Conrad Black - Trump’s Foibles, and Rising Concern Over Iran Peace Deal, Offer a Gift to the Democrats

 The controversy over the Iran cease-fire agreement and growing public concern about foibles of President Trump’s personality have obscured the palsied state of the Democratic leadership and the approach of that party to a commitment to the extreme left that could easily become an act of collective political suicide. Mr. Trump is

 testing the theory of many previous presidents that too much exposure annoys the public and creates a sense of boredom, particularly as he gets close to the last quarter of a two-term presidency.

These circumstances have obscured the extreme vulnerability of the policy positions of the Democrats and the weakness of their leadership. 

Not even in the worst phase of the Vietnam era, when the Democrats had deserted their president, Lyndon Johnson and their war, and as demonstrators burned American flags, vandalized the Wall Street statue of George Washington, rioted constantly throughout the country, and as the New York Times put it, advocated a harsher peace for the United States and South Vietnam than North Vietnam was asking for, has a major political party been so out of step with the country.

Because the official leadership, Senator Charles Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries in the Congress and Vice President Harris, Governor Gavin Newsom, and Secretary Pete Buttigieg as possible presidential candidates, are so dreary and mediocre, and so terrified by the radical left, they have, and deserve, no credibility. And the Democratic Party is gradually being taken over by Senator Bernie Sanders, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the Squad and their demands for class warfare, appeasement of militant Islam, outright antisemitism, open borders, toleration of crime, truckling to transgender activists, the Green Terror, and paroxysms of socialist authoritarianism. 

The far left are astutely presenting their candidates in left-wing cities where they have a reasonable chance of election, and their principal constituency is the brainwashed product of the intellectually bankrupt and largely anti-American university system. Whatever happens in the midterm elections, the greater the inroads of the extreme left on the Democrats, and the decrepitude of the old guard clinging to the ramparts, the Democrats’ softness on almost all the principal issues will be a disaster. 

They are becoming a completely unelectable party of spavined party wheel-horses and shrieking extremists and in two years they will be running against a new face, probably Vice President Vance or Secretary Marco Rubio, and Trump-hate won’t cut it for them. I have always thought, from the first extremely successful days of the military action against Iran by Israel and the United States, that the war would, one way or another, be a Republican vote winner in November. 

I think the negotiations will produce a complete Iranian renunciation of nuclear weapons, and of any ability to interfere with traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, and a drastic reduction in assistance to terrorist organizations, in exchange for relaxation of cash seizures, and sanctions, or Mr. Trump would have demonstrated that he had given peace a chance, and then finished the job in Iran with an aerial blockade, American management of oil exports through the strait, and the destruction via bombardment of Iran as a modern state, all in a few weeks.

In addition to the fluid response to Iranian developments, the pre-midterm election prospects have been affected by the beginnings of a lame-duck political handicap attaching to the president. This is not just the traditional approach of the end of the second term. It has been aggravated by the controversy with the former Federal Reserve chairman, Jerome Powell, the bad taste left by the unsuccessful advocacy of the fund for excessively or falsely prosecuted victims of the alleged trespassers on January 6, 2021 at the Capitol. 

The country became very impatient with the president’s oscillation between draconian threats and predictions of imminent peace.

Claims by the president that he had gained an unconditional surrender seem just as hollow as the Democrats’ false assertion that Trump was no more successful than President Obama’s infamous surrender to Iran in 2013 and 2015. The Obama arrangements were only a delay in development and deployment of nuclear weapons, and signing the agreement brought a Niagara of cash delivered at once by airplane to Iran. 

Trump almost completely destroyed the Iranian nuclear program and he has wrung from Iran a pledge not to revive it or meddle in the Strait, and cash, which will not come from the United States, will be released according to the progress of the discussions.  There have been other events that have shaken the confidence of the president’s less tenacious supporters. 

His rambling monologue for the press in France with several cabinet secretaries standing uneasily behind him as he referred to himself as a “genius,” and other flattering encomia, was not reassuring.  And the ridiculous and demeaning controversy with Premier Giorgia Meloni of Italy over whether she had been anxious to have her photograph taken with the president, which resulted in her foreign minister cancelling a scheduled visit to the United States, was a disturbing and unseemly episode.

And the president’s relentless ambition to have his legislation adopted to preserve the integrity of American elections, which is vital and has public opinion behind it, is running up against the cowardice of pre-Trump Republican senators and congressmen, as well as the rank hypocrisy of the Democrats. 

If the president raises his game, he can still win all these points, while the Democrats splinter and waffle into a left-wing wasteland where few voters dwell.

https://www.newenglishreview.org/trumps-foibles-and-rising-concern-over-iran-peace-deal-offer-a-gift-to-the-democrats/