats with him. And even if Biden can be persuaded to step aside, the damage has been done. By a two-to-one margin, voters believe that Democrats have lied to them about the President’s condition.
I have no sympathy for the Democrats: They did this to themselves. And if, as seems probable, Donald Trump is returned to office in November—Democrats, progressives and their legacy media minions will have paved the way for him. So right now, they can all just shut up. Defenders of “our democracy” like these people we can do without.
We've had a four year test run on Trump and found him to be quite effective, all things considered. All things being the fact that the GOPe aligned with the Dems to hobble him and Covid appeared at an opportune time for the Dems and Big Government types. The Trump administration was insufficiently to thwart the power grab by the expert class; Trump had warned early, and rightly, about the cure being worse than the disease.
Whatever one might think of Trump as a person (would you like him to date your sister?), his presidency was exceptional:
1. The greatest success of American foreign policy in decades is the Abraham Accords, a Trump vision accomplished without help from State Department mediocrities.
2. Domestic economy delivered significant increases in real wages, compared to the steep decline of the Biden years and those increases were greater for lower income people:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N/
3. Illegal immigration: enough said