An ‘unusually successful president’ may be swindled out of victory

Only those who wish the pre-eminence of totalitarian China and Spengler’s long-awaited Decline of the West should be ululating with joy at the thought of a Biden victory

by Conrad Black

Donald Trump has bumptious, churlish and even juvenile moments that have grated on me as they have on his detractors, but they are insignificant compared to questions that are at stake in Tuesday’s election. His opponent, Joe Biden, is only in contention because the American media is overwhelmingly anti-Trump, as evidenced by numerous reports out of Harvard and the Pew Research Centre showing that coverage of his administration has been over 90 per cent negative. This and the media’s frenzied campaign to incite panic over the coronavirus and the practice in some Democratically governed states of allowing ballots apparently postmarked by election day to be counted for an additional six days have lifted Biden out of his candidate protection program. And if Biden wins, the politicization of the senior ranks of the FBI and intelligence agencies to try to alter the 2016 presidential election (before and after election day), the greatest constitutional scandal in American history, will be swept under the rug. So will official curiosity about the $9.44 million the Biden family is alleged by the president to have received from Russia, Ukraine and China while Biden was vice-president. No evidence has surfaced that it influenced government policy, but it has been the subject of colossal campaign untruths and a scandalous effort by the social media to throttle News Corporation, especially the New York Post and Fox News, and even the White House press secretary, to prevent them from discussing the issue.

A Biden victory would be a triumph for the morally bankrupt American national political media and their almost air-tight Trump-hate misinformation campaign (slavishly echoed by Canada’s media). Biden (in Cromwellian terms) is a decayed servitor, a semi-senescent wax-works dummy hiding in his basement as part of the Democratic media’s COVID-19 hysteria campaign. The media have conducted the Democratic campaign and have helped reduce public respect for the media to below 20 per cent. Democracy requires a free press that is valued and deserves respect. Validating the media’s disgraceful conduct in this campaign could substantially undermine the prestige and credibility of American democracy in the eyes of Americans themselves. There has not been a more important American election at least since FDR’s victory for aid to the democracies and an immense arms build-up when he sought a third term in 1940.

Trump’s re-election is the only way of restoring the conditions that he created that effectively eliminated unemployment prior to the onset of the COVID-19 crisis. This, coupled to his near-elimination of illegal immigration (against fierce Democratic resistance), of 500,000 to one million unskilled Latin-Americans a year, generated greater percentage income growth amongst the lowest 20 per cent of income-earners than among the top 10 per cent — a noteworthy start on addressing the universal income-disparity problem. Only a Trump victory will ensure retention of the present relatively low personal and corporate income-tax rates and the avoidance of insane COVID shutdowns. As I wrote here last week, that virus only mortally threatens a small percentage of the population, who can be isolated and protected.

The charge that Trump has botched the COVID crisis, like the fatuous claims that he is a racist and misogynist, is bunk. He inherited a decrepit health crisis response system that required all tests to be made by appointment in hospitals and sent to Atlanta for evaluation. There were acute shortages of everything that was needed. He managed swiftly through all that and advanced the timetable for a vaccine, which is the only serious defence, by over a year. Meanwhile, America’s economic performance has been the best in the world — twice as strong as Canada’s, and 60 per cent better even than Japan or Germany. The U.S GDP rebounded in the third quarter at the astonishing annual rate of 33 per cent.

Only a Trump victory will prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear military power within five years and North Korea from resuming its missile tests over Japan and South Korea. It is unlikely that Biden would maintain a firm but not belligerent economic and strategic containment strategy towards China, co-ordinated with India, Japan, South Korea, and other key allies in south and east Asia and Australasia. The Democrats are committed to giving the PLO and Hamas a veto over any resolution of their conflict with Israel, and since they do not accept the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state, that will ensure continued stagnation, attrition and terrorism, financed by a newly re-enabled Iran. The Trump two-state strategy with strong economic incentives is steadily lining up the support of the Arab world. Biden would reassume the self-flagellating Paris Climate Accord, and the $100 trillion Green Terror — the Green New Deal assault on the petroleum industry and a bone-cracking rise in electricity costs after closing gas-fired electricity plants. This administration has protected the environment, but not by disemploying millions of people.

Trump will continue to promote private, charter, community,and separate schools that will reverse the steady decline of educational standards generated by the teachers’ unions, to which the Democratic party is bound hand and foot (a familiar problem in Canada). Although he has been tactically mistaken in not producing his full alternative health-care plan, Trump will not reinforce Obamacare’s destruction of doctor–patient relationships with the Democrats’ hideously expensive socialist alternative. Only Trump can ensure that the concept of freedom of religion will not be bulldozed by such tyrannical outrages as requiring the Little Sisters of the Poor to pay for the contraception and abortions of their students and employees. The United States has five per cent of the world’s population and 25 per cent of its incarcerated people. Trump has acted on penal reform. The American criminal-justice system is a disgrace, and both Biden and vice-presidential nominee Kamala Harris, the former attorney general of California, are complicit in that disgrace, and won’t do anything about it.

The Democrats are tainted by their intimate dependence upon their corrupt urban political machines and by having maintained a low profile all summer as the worst rioting in America in over 50 years raged across the country. Hooligans burned and stole and vandalized billions of dollars of property, nearly 40 people were killed and over 700 police injured by mobs masquerading as civil rights crusaders. They tried to destroy statues of some America’s greatest leaders, including those most dedicated to the advancement of African-Americans: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant.

The Democrats would assault the existing constitutional system, including a neutralization of the Electoral College by imposing the victory of the candidate with the most votes nationwide even in states that voted for other candidates, effectively disenfranchising the 25 smaller-population states in the country. It would also include packing the Supreme Court and a renewed relaxation of entry of illegal migrants and the confirmation of the inability to screen non-citizens as ineligible voters in presidential elections. The District of Columbia and Puerto Rico would be admitted as states to provide four more Democratic senators, and the lowering of the voting age to 16 would ensure prolonged Democratic predominance.

Trump has stopped all talk of China inevitably surpassing the U.S. Biden is pathologically mediocre, Harris is a compulsive chucklehead and Trump is a quasi-vulgarian but a very effective executive. An unusually successful president faces a dual personification of weakness and vacuity. Only those who wish the pre-eminence of totalitarian China and Spengler’s long-awaited Decline of the West should be ululating with joy at the thought of a Biden victory.

First published in the National Post.