By Conrad Black
There are astonishing achievements that show every sign of being durable trends.
Four facts of great importance quietly emerged last week though they were temporarily overshadowed by immigration controversies. These were that the murder rate in America has declined to its lowest level in 126 years and that narcotics-related deaths have sharply decreased.
Also that the life expectancy of Americans has recovered and reached the highest point in its history and that, in large part due to the complicated use of tariffs, the federal fiscal deficit has been reduced by 27 percent and the national trade deficit by more than 70 percent.
These are astonishing achievements that show every sign of being durable trends. If, as has been tentatively reported, it is confirmed that the year-over-year economic growth rate is now around six percent, this would confirm the stunning success of the early Trump second term and would augur well for Republican political prospects.
Because the Democrats ultimately have no program except Trump-hate and because the national political media continues to be reflexively hostile to the administration, the illusion has been revived that the public relations vulnerabilities of President Trump and some of his colleagues pose a greater danger than they really do as the November midterm elections approach.
The administration has been inexplicably clumsy in allowing the great popularity of its successful termination of illegal migration into the United States, an immense achievement of great significance to national security and the quality of life of all Americans, to be compromised by an appearance of callous zeal in the deportation of some illegal migrants. This was highlighted by the recent death of two protesters at Minneapolis.
As has generally been Mr. Trump’s custom, he has moved effectively to repair what was becoming a serious public relations problem by moving the chief guardian of the borders, Tom Homan, a capable and respected homeland security veteran, to Minneapolis to de-escalate and resolve the problem. It is an extraordinary anomaly.
Minnesota, long identified with the honest, compassionate politics of a former senator and vice president Hubert Humphrey and his chief disciple, Walter Mondale, both presidential candidates, has become a rotten borough of filth and corruption. Members of the Somali-American community have been accused of embezzling billions of dollars in exchange for their votes and perhaps more tangible enticements to Democratic officeholders, yet to be unearthed.
The great majority of Americans continues fervently to desire the apprehension and expulsion from the country of those who entered illegally and committed or are believably accused of committing grievous crimes in the United States. Yet the administration has never commanded a clear majority on the issue of the removal of those who entered the country illegally but have subsequently proved to be law-abiding, productively employed, and responsible denizens of the country.
The political battle has focused on whether the forced removal of illegal aliens has, as the president and his spokespersons claim, been of “the worst of the worst,” or rather, as the Democrats claim, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents agents are just rounding up those who entered illegally but have not otherwise broken any laws, that they can most easily find in order to maintain quotas.
The administration must establish the truthfulness of its position in this argument. The whole notion of sanctuary cities is a revolt against the constitutional authority of federal law and the subornation of local government by lawless foreigners and their enablers. It must be suppressed and the right of citizens alone to vote must be reasserted. Ultimately, the integrity of the Republic depends on it.
The clumsiness of the ICE focus on Minneapolis conferred a brief advantage on the Democratic-media anti-Trump propaganda campaign. The shamed and ludicrous state Democratic leadership of the outgoing governor, Tim Walz; Minneapolis’s mayor, Jacob Frey; and the state attorney general, Keith Ellison; desperately obfuscating to distract attention from the looming Somaligate scandal, did themselves no favors with their customary Democratic anti-Trump litany about the “Gestapo” and other Nazi flourishes. It now appears that Mr. Homan will steadily manage this crisis down.
The Jeffrey Epstein files, which the Democrats and their press allies claimed for a full year Mr. Trump was trying to suppress from fear of its disclosures, has this week been confirmed as a nothingburger. The idea that Epstein made his hundreds of millions of dollars blackmailing wealthy people that he had closeted with underaged women was never more than a Chuck Schumer-Rachel Maddow neuro-fantasy.
The Democrats are wheezing and gasping on their anti-Trump slanders and conspiracies, while the economy surges, fiscal sanity returns, crime rates decline, the nation outgrows wokeness and becomes healthier, becomes stronger in the world, and green shoots of relevance, tolerance, and authentic scholarship return to the intellectual junkyard of American universities and public schools.
Contrary to the calumnies of most of the corrupt political media, Mr. Trump’s star is rising. The arrest of former CNN anti-Trump mudslinger Don Lemon, for interrupting a Christian church service in Minneapolis bellowing anti-fascist epithets against the administration, is indicative of the country’s real direction.
First published in the New York Sun
