The Trump-Haters Are Desperate

by Conrad Black

The increasing desperation of the Trump-haters is nowhere clearer than in Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan’s remarks at the Reagan library annual discussion on the future of the Republican Party last week.

Her comments are substantially reproduced in her column in the Wall Street Journal on Feb. 10. The piece opened with unexceptionable advice to maintain the present Trump policies of embracing the working class, cultivating economic growth, defending free markets, and maintaining at least a streamlined version of the welfare state.

It moved on with great eloquence to the mighty funerals of the two slain policeman in New York last week, where Cardinal Timothy Dolan had a large group of clerical officiants and a full choir. The fallen policeman were movingly eulogized, especially by the widow of one, who laid the blame squarely at the feet of New York’s Sorosite district attorney Alvin Bragg. The Cardinal and the whole congregation rose in applause, and when the great doors of the cathedral opened it was to massed ranks of New York policeman saluting their fallen comrades. They were, indeed, moving occasions, and Susan Sarandon’s comparison of them with fascist ceremonies was an obscenity perfectly illustrative of the abominable taste, cavernous stupidity, and moral bankruptcy of contemporary Hollywood.

At this point, unfortunately, the column started to go horribly wrong. First popped out the Trump-hater, followed soon enough by the terrified Trump-hater. It was inexorable: the Republicans cannot consider the events of Jan. 6 “legitimate political discourse.” The same Peggy Noonan who told us 18 months ago that President Donald Trump was a “malignancy metastasizing in the Oval,” threw down the mask of calm counselor to the Republican Party and emerged the full-metal jacket Trump-hater. She expects great things of the Jan. 6 committee, a shabby Pelosian lynch-mob with 14 seasoned prosecutors, although the Congress has no power to prosecute anyone, and where the Republican leader’s nominations to the committee were rejected. This is a kangaroo court where the kangaroos have been replaced by jackals.

In phrasing her charges of insurrection as she did, Noonan denied the legitimacy of the crowd of hundreds of thousands of peaceful supporters whom Trump addressed, and focused entirely on the hooligans whom she clings to with the fervor of rigor mortis as faithful representatives of Trump the insurrectionist, in the nasty and forlorn hope that it will extirpate Trump after all the silver stakes and misapplied crucifixes of relentless years of Trump-hate have failed.

The director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, said shortly after the Jan. 6 incident that he had found no connection between the vandals and Trump or his campaign. A moron with 10 percent of Noonan’s intelligence could see that the last thing in the world Trump wanted was violence inside the U.S. Capitol, and it doesn’t require Sherlock Holmes to see the desperation of the attempt of Trump’s enemies to attach sedition to the bill of attainder they had been trying to write up to dispose of him for five years.

There were over 40 million potentially harvested ballots in the 2020 election, where about 45,000 flipped votes in Pennsylvania and two of Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin (where there was completely inadequate verifiability) would have won it for Trump. The Republican Trump-haters have drawn their wagons into a circle, and Noonan has endorsed Sen. Mitch McConnell’s assertion that Jan. 6 was “a violent insurrection meant to stop the constitutionally mandated process.”

Trump warned House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser that reinforcements would be needed for the Capitol police, unusually for someone plotting an insurrection. They ignored him. He saw that there could be a fringe of hooligans in the large and peaceful crowd of his supporters that he addressed on the Ellipse that day, and he urged them to demonstrate “peacefully and patriotically.”

The preceding election was of doubtful constitutionality, and the judicial coequal third branch of government that was called upon to judge the issues raised by the extraordinary amendments to the voting and vote-counting procedures in a number of swing states in the election simply abdicated. The courts refused to hear any of the 19 lawsuits that directly challenged the constitutionality of the changes that brought about the unusual factors in determining the outcome of the election. None of these issues was judged on its merits, and the overwhelmingly biased national political media attempted to sell the country the fraud that the issue of the legality of the election had been entirely determined by the failure of Rudy Giuliani’s helter-skelter trick-or-treat canvas of courts on behalf of individual aggrieved voters.

McConnell and Noonan know perfectly well that they have joined entirely with the Democrats in trying to use the unhappy events of Jan. 6, 2021, as a method of politically disposing of Trump. No one who voted for or publicly favored the conviction of Trump on the second of his spurious impeachment trials should be judged acceptable to retain any position in the Republican Party.

Donald Trump has many faults, and that he’s an unattractive public personality to a huge number of people is legitimate and unsurprising. And 2020 was one of four U.S. presidential elections where it will never be known who really won, like 1876, 1960, and 2000. Hayes and Tilden reached an agreement in 1876; Richard Nixon, though urged to challenge the results by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1960, declined to do so because he thought it would be bad for the country at the height of the Cold War; that was his choice, and he has received virtually no credit for it. The 2000 election was determined by the Supreme Court; there is room to question its judgment, but at least Al Gore got a hearing. The dirty little secret is everyone knows that 2020 was a very dodgy election and the judicial system abdicated rather than adjudicate it. And the national political media unanimously joined the pretense that there was no doubt of the result. That was the context of Jan. 6, and Trump did all he could to keep it peaceful.

Noonan and McConnell were throwing their hats in the air following the election, and McConnell’s oleaginous commendation of his “distinguished former colleagues” Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on Inauguration Day was a nauseating triumph of the hypocrisy of the swamp. McConnell wanted to “drop [Trump] like a hot rock in 2016,” and thought he could in 2020. Noonan thought that she had helped to excise the tumor in the Oval Office. They must now realize that they helped enable the elevation of the most dangerously and uniformly incompetent administration in American history.

They must also know that Trump is leading the polls now, and that he’s 43 points ahead of his nearest competitor for the Republican nomination. They and their kindred spirits who fled into the lifeboat of Trumpism-without-Trump have found it has no oars and isn’t seaworthy. They sanction the likely unconstitutional sabotage of Trump, and they’re complicit in the likely illegal elevation of a horrifyingly inadequate regime. It’s little wonder that they see the approach of the next elections with trepidation. Noonan interestingly invoked the Roman Catholic Church as catchment for public support and adherence. A hint of confession and repentance would be a good deal more persuasive than this desperate and heretical casuistry.

First published in the Epoch Times.