The truism shared by the Democrats almost literally whistling past the graveyard, and by the imperishable Never Trump Republicans, is that the 45th president cannot defeat President Biden in a rematch.
by Conrad Black
The more conscientious of the Trump-haters are taking to their foxholes and emitting peculiar noises that could easily be mistaken for expressions of panic. Peggy Noonan, who infamously described President Trump as “a tumor metastasizing in the Oval Office,” and went as far as any sane person could with President Biden, is now giving pep talks in the Wall Street Journal to inspirit Governor DeSantis, and to anyone minded to join the race for the presidential nomination in either party.
Andrew McCarthy, writing in National Review, purports to believe that Mr. Trump can’t win. He is an outstanding lawyer but with no particular credentials as an election analyst, and he now claims to have been a Trump loyalist during the Russia-collusion nonsense, which in fact he took seriously right up to the publication of the Mueller Report. He denies that he is a Trump-hater though he admits to being a Trump opponent and approved his impeachment and conviction for “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
The truism shared by the Democrats almost literally whistling past the graveyard, and by the imperishable Never Trump Republicans, is that Mr. Trump cannot defeat Mr. Biden: “Biden beat Trump in 2020; there’s no reason why he won’t win again in 2024.” Yes, there are a number of reasons. In 2020 Mr. Trump was the perfect target for a wall-to-wall political press and 100 percent social media pillory.
Hardly six hours went by for months on end when Mr. Trump did not give his enemies a tweet or other public comment that they could ridicule or mangle into at the least, an “unpresidential” reflection. Such opportunities are very rare now. Twitter is no longer a 24-hour instrument of Trump-hate, and the collusion of the politicized FBI with Trump-haters has been well-established and leaves the public much less credulous to this sort of comment that it was four years ago. Some of Mr. Trump’s most vocal press antagonists have gone.
In 2020 the Democrats were able to play the George Floyd tragedy both ways. Somehow, Mr. Trump was in league with those who would brutally assault African-Americans. Yet the widespread rioting that followed that horrible incident and caused up to $2 billion of damage, according to Axios, injured hundreds of people, and led to dozens of deaths across the country were in no way the responsibility of the Democratic mayors who were completely ineffectual at restoring order. It was all cracked up to the chaos of the Trump era. All the country had to do was get rid of Mr. Trump and there would be no more riots.
Covid was a godsend for Mr. Trump’s enemies. He made the mistake of effectively taking over the commission in charge of which he had put Vice President Pence, and the Democrats blamed him for dragging his feet on the shutdowns which Democrats demanded in order to create an economic depression which they could then blame on Mr. Trump. With the collusion of the press, they gave Mr. Trump no credit for the remarkable swiftness of his response to the crisis, providing more hospital beds than were needed and moving emergency hospital ships into position where in fact there was no requirement for them.
They gave him no credit for producing a vaccine three years ahead of what had been predicted. Best of all in the Covid area, the Democrats had an excuse for keeping Mr. Biden in his basement and away from voters. When he did speak, he was contending, often unsuccessfully, to make his voice heard over “the Canadian geese” as he described them, in his garden.
And there were the voting and vote-counting rule changes undertaken in the professed interest of assuring as large a turn-out as possible in the election despite Covid restrictions. Many of these changes were not undertaken, as the Constitution requires, by the state legislatures, but rather by authority of the state governors or state courts. The judiciary refused to hear and try on its merits any of the 19 lawsuits that were taken challenging the constitutionality of material changes to the election process.
It is a national disgrace that the American press have practically unanimously pretended that there is no possible question of the validity of the election result. More than 40 percent of ballots were not cast on election day in the voting place by the voter whose name is on the ballot. It is clear that in an election where millions of unsolicited ballots were mailed out to voters — raising concerns about ballot harvesting, and that if 50,000 votes were flipped in Pennsylvania and two other states Mr. Trump would have won, there is a serious question about the integrity of the result. The press deny this and pretend Trump’s only challenge to the authenticity of the 2020 election results were the somewhat unserious efforts of Rudolph Giuliani and, on her own account, Sidney Powell.
The aversion of the Democrats to making the voting system more resistant to vote-rigging was demonstrated in changes in Georgia which Mr. Biden represented as a return to segregation and the denial of the rights of African-Americans to vote. The 2018 election results exposed these complaints as unfounded and substantially addressed the problems that gave rise to the voting controversy in Georgia in 2020. Other states have taken similar steps and it may be assumed that the absence of Covid restrictions will produce more indisputable election results. There were no substantial allegations of abuse in the midterm elections last year.
Neither Mr. McCarthy nor any other serious legal commentator, however hostile they may be to Mr. Trump, seriously claims that the prosecution of the former president in New York over the Stormy Daniels affair and the possible further prosecutions in respect of the Georgia election, the events on January 6, 2021 at the U.S. Capitol, and whatever documents the former president took with him when he departed the White House, are not politically inspired.
This ultimate clincher in the Democratic playbook has already failed. The country knows that this is an abuse of the justice system and the deliberate criminalization of opponents to smear and destroy them. As I’ve written here before, this is the last stop on the route that began with the destruction of the very successful Nixon presidency, that had recently been reelected by the greatest plurality in American history, over the absurdly trivial Watergate matters.
And finally, Mr. Trump will have the advantage of running against an administration that is appallingly vulnerable on its record: high inflation, vertiginous deficits, minimal progress in real income for scores of millions of Americans, an open southern border that has been crossed by millions of illegal immigrants and quantities of fentanyl that kill approximately 200 Americans a day, all in league with the most violent and dangerous crime gangs in the world in northern Mexico.
The green program has squandered energy self-sufficiency, unnecessarily raised costs, and has amounted to a war on the petroleum industry: all in pursuit of goals that have not been proved to be either attainable or desirable. The assistance to Ukraine has been commendable but there is no sign of an exit strategy. Most forecasts are of a recession. The debacle in Afghanistan is totally inexcusable. This is the record the Democrats will have to defend.
Political conditions are always highly changeable. Today, Mr. Trump is the clear favorite to win the Republican nomination, is already narrowly leading Mr. Biden in the polls, and on what can be seen, is likely to do that next election day.
First published in the New York Sun.
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One Response
Mr Black’s analysis is for the most part spot on as usual. He is an old school believer in liberal democracy and his honesty & decency shines through all his articles. But I am afraid he underestimates the extent to which democracy in the US has been degraded. And consequently, he does not understand the forces arrayed against anyone who wishes to dislodge the people now in power in the US.
That old rule of covert ops – “always accuse your enemies of what you are doing yourself” – applies equally to politics. And the simple truth is that the people who can’t stop telling us that they’re out to “save democracy” are the ones now systematically destroying it at every turn.
Mr Black correctly castigates the American press as a national disgrace for their reporting of the last election. But the fact is that most of the national press was thoroughly captured years ago, along with Big Tech on whose platforms most people get their information these days. Corporate interests, guided by unelected mandarins in key US security agencies, call the shots today. This partnership started before Trump, was cemented in place after his shock election in 2016, and is now a fait accompli. It was on display for all to see during the covid melodrama. Once-liberal media outlets shamelessly shilled for ‘Big Pharma’ while at the same time ceaselessly smearing and censoring anyone who dissented from the “accepted” narrative. What we were subjected to was effectively state propaganda: non-stop messages – “apocalyptic virus”, “stay at home”, “get vaccinated” – were beamed out 24×7, along with vicious smearing and demonizing of non-compliant “covidiots” & “the unvaccinated”. The entire “information messaging” process was managed by the aforementioned security agencies. And we now know that much of the funding originated from the DoD.
The “News” we receive is now fully curated and consists principally of approved “narratives”, often silly distractions, and – always present – a “smear” component which involves the denigration of movements & individuals deemed to be threats to the regime (e.g. ‘MAGA Republicans’ or ‘Tucker Carlson’). As a matter of course, real news is deliberately ignored: for example, revelations about Biden family corruption; the Twitter files exposures of regime censorship via social media companies; the Hersh reporting of the blowing up of the Nordstream pipeline; the letter (signed by 51 former intelligence officials) which was arranged by a former deputy CIA director to justify a disinformation campaign about the Hunter Biden laptop.
Of course this kind of news management requires compliant media personnel with zero respect for professional journalistic standards. Cometh the hour, cometh the dregs! The purveyors of our mainstream media today are quite happy to all sing from the same song sheet. They will follow slavishly whatever “line” they are fed, and parrot idiotic phrases ad nauseam. Such people naturally revel in smearing anyone who publishes opinions contrary to the current “acceptable” line. They have cheered on Big Tech censorship and in recent years we have seen prominent “journalists” express contempt publicly about the need for objectivity in reporting and question the need for the First Amendment in the 21st century.
This state of affairs has consequences for real journalists who still care about facts. No longer permitted to operate within corporate media (the latest example of this is Tucker Carlson) they are forced to operate independently (e.g. on SubStack or via podcasts). However popular, their reach is limited & from the government’s point of view they are effectively “contained”. Thus isolated they can be ritually smeared and harassed by organs of the state: witness the treatment handed out recently to lead Twitter Files journalist Matt Taibbi. And depending on circumstances, small independent media platforms can be “switched off” at any time. We saw this with the eradication of the social media app ‘Parler’, which was literally unplugged overnight in early 2020. So much for freedom of expression!
I point all this out to temper Mr Black’s quiet optimism about Trump, or anyone else, supplanting the current regime. Like Vladimir Putin and every other long-serving ruler & dictator, the people running the Biden administration understand the key rule about mass communications: “control the message and you control the process”.
The fact of the matter is that real power in the US is no longer exercised through the democratic process. The Democratic Party have no intention of relinquishing power and will do what they have to do. They have understood that they are a (currently acceptable) proxy; and that if they don’t play along the power brokers in the security state might opt for the “pliant” wing of the Republican Party. One thing is crystal clear though: outsiders like Trump and Saunders will NOT be tolerated. The same goes for recently declared “maverick” candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr who is already being smeared by the mass media. Stand by for a ramping up of the nastiness. Because he was never meant to declare; the barriers had already been erected: Wikipedia, for example, has long dismissed him as a “conspiracy theorist”.
One final observation. Controlling the mass media and weaponizing security agencies offers all sorts of opportunities: events & emergencies can be created and manipulated; and the details can then be passed to the media to be reported either sensationally or via long-running drip feeds. We have seen this technique employed many times over the past few years. For example:
– The calculated disinformation campaign about Trump’s supposed “Russian collusion” designed to derail Trump’s election & term in office.
– Ditto the manufactured “proof” that the Hunter Biden laptop was “Russian disinformation” timed to ensure Joe Biden’s election.
– The staged Mar Lago raid (with the media notified in advance) & the leaked draft of the Dobbs v Jackson opinion, both timed to influence the upcoming mid-terms.
– The “attack” on Nancy Pelosi’s husband immediately before the mid-terms which was instantly, and falsely, blamed on a Trump “MAGA” supporter to influence voters.
– The Trump indictment “media event” in New York after he had declared his presidency which was mighty handy in deflecting attention from Biden corruption, Nordstream & Twitter files exposures of regime censorship via social media companies.
– The stalling by the DOJ of multiple efforts to prosecute Hunter Biden; and the total news blackout on his influence peddling across the MSM.
America is on the road to fascism. It won’t be the Gulag version with jackbooted thugs parading in the streets and enemies of the state disappearing into concentration camps. To start with, at least, it’ll be what Mussolini realized: a fusion of corporate and state power, where dissent will not be tolerated; and the ruling party is forever.
As for the leadership change which Mr Black thinks might restore some sanity to the US, don’t be surprised if some new “emergency” occurs in the months leading up to the 2024 election. It’ll be for our own good. And we’ll end up with what we have now!