Democrats Set to Reap What They Have Sown

A waffling old cipher of a candidate is about to have the antics of his more robust partisans hung around his neck like a dead raccoon.

by Conrad Black

The election as of Wednesday evening was on a knife’s edge, and the outcome remains unclear. At this point, Joe Biden leads. But if the votes are counted fairly, Trump is the more likely winner in Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Alaska, which would bring him to 268 electoral votes to Biden’s 264 votes. 

If Arizona flips back to the Republicans or Nevada, where the candidates are only separated by 7,000 votes with a quarter of the vote yet to be counted, goes to Trump, then he wins. If neither event occurs, Biden apparently wins. But increasingly persistent and disquieting allegations of irregular treatment of late-mailed or delivered ballots are opening up the likelihood of massive contestation of results. 

Even in these uncertain circumstances, there are a few conclusions that can already be made. The Trump-haters, including almost all of the American national political media, had drunk so much of their own bathwater that they expected the election to be over by 9 o’clock Eastern time and were flabbergasted at the formidable performance of the president on Election Night.

Even before the winner’s identity is known, it is not too soon to examine the trends this election amplifies and reveals. The change of roles between the Democrats and Republicans is accelerating as the Republicans encroach heavily upon the former working-class support of the Democrats and poach from their former preserves amongst the minorities, especially African Americans and Latino Americans. 

President Trump gained three times the percentage of Latinos that John McCain attracted in 2008, and 50 percent more than Mitt Romney won in 2012. The Democrats have now become the party of the upwardly mobile middle-class, as well as the academics and those elements of the high-income groups that fancy themselves to be wealthy because they are original and meritocratic, and are not in the slightest attached to the traditional capitalist interests of their economic peers.

Whether it is at its end or its midpoint, the Trump era has already accomplished an important Republican penetration of America’s permanent political class. 

After the five consecutive terms of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman, when to combat the Great Depression and conduct World War II, the United States government grew exponentially. Washington, D.C., turned from a sleepy provincial town practically uninhabited by middle- and upper-income groups in the summer into the permanent residence of a vast bureaucracy and of all the interests of America and the world that attend upon it. The principal Republican leaders since Theodore Roosevelt a century ago—Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump—all ran to some degree against big government and the permanent state. Ronald Reagan even routinely denounced the presumption and proportions of government when he had been the president for six or more years. 

These men were each successful for different reasons: Eisenhower was a war leader and an admired general while he was a pleasant, smiling, golfing, avuncular figure. Nixon artfully straddled between conservative Republicans of the Goldwater faction who presaged Reagan, and the old liberal Republicans now almost extinct, led for many years by New York Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller. Ronald Reagan moved the needle to the right in matters of taxation, regulation, and a foreign policy based upon the conviction that the Soviet Union was not strong enough to be a full economic rival to the United States while maintaining parity of military strength.

Trump’s appeal and following are different. He ran against the entire governing class—the Republican leadership as much as the Democratic—and he promised tax and social policies pitched directly at the middle and lower-income population of the United States while being wide open and welcoming to ethnic minorities.

As all the world knows, this approach was narrowly successful four years ago against Hillary Clinton. Because Trump was attacking practically the entire system of the personnel who perennially provided its bipartisan management, he was correctly perceived as a mortal threat to the political establishment. He was savagely attacked as no other president in history has been: the completely phony Russia-Trump allegations, the preposterous impeachment charges, and the manipulation of the COVID-19 pandemic to portray him as the author of an economic depression and an accomplice in the death of 230,000 people with (if not necessarily from) the coronavirus.

The complacent and flabby establishment had considered it impossible that Trump could defeat Clinton in 2016 and looked forward to this year’s election as the complete annihilation of Trump and his defenestration from the White House like a dead roach. The Democrats were to add to their majority in the House of Representatives, regain control of the Senate, and lurch leftward with the doddering Joe Biden amiably presiding over the institution of an outright socialist regime in Washington, a Trojan Horse of the far-Left that would be empowered and riveted on the back of the country. They would do all of this on the wings of what was presumed to be a profound national revulsion against the mad, fascistic, and boorish rabble-rousing billionaire Trump.

Whatever the result of the presidential election, this plan will be a self-immolating disaster for the Democrats. Since they had no idea that Trump might be able to defeat Hillary Clinton four years ago, they took advantage of the pandemic to put through in Democrat governed swing states voting regulations permitting and facilitating unprecedented recourse to mailed or delivered (“dumped”) ballots—a broad superhighway to voter fraud, upon which it is becoming clearer every hour the Democrats enthusiastically embarked. 

This is the logical sequel to the Trump-Russia and impeachment frauds, and the mighty Trump-hate campaign conducted by a wall-to-wall, nonstop, bloodless assassination mission of almost the entire media and entertainment communities.

It is backfiring. Biden now has only a 50 percent chance of apparent victory in the Electoral College, the Republicans retain the Senate, gained in the House, have almost held their own in the popular vote, and egregious vote-rigging in several states is going to face a legal challenge for which the last precedent is the Hayes-Tilden contest of 1876.  

The great smear campaign failed. Win or lose, Trump has defeated his enemies in the press and their allies in the equally fake polling organizations. If he leaves office, it will be with his successor hemmed in by Republican senators and a constitutionalist Supreme Court, and with the media’s credibility lower than at any time in verifiable American history.

Biden has no chance of being more than a figurehead. His running mate, Kamala Harris, is a leftist chameleon chucklehead. If they form a regime, it will have no capacity or mandate to lead the country anywhere. Starting on Inauguration Day, a Biden Administration would be dispatched into the dustbin of American history. 

The president announced on Election Night that the Democrats were attempting to steal the election and that he would not permit it. Within 24 hours, a heavy barrage of lawsuits already had been launched and from early indications, the procedures of the Democratic swing state governors for processing post-electoral mailed and delivered vote-counting were extremely vulnerable to legal attack. The Democrats expected to crush Trump because they had no comprehension of the extent of his support and no appreciation of his many policy successes. 

In their congestive moral bankruptcy, Democrats had no idea of the intolerable nature of their vote-rigging. A waffling old cipher of a candidate is about to have the antics of his more robust partisans hung around his neck like a dead raccoon. Biden has a chance of taking office but almost no chance of making a success of it. The Democrats have sown, and they shall reap.

First published in American Greatness.