Conrad Black - Trump Has Himself To Blame

 To my readers I apologize for my mistaken prediction last week that the Republicans would retain control of the Senate. What happened in the House of Representatives was not too surprising. 

But neither I nor the leftist polls which normally discount the Republicans by at least three percent give any warning of the anti-Republican tidal wave in Texas or even the proportions of the shift in Iowa, Kansas, and Florida, where the Republican candidates for governor and senator won much more narrowly than had been expected.

The president has essentially himself to blame for the proportions of this setback.

 While he continued to pull large crowds and worked tirelessly for his party’s candidates, the old formula is wearing thin: this is the sixth time that he has gone around the country loquaciously extemporizing and heaping ad hominem abuse on his opponents, sometimes amusingly, sometimes not. 

The outstanding economic news came in very late and has not been as acutely detectable in the pocketbooks and the billfolds of the country as gasoline, diesel, and food prices.

Yet more dangerous and ultimately very damaging were his public relations mismanagement of key issues. He has never possessed the ability of other presidents in the electronic media age and particularly those between Roosevelt and Nixon, to give an impartial, thoroughly reasoned address on important public policy from the Oval Office, and to explain his position, stare straight at the camera, and ask for the nation’s support.

This is what FDR did in his “Great Arsenal of Democracy’ speech at the end of 1940 where he denounced the “pious frauds” of democracy’s enemies and declared that “No dictator, no combination of dictators” would distract the nation from the pursuit of its national interest and moral duty. 

This is what President Nixon did with his “Silent majority” address of 1969 when he outlined his program for departing Vietnam undefeated and took responsibility for it: “if it does succeed, what the critics say now won’t matter; if it does not succeed, anything I say then won’t matter.”

The president scuttled his own credibility with his nerve-racking oscillation between imminent peace and the alternative of destroying Iran completely. 

Not one American in ten understood that if he could defang or help overthrow the Iranian regime, peace in the Middle East would be possible at last and the War on Terror would be substantially won with the end of the world’s principal terrorism-sponsoring regime.

These would be immense achievements that, when added to his lowering taxes, accelerating economic growth, countering wokeness and DEI and the green hysteria, ending illegal immigration and eliminating Syria and Venezuela and Cuba as useful Russo-Chinese allies, entitled Mr. Trump to be considered one of the nation’s most successful, if not one of its most elegant, presidents.

Fortunately, Mr. Trump retains an opportunity to bring the Iran conflict to a positive conclusion. It is not the case, as the purblind, Paleolithic isolationists and pacifists of both parties are claiming, that he must “end the war.” The American national interest and the peace of the world require that he finish the war. Like the brilliant economic news that came in too late to help him at the polls last week, he was late but successful in squaring his promises to avoid participating in a land war in the Middle East.

He did so while denying Iran a nuclear weapon and restoring a normal flow of oil from the Persian Gulf. He only needs to continue the maintenance of this pressure on Iran, which does not technically constitute a state of war and should be immune to the fiendish tinkering of the Schumerite troglodytes of the old Democratic Party and the Islamo-Marxists of this brave new future, El-Sayed et al.

Some of the financial activities of the president and his family have appeared to be greedy and tasteless but presumably they are legal. Mitt Romney’s successor as senator from Utah, John Curtis, has already called for an investigation into them but unless the First Family has taken complete leave of its senses, there should be nothing other than public relations damage there.

In the tradition of Eric Holder and Merrick Garland, Attorney General Todd Blanche will ignore congressional subpoenas and if the Democrats become unutterably obnoxious, they could find the skies raining stair-rods of subpoenas and indictments upon them. Mr. Trump has amply demonstrated that he is even fiercer and more determined as an underdog than as a relatively unfettered president.

The great battle now is for retention of the consensus established by FDR and sustained by all of his successors that the United States must retain a presence in Western Europe and the Far East to assure that the entire Eurasian landmass does not, as it did in 1940 and 1941, fall into the hands of democracy’s enemies. Mr. Trump has the will and the power to do this, just as his vetoes will prevent the Democrats from destroying the blooming Trump economy.

Mr. Trump retains the undisputed headship of the MAGA rank-and-file of his party and should be able to hold the fort. The vice president may have permanently blotted his ledger with his impudent demurral from administration policy on Wednesday. 

He effectively blamed the Republican defeat on Israel and its American friends. No one who holds such views is fit for the one office higher than the vice presidency.

 These will be challenging years, but the extreme divisions and bitterness of the Trump Era will start to subside as that era approaches its end, an undoubted but very contested success.

https://www.newenglishreview.org/trump-has-himself-to-blame/