America Waits Out the Biden Era

The next four years will test the American threshold for governmental incompetence and venality.

by Conrad Black

Now that the post-electoral haze is clearing a little, and we see that the Democrats so skillfully arranged for massive ballot-harvesting electoral fraud in several swing states that their likely theft of the election may, in yet another demonstration of the atrophied condition of the American legal system, be legal, the unholy coalition that supported Biden must consider the implications of what they have done. We see him putting forth as secretary of state someone who fervently attempted to give life support to the Kremlin–Trump connection long after any informed person in the world with an IQ of at least double figures knew that it was false. We see a proposed candidate for homeland security who wants to reopen the borders and reinstate the open invitation of up to a million illiterate peasants to enter the United States illegally every year. We have the inimitable John Kerry, who voted for the Iraq War but not to fund it, the scarred veteran of the Swift Boat controversy, back again to attack the petroleum industry, truckle to the international leftist climate extremists who departed the sinking ship of international communism to attack capitalism in this new green way, and combat a warming of the globe that is not, in fact, occurring. The nominees to date contain a number of shining allegories of the old log-rolling, back-scratching Washington, where Joe Biden lolled comfortably (and profitably) for nearly 50 years.

This is what would be called, if anyone less spavined and shopworn than Joe Biden were ostensibly at the head of it, the brave new post-Trump world. Already the oppressive ambience of the Obama years is seeping like swamp gas through the keyholes and under the doors; the ex-president has gone back to insulting voting groups that favor the Republicans, and he and his wife have returned to the slander that President Trump, who this year increased his share of the African-American vote by 50 percent and of the Hispanic vote by 100 percent, is a racist. (This may be part of the Democrats’ vaunted “progress,” as four years ago Obama was routinely describing Trump as a supporter of the Ku Klux Klan.)

The Trump-hating media and their more recent converts tiresomely repeat that the mountains of affidavit evidence accumulated by the president’s supporters seek a remedy more drastic than can reasonably be given, because the relevant state legislatures opened up the possibility for electoral theft in a procedurally correct way, and there is not now time to take the constitutional challenge of the right of the country to a fairly determined presidential election result up to and through the Supreme Court before the inauguration process overtakes it. So we have the insolent Biden entourage issuing statements about “evicting trespassers from the White House,” i.e. Trump, and some of Trump’s unsuccessful rivals for the Republican nomination four years ago urging him to be a good sport, like Samuel Tilden in 1876, Richard Nixon in 1960, and Al Gore in 2000. (Understandably, Hillary Clinton’s egregious performance four years ago is not mentioned in this context.)

Tilden went quietly in exchange for significant concessions in the national interest from his opponent, Rutherford Hayes, which were honored, and while it was a disputed election, it was not necessarily a stolen election. Mr. Nixon, who chose not to embarrass the country by mounting a full challenge of the election even though President Eisenhower urged him to do so, just as 14 years later Nixon declined to submit the country to the embarrassment of an impeachment trial, even though there has never been any conclusive evidence that he committed the crime. He has received practically no credit from the American liberal historical establishment for his self-sacrificing stance on either occasion, as has been his lot generally at the hands of America’s liberal historic myth-makers. No one knows who won the 1960 or 2000 elections, and Al Gore’s requests for selective recounts were in the circumstances impractical; he may have been the victim of bad luck but not of electoral larceny.

This year is very distinguishable. The more respectable elements of the anti-Trump coalition are now, like Caesar’s assassins, dipping their hands in the blood to share in what they consider to be the credit for the apparent defeat of the president. David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, is back to writing about the triumph of truth over Trumpian mendacity. The facts that Trump has been the victim of two great political offenses — the politicization of the intelligence services and the FBI to try and alter and then undo the 2016 election, and of this year’s vote-by-mail extravaganza in four Democratic-governed swing states — and that he has been pilloried without mercy or interruption by the press for four years, do not inhibit Remnick’s irrepressible reflex to hammer one more time the piñata of Trump’s alleged moral turpitude. The worthy David Brooks of the New York Times, in the same column where he publicly urged upon presumptive nominee Obama the merits of Joe Biden as vice president 12 years ago, and who assured us that Obama would be a good president because he had a sharp crease in his trouser leg, treats us yet again to his singular perspective on the moral decay of the Republican Party. This is a party that Trump has dragged from the suburban golf clubs and the thickets of bourgeois complacency and has made popular among previously inaccessible minorities while retaining its capitalist credentials with tax reductions, wholesale deregulation, and free-market growth that produced the elimination of unemployment and a 70 percent rise in the equities markets.

As the full horror of the Biden mediocrity, enfeeblement, cronyism, nest-feathering, and resistless pandering to all the fringes of this depreciated and atomized Democratic Party, including the urban guerrillas and hooligans who did terrible damage to Democratic-governed cities across the country with their “peaceful protests” all summer (and were never mentioned at the Democratic National Convention), unfolds, we may expect further apologia to ooze forth, sluggishly and implausibly, from intelligent conservatives who should have known better. They are the co-owners of this ghastly déroute, and they will have ample opportunity to regret, if not publicly repent, their self-destructive snobbery and hypocrisy. Even the Times’ Tom Friedman, a commendably consistent liberal Trump-hater who told us that the Trump–Russian collusion was an assault on American sovereignty equal to Pearl Harbor and 9/11, is already warning Biden not to go back to giving a nuclear military blank check to Iran.

The truth is that President Trump has had the most successful first term of any president in the country’s history except Lincoln, FDR, and Nixon, but the fact that he was attacking the entire political class, coupled to the less alluring aspects of his garish personality, enabled a wildly incongruous coalition of his enemies, by recourse to massive electoral fraud, to cheat him of a consecutive second term. Trump followed the two most unsuccessful presidents since Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan and will be succeeded by the least impressive individual raised to that great office in all of its history.

Trump’s upper-middle and highbrow conservative enemies will have to contemplate the implications of these facts these next years, and they will notice that Donald Trump is, by tens of millions, the most popular political leader in the country and the only person since FDR for whom scores of thousands of people would stand in the rain and cold for hours to hear him in person. We have heard the worst, but not the last, of those of his critics who should have known better, but we have certainly not heard the last of Donald Trump. All is to scale, but if Trump learns anything from this bumpy ride, the next four years will be his replication of Mr. Churchill in the wilderness and of General de Gaulle at Colombey-les-deux-Églises, waiting for the Fourth Republic to flounder to an end. As Adam Smith said, “There is a deal of ruin in a country,” but if Biden squeaks through, these next four years will test the American threshold for governmental incompetence and venality.

First published in National Review.