Trump, Having Been Tested Like No Other, Emerges as a Much More Compelling Figure Than Previous Versions

By Conrad Black

This entire prolonged twilight of the hijacking of post-Reagan America by Democrats and look-alike Republicans is ending with slow and excruciating inexorability. There has been a reduction of the dignity of American presidential politics in which both parties have participated.

Richard Nixon, a distinguished president of whom there remains, 50 years after his resignation, no probative evidence that he committed a crime, was an old-fashioned patriotic American. He was so appalled at the thought of a presidential impeachment trial, which had not occurred in more than a century, that he retired rather than subject the nation to such an indignity.

Like Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Lyndon Johnson, President Nixon never accepted a cent as an ex-president to give a speech or make an appearance. As we have seen, times have changed greatly.

Four years ago, the country had no idea that it would get 9 percent inflation, an absolute reduction in the purchasing power of the average family and individual, the admission of 10 million illegal immigrants, including scores of thousands of violent criminals, the worst military fiasco in American history in Afghanistan, a war in Ukraine with no exit strategy.

Not to mention a war in the Middle East where the administration has unsuccessfully attempted to straddle between the rights of Israel and trying not to offend Muslim voters in Michigan and Minnesota by saying that Israel had a right “to defend itself,” but not to take any serious reprisals against even the terrorists who inflicted the greatest murder of Jews since the liberation of the Nazi death camps in 1945.

If the public had known any of these things, it would not have voted as it did four years ago. This does not pretend to address the concerns over the potential mischief involving millions of mail-in ballots that could have been a factor in the Democrats’ victory in 2020.

Because the 45th president’s Democratic and Never Trump Republican opponents regard President Trump as too bumptious, undignified, and “unhinged” to be president, they have resorted to the greatest electoral indignities and illegal outrages in American history to attempt to deny him reelection.

The repurposing of the Justice Department as a partisan operation, from James Comey’s illegal promotion of the fraud of Trump collaborating with the Russian government to rig the 2016 election, through to the spurious indictments launched against Trump to sandbag his third candidacy for president as too repugnant to be tolerable in the White House, have backfired. These initiatives have been more profoundly dishonest and reprehensible than any charge that could be leveled against Trump.

As Trump has denied that he colluded with Russia in 2016, and that he sought anything other than the facts in a perfectly reasonable discharge of his duty in his famous conversation with the president of Ukraine about the financial derring-do of the Biden family in Ukraine, and as he has denied, with obvious justice, that he was seeking an insurrection at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, he is accused of lying. That is, his lies were the accurate denial of lies uttered by his enemies about him.

No matter how intense the campaign becomes, there is no indication that the public has lost sight of the factors of this election: It has seen Trump before as president, and he increased national prosperity, used the tax system to spread it generously among the disadvantaged, and there was peace in the world, and none of this could be said about the present administration.

The Democratic nominee was not a competent vice president and has given the country no reason to believe that she would be a competent president. The public, in their collective wisdom, have not been impressed or swayed by the greatest orgy of political dirty tricks in American history.

When all the polling has been done, when all the billions of dollars of advertising have been spent, when all the television commentators have made themselves hoarse with their usually rather banal reflections, the country cannot re-elect the Biden-Harris administration. Despite unusual reservations about Trump based on his flamboyant egocentricity, they have a comfort level from his past performance and his improved campaign techniques that he can do the job, and they have profound reservations that Harris can.

Although the political establishment was profoundly convinced that Trump was a mountebank and a flash-in-the-pan, his following has grown in his near-decade in presidential politics and he is only the fifth president to have been a serious candidate for president in three consecutive elections, after Jefferson, Jackson, Cleveland, and FDR, and seems likely to be only the second president, after Cleveland, to win non-consecutive terms.

The Trump that the country sees today is a much more compelling electoral figure than previous versions. Far from the grandstanding scene stealer that he was represented as by his opponents eight years ago, he has survived the egregious chicanery of his opponents, the maximum rough and tumble of presidential politics, and even the efforts of assassins. He will not be underestimated on Election Day.

First published in the New York Sun