Evicting Donald Trump was clearly a catastrophe

by Conrad Black

Seven months into the Biden regime, the truism that dare not speak its name is now almost too obvious to bear stating. It was a catastrophic error to evict Donald Trump. No one, and certainly not I, would try to whitewash the stylistic infelicities of Donald Trump. He said many things that were toe-curlingly embarrassing coming from the holder of so great an office. But he proved in government as he had in the private sector that he was capable and forceful, and although he had the terrible handicap of personalizing everything and escalating all disagreements, he had a clear conception of domestic and foreign national interests and pursued them very successfully.

Despite the frenzied, wall-to-wall, linked-armed international effort to present Trump as a brutal, crooked, moron, he almost eliminated unemployment and illegal immigration, did eliminate energy imports, and by identifying and incentivizing “enterprise zones,” he created conditions in which the lowest 20 per cent of American income earners were gaining income in percentage terms compared to the top 10 per cent on the income scale. President Trump, without demagogy or hyperbole, attracted American attention to the commercial and geopolitical threat from China. He incited NATO to stop sponging off America and raise the national defence commitments to figures much more closely approximating their long-standing promises to the United States. (Canada was one of the most delinquent countries and has been one of the most sluggish to respond-the Trudeau government dissented from and mocked virtually every position that President Trump took and now is probably the most egregious and ungrateful alliance freeloader. Trump was the first U.S. president since Herbert Hoover not to visit Canada while in office.)

Because Canada is so close to the United States and more than 90 per cent of Canadians live within 200 miles of the U.S. border, and because most English-speaking Canadians are culturally almost indistinguishable from Americans living in northern states, Canada knows the United States better than other foreigners and is most profoundly influenced by the mobile currents of American public opinion. For this reason, Donald Trump naturally appeared to us as the apogee of the Ugly American: a braggart, a bully, a know-nothing, and the personification of vulgar and avaricious American materialism: the ugly face of American capitalism and jingoism. This was a caricature, but like most recognizable caricatures, there was an element of truth in it, and it was a particularly easily embraced caricature because of the almost universal hostility to Trump among the American national political media, and because of the natural Canadian tendency to discredit even slightly conservative America and its leaders, (the better to sustain Canadian notions of national distinctiveness).

Virtually the entire Canadian media, and as far as could be discerned, the entire Canadian population, seized and swallowed whole the notion of President Trump’s venality, repugnance, and incompetence.

The bipartisan American political establishment was traumatized by the elevation in 2016 of a president determined to tear up root and branch the complacent post-Reagan Bushintons who squandered America’s great victory in the Cold War, produced the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression, tore up the Middle East expanding Iran’s influence and causing an immense humanitarian tragedy, and were steadily suborned and outmaneuvered by China. In defeating, in their fashion, the president who frightened them, the Washington political establishment elevated a hollow and unfrightening candidate who has fronted a socialist agenda far to the left of the majority of the people he serves. The Biden administration is proposing to naturalize millions of illegal immigrants, which would be in the current governing party’s electoral interest. It is squandering trillions of dollars in socialist nostrums that have already torqued up inflation. The federal government has identified with and is largely propped up by the corrupt urban Democratic machines that have defunded the police and presided over an unprecedented rise in violent crime. Large parts of urban America are no-go areas, unpoliced shooting galleries. Biden has squandered America’s status as an energy self-sufficient country.

And in Afghanistan, inexplicably, President Biden and his entourage determined to leave Afghanistan practically as quickly as aircraft could remove American military personnel, without consultation with NATO allies who had three quarters of the international forces in Afghanistan, without a thought for the many thousands of American civilians in the country, and without any regard for the tens of thousands of Afghans who had worked with the Americans and are in mortal danger with the Taliban in power. As the operations swiftly degenerated into a cowardly fiasco and the American president was for the first time depicted by the British Parliament as a figure of shame, Biden and his principal colleagues lied to the public, contradicted each other, and magnified America’s monstrous humiliation at the hands of a bunch of primitive and barbarous, flea bitten, terrorists.

There is open discussion of trying to reconstruct the Western alliance without American leadership. Biden’s own partisans are silent as his standing in the eyes of his countrymen crumbles. Is there any sane person who in the dark and quiet of their bedroom in the dead, vast, and middle of the night would not prefer Trump with his gaucheries to this horrifying immolation of American national credibility and of the unbroken right of the West over 2500 years to be the preeminent influence in the world? Possibly, but they are no longer numerous or outspoken.

First published in the National Post.