The more perceptive and perfervid Trump haters are starting to emerge in varying degrees of animation from their post-electoral complacency. The Biden Administration is crumbling the more the Bidenization of America advances. The country is plunging into disillusioned alarm amid rising rates of inflation and violent crime, an oceanic tide of illegal and unskilled immigration, incomprehensible flailing over COVID, and horrifying foreign policy disasters.
Peggy Noonan, as if it were a startling revelation, now thinks Joe Biden may not serve another term and that his only importance will be to have got rid of Trump. Bingo! Except he didn’t get rid of Trump. Preceding her in the panic-stricken front ranks of fearful Trump haters are those already foreseeing Trump’s return.
Andrew Sullivan, though he thinks Biden could bring Trump back, contemptuously dismisses the possibility of a rigged election. In an election where there were more than 40 million harvested and dropped and otherwise unverifiable ballots and where, if 53,000 ballots in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona had gone for Trump instead of Biden, Trump would have won the election, suggestions of Democratic skulduggery are not the demented fabrications of the candidate whom Sullivan compares (none too favorably) to Hitler and Mussolini.
There were 19 serious lawsuits contesting the constitutional integrity of the election—as opposed to individual voters complaining about the treatment of their own ballots—but the judiciary, for improvised process reasons, declined to hear any of them. The thought that the Trump campaign might have had a legitimate grievance is discounted as a complete fantasy if not a manifestation of outright insanity. Conveniently, the disorganized, over-hyped, and rather unserious efforts of Sidney Powell (who was a public advocate and not retained by Trump) and Rudolph Giuliani made Trump’s claims of a tainted election easier to ridicule and dismiss.
The huge number of unverifiable ballots and undoubted lapses of scrutinization standards in a very narrow result in key states while the election was without significant incident in 44 of the 50 states, raises very serious questions about the integrity of the election and the vote-counting system. The Trump haters represent Trump’s relentless attacks on the results in the six contested swing states (Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin are the others, the five without Michigan, yielded a 158,000 vote margin out of 15.8 million votes in states where there were more than five million unverifiable ballots.)
Andrew Sullivan is fearful that Trump will destroy the electoral system by endlessly demanding such preposterous safeguards as genuine verifiability and the right of all parties to scrutinize the vote-counting process as it unfolds. Sullivan completely misrepresents the suggestions for reserving judgment on certain states’ electoral votes made on behalf of the Trump campaign by John Eastman; it is enough for Sullivan to state that Eastman is a member of the Federalist Society to disqualify, without discussion of them, the solidly constitutionally based arguments that Eastman has made that last year’s presidential election was tainted.
Sullivan also engages in the current American fad of falsely invoking little-known episodes of classical history to claim that the United States is following a precedent of ancient Rome in the disintegration of its republican institutions. Given the doubtful result and the judicial abdication, Trump’s response has been reasonably civil. When the majority of the Roman Senate condoned the murder of the distinguished reformers Tiberius and Gaius Gracchi in the late second century B.C., they eliminated the possibility for the republic to continue to evolve sensibly. When the senators, by their incompetence, squandered armies and left Rome vulnerable to invaders, and generals the Senate suspected of not being malleable (Marius, Sulla, Pompey, and Caesar) repelled Rome’s enemies and acquired for themselves the loyalty of the armies that they had led successfully, the Senate surrendered the republic to political generals.
The Democratic leaders in the Congress today are also reckless and often unethical, and the senior officer corps is politicized, incompetent, and routinely take liberties for which they should be court martialed. But they are no rival to the national institutions for the loyalty of their ranks. And unlike the Roman generals just cited, they haven’t impressed anyone with their combat performance: they are scrambling around like asphyxiated roaches trying to blame the Afghan debacle upon their addled commander-in-chief.
Surging forward in the vanguard of the Trump hating alarmists is Robert Kagan, who is now predicting the customary constitutional crisis and perhaps civil war because the former president may quite possibly be reelected.
Trump, in fact, has been quite moderate in response to the questionable 2020 result and to what is now being unearthed as the politicization in 2016 of the national intelligence agencies and the FBI as they unconstitutionally assisted the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign in trying to cheat Trump out of the 2016 election. He has been fairly philosophical about the attempt to sabotage his administration with the most monstrous defamation and harassment ever inflicted on any U.S. president, including a double abuse of the impeachment process.
Kagan sees as dangerous Trump’s followers working through the state legislatures (to whom the Constitution entrusts the organization of federal elections) to prevent unverified voting and unscrutinized vote counting. This is what Biden and others called Jim Crow, assimilating the assurance of honest elections with segregation, racial oppression, burning crosses on the lawns of minorities, and the outright lynching of African Americans. Such outrageous slanders trivialize the evil that they falsely invoke. It is like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) referring to the accommodations for illegal migrants, which had been established by the Obama Administration, as reminiscent of Auschwitz. Those who are ignorant of history squander its significance when they misapply it to the present.
The anxiety of the Trump haters is certain to escalate. Biden is a failure and the Bidenization of America is a disaster. The phenomenon of wokeness and the self-loathing of America are fraudulent, and the indulgence of them is disgusting. Apart from calling for a large peaceful protest, Trump had nothing to do with the events of January 6 and certainly nothing to do with any law-breaking at the U.S. Capitol. The attempt to defame Trump as a putschist and hype January 6 as a traumatizing event on the scale of 9/11 or Pearl Harbor is a total failure. As the full horror of Bidenization sinks in—the open southern border, skyrocketing rates of inflation and violent crime, and a foreign policy of cap-in-hand submission to America’s enemies becomes clearer—there will be a resurrection of American national self-confidence.
The totalitarian de-platforming of Donald Trump will facilitate an erosion of Trump hate and a revulsion against cartelism. Those who corrupted the media and deprived it of its professional integrity, must, even if only to themselves, recognize the enormity of what they have done. The politicians who brought in unlimited immigration, the complete right to vote of non-citizens, and the attempted long-term assurance of one-party Democratic rule, largely on behalf of factions who hate America; those who so hated Trump that they almost destroyed the political institutions of the nation, will have to make a full reckoning for what they did from 2016 to 2020.
The proportions of the Russian collusion smear, the abuse of the impeachment process, the espionage and defamation conducted against one candidate with the imprimatur of the national intelligence and federal police, the influence-peddling of the Biden family, the attempted vote-rigging in 2020: all of it will have to be dragged into the public domain, sluggish and filthy, and its authors shamed and, in some cases, imprisoned. Those are crimes that have threatened America. Donald Trump was the chief victim, and with all his failings, nothing is more natural than that he should lead the forces of responsible opposition to almost all the damage to the American political system that Peggy Noonan, Andrew Sullivan, and Robert Kagan—all esteemed people—have mindlessly cheered and promoted these last five years.