A Sequence of Disasters for Faltering Biden Administration Spells Trouble for the Democrats in the Coming General Election

By Conrad Black

The administration is badly underwater in all five main policy areas: inflation, immigration, crime, the impossible green tyranny, and the collapse of international stability.

The last week has been another sequence of disasters for the faltering Biden administration. Every informed person in America saw the approach of general campus disturbances, and could easily predict that the most heavily armed militant among the agitators would be people who had nothing to do with the academic community they were disrupting.

Apart from Samuel Hayakawa, who was elected to the senate in recognition of facing down student demonstrators in the late 1960s at San Francisco State University, every university administration in living memory has caved in like a house of cards whenever there has been agitation on campus. The more venerable among us painfully remember Grayson Kirk of Columbia and others in the late 1960s.

A riffraff of overindulged students and outright hooligans shut down and vandalized their campuses. Clark Kerr of the University of California had the advantage of having Ronald Reagan as governor, and he had the national guard with fixed bayonets clear the main square of the University of California at Berkeley without any casualties.

It over stretches our imaginations to think of the current governor, Gavin Newsom, facing the same problem. UCLA did inadvertently produce the most uplifting moment of the academic week in America, when the police separated pro-Hamas and pro-Israeli demonstrators and the two sides agreed on the lyrics of a chant criticizing President Biden. Mobs are never courageous.

The nostrum the White House put forward as a possible solution to the problem brought on itself by appeasing the Islamist antisemites while professing support for Israel last week excavated a new low in tactical misconception: the admission of 100,000 presumably Hamas-supporting Palestinians to the United States.

The Palestinians are, with justice, seeking a state of their own, and the people of the United States, despite the open border Biden policy, seeks controlled and assimilable immigration, not the abrupt arrival of 100,000 people who are quite likely to bring their antisemitic hatred and lawlessness into this country.

The real problem the president faces was predicted by many when it was rendered inevitable by the election tactics of the Democrats in 2020. In the desperation of the Washington political establishment to prevent their swamp being drained, and to banish President Trump, who has terrified the bipartisan political establishment of America, unlike anyone in the history of the country, they embraced the rioters and arsonists of that “Summer of love.”

The violent protests that engulfed much of urban America that summer were supposedly in solidarity with George Floyd, the man who was killed by a Minneapolis policeman, who supposedly was arresting him and who was convicted of murder. It was a disgusting incident that appalled the entire world, which had a full video exposure to it.

Yet the months of subsequent violence and destructive protest doing billions of dollars of damage and injuring hundreds of people had practically nothing to do with George Floyd, was not seriously combated by the police forces of the mainly Democrat-governed large cities of America.

The Democratic response was to defund the police because of their excesses and allow the “peaceful protests” to continue practically unchallenged as evidence of the discord and disorder inevitable in America when Mr. Trump was president.

In the summer of 2020, the spokespersons for Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and other radical and violent groups made no secret of their intention to “burn America down” if it did not give these extremists everything they demanded, which included the transformation of America into a racist, gangster, dictatorship.

The Democrats were prepared to take votes wherever they could get them and make encouraging noises in all directions, so this army of racist thugs was dutifully recruited, and the outrageous falsehood spread through the almost unanimous anti-Trump press that none of these extremists meant a word of it, and none of them would throw a rock or raise an angry placard if they did not have to deal with the cruel and unusual provocation of having Mr. Trump in the White House.

All of America has seen how that political conception has worked out and the Democrats will pay a heavy price for it, as they should. The increasingly ludicrous and embarrassing spectacle of Mr. Biden trying to reconcile the patriotic and sensible bedrock of the Democratic Party of the past with this nihilist and hate-driven mob of racist America-haters, has opened a wound in the Democratic Party that grows and suppurates more damagingly every week.

Since the administration is badly underwater in all five main policy areas: inflation, immigration, crime, the impossible green tyranny, and the collapse of international stability, it has only had Trump-hate as an argument, excoriating MAGA extremism even as the Democrats’ woke allies make many of the downtown areas and some of the world’s most famous boulevards, intolerably drug- and crime-ridden environments, and in some cases, virtual shooting galleries.

Beyond that, the administration has only two remaining lines of defense: the lawfare offensive of politicizing the Justice Department and hurling a series of spurious indictments at Mr. Trump to try to smear him as an incorrigible lawbreaker, and tie him up in bad publicity, in court for the campaign and if possible, convict and even imprisoned him.

The country watched with amusement as District Attorney Fani Willis completely botched the absurd prosecution in Georgia, and it has taken note of the Supreme Court’s decision to deliberate — and on the likely partial success of — some of Mr. Trump’s motions for some level of immunity.

The legal strategy now hangs by a thread, with the most preposterous charge ever leveled at an American national politician, linking together two dubious misdemeanors, on which time limits have expired, and claiming, with no plausible evidence, that they are transmuted into a felony because of criminal intent.

Add to this improbable argument the most inept prosecution that almost any commentator has ever seen. Despite transporting from Washington a senior justice department specialist in Mr. Trump prosecutions, the Manhattan district attorney has been calling witnesses who have been favorable to Mr. Trump, and after two weeks, the court hasn’t adduced any inculpatory evidence, and the district attorney has failed to identify a crime for which he seeks to send a former president of the United States to prison.

This administration has not only reduced the justice department to an arm of the nasty campaign tricks division of the Democratic national committee, it has reduced the entire prosecution apparatus of the federal government to a Keystone Kops send-up of how a sophisticated country administers its justice system.

There is now some evidence that the Trump campaign is pulling ahead and that this need not be, as is almost universally proclaimed, a close election after all. Polls last week had Mr. Trump opening up a lead of between four points and ten points in the popular vote and leadership in all of the swing states.

This may thrust the Democrats back on their final line of defense which will be to replicate and amplify their achievement with harvested and unverified and unscrutinized ballots of 2020. Their skill with this activity should not be under-estimated. This may thrust the Democrats back on their final line of defense.

Their skill with this activity should not be underestimated, but the lead Mr. Trump appears to have, if it holds, will require the insertion of millions of fraudulent ballots under the eyes of a Republican Party that is finally aware of these problems and is working feverishly to combat them.

Six months allows plenty of time for changes and unforeseeable events. Six months out, though, it appears that the American public is going to dispense with Mr. Trump’s enemies, bag and baggage, and they are unlikely to have less reason to do so then than they do now.

 

First published in the New York Sun