Trump Phenomenon’s Political Implications Are Coming Into Focus as Democrats Fade Into Irrelevance

 

The opposition’s principal leaders are superannuated logrollers, Marxists, and authoritarian reverse racists.

President Trump and Melania Trump on November 6, 2024, at West Palm Beach, Florida. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

CONRAD BLACK August 13^th, 2025

 

The transformation of President Trump from being dismissively explained away as a freakish puncture of the “stability” of complacent bipartisan post-Reagan rule of America by the OBushinton-McRomneys, to a profound political phenomenon is finally being recognized. 

The Republicans between President Reagan and Mr. Trump bustled about the country stirring up apathy; President Clinton was one of American history’s masters of empathy but his principal legacy was the equity bubble and the resulting 2008 economic meltdown. President George W. Bush gave most of Iraq to Iran, fomented the election victories of Hamas and Hezbollah, and rallied the nation when the economy collapsed with the rousing tocsin “the sucker could go down.” 

President Obama’s morbid preoccupation with racism, which he managed to find lurking under almost every word in common usage in the English language, delivered the great Democratic Party to woke political masochists. Whether Mr. Obama directly endorsed these grotesque historical distortions or not, he was instrumental in creating the intellectual and political ambience that surrendered preemptively and unconditionally to the fiction that America is and has always been a racist enterprise and that all of its claims to historical distinction and accomplishment are a fraud. 

The pre-Trump Republicans didn’t agree with this, but they were too enfeebled and deracinated to put up a serious opposition. Although Mr. Trump in his first term managed to reduce taxes, sharply reduce illegal immigration, get excellent economic growth prior to the Covid pandemic, put the North Atlantic Treaty on notice that America would not finance the freeloading “alliance of the willing,” accelerate the development of a vaccine by several years, and end all talk of Communist China surpassing America economically, his enemies managed to win the 2020 election.

Yet that outcome has been cast in doubt by the election changes made during the Covid pandemic, including the unsolicited distribution of tens of millions of unverifiable mail-in ballots that ran the risk of being subsequently harvested. 

The national political press had lost its credibility by supporting the assault upon the Constitution of the collaboration of the intelligence agencies and the FBI in  legitimizing the Clinton campaign’s Trump-Russia collusion fabrication. The press further debased itself by locking arms in support of the pristine fairness of the 2020 election. The myth was propagated that Mr. Trump had his day in court with Rudolph Giuliani’s unserious trick-or-treat operations mainly involving individual disgruntled voters.

The Democratic Party bosses took the 2020 nomination away from Senator Bernie Sanders, whose Marxism was too much for most voters, and replaced him with the unfrightening eventual nominee, Joe Biden, who committed to Mr. Sanders’s far-left program. The total votes between 2016 and 2020 miraculously increased by some 22 million (and then declined by some 4 million in 2024). 

Mr. Trump contends that Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Washington’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, declined his offer of supplementary National Guard security when hundreds of thousands of his supporters came to Washington on January 6, 2021, as he feared that some hooligans might attempt to infiltrate and cause mischief. The myth was pounded into the conventional wisdom that Mr. Trump had attempted to overthrow the government.

All of it has now collapsed. The Trump Department of Justice is now investigating whether crimes were committed in the 2016 election and whether the intelligence agencies and the FBI were severely corrupted. It is also obvious that the voting policy changes in 2020 undermined the fairness of that election and, though it was a somewhat close election in 2024, it was also decisive in that the country would not stand for partisan prosecutors trying to eliminate the leader of the opposition with spurious indictments. 

These ranged from District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s confection of a pseudo-offense at New York to the FBI’s re-enactment of the amphibious and air landings at D-Day at the former president’s Florida residence to enable prurient FBI agents to rummage through Melania Trump’s clothing. The entire contemptible and horrifying assault upon constitutional democracy will now be fully exposed.

At first after Mr. Trump’s return to office, the closing of the southern border to illegal immigration attracted Democratic solicitude for dangerous criminals, and unbecoming sympathies for violent mobs at Los Angeles and elsewhere waving the flag of Mexico, a country that conspicuously does not want them back. Public opinion is elsewhere.

The promised elimination of the Iranian military nuclear program without an American casualty was at first represented as a mere inconvenience to Iran of several months. The drastic measures taken to reduce America’s $1.2 trillion annual trade deficit as well as its intolerable federal budget deficit caused uniform shrieks of alarm over inevitable economic disaster. It’s not happening. 

Where there was not a single serious initiative to bring the Ukraine war to a satisfactory end under President Biden, it is now likely to end, preserving most of Ukraine, teaching the Kremlin a valuable lesson, and yet creating the conditions in which Russia can cease to be a vassal of China and reengage with the West. NATO has been reconstructed as a serious alliance.

While this has occurred, the Democratic Party has putrefied. Its principal leaders are superannuated logrollers, Marxists, and authoritarian reverse racists. American politics is not now a contest. The latest indication of this is the proclamation by National Review, which spent 10 years disparaging Mr. Trump as a mountebank, while congratulating itself for finding the odd policy nugget in his program, that he is an important president. Mr. Trump has won.

https://www.nysun.com/article/trump-phenomenons-political-implications-are-coming-into-focus-as-democrats-fade-into-irrelevance