The Trump-Hate Coalition Is Crumbling

by Conrad Black

It is remarkable to see how quickly the unified opinion against former President Trump and for the alleged necessity of removing him from the White House has cracked apart since that goal was achieved. Following the inauguration, there were endless purposeful assurances that the former president would be pursued to the ends of the earth for his iniquity. Even hard-bitten Fox News commentators like Brit Hume felt compelled to toe the line and denounce claims that the election had been rigged as discredited bunkum. 

Questioning the integrity of the election result was considered tantamount to an attempt to continue the quest for insurrection, and questioning whether Trump had attempted to generate an insurrection was itself a racist offense. The president-elect assured us that the January 6 assault on the Capitol was a white supremacist attack bungled by white supremacist Capitol police. Racism, like treason with Russia four years before, was everywhere.

Andrew Weissmann, the egregiously rabid prosecutor who desperately tried to torque the Trump-Russia collusion fraud into an obstruction case, solemnly declared that the prosecution of the outgoing president would have to continue. (It was not clear what prosecution this might be since there has been none, though there have been numerous breathless revelations of visits to the Manhattan district attorney by former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen for the subornation of doubtful evidence against the ex-president.) 

Holding On to January 6 As Long As Possible

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was warming up to engage General Russell Honoré, a well-known antagonist of President Trump’s, to investigate the January 6 episode at the U.S. Capitol. Incoming Attorney General Merrick Garland stumbled and hesitated but eventually stated that the most complicated investigation facing his department was the events of January 6. This cannot possibly be true, because even the implausible surviving head of the thoroughly discredited FBI, Christopher Wray, acknowledged in congressional testimony there was no evidence whatever that those events were coordinated or organized by elements connected to the former president.

Every informed person in the world knows that the events of January 6 were the result of a loose sequence of facts that were only allowed to aggregate into the assault on the Capitol because of the malice or incompetence of Trump’s enemies. The U.S. political system tolerated a great many interventions in the techniques for voting and counting votes in the presidential election, especially in six states that were known to be closely contested: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Many of these changes were not adopted by the state legislatures as the Constitution requires, but by executive or judicial action within the states. 

There were, counting the action of the attorney general of Texas supported by 18 other states, 28 lawsuits by the Republicans concerning the election. The courts refused to adjudicate any of them. Excuses and technicalities were found to avoid judging the claims. The Trump-hating media misrepresented this abdication of judicial responsibility, most contemptibly by the Supreme Court in the Texas matter, as the considered dismissal of the claims and grievances of the Trump campaign. It was nothing of the kind.

The immense and justified outrage of President Trump and his 75 million followers never led to violence or illegality and the gathering in Washington on January 6 demonstrated solidarity with the outgoing president. He urged “peaceful and patriotic” action and avoided any incitement to improprieties. A few thousand of the large number of professional hooligans in the country saw an opportunity and were present.

Because the mayor of Washington, D.C. and the speaker of the House had ignored the requests of the head of the Capitol police for reinforcements, the thugs forced entry into the Capitol. National legislatures are frequently attacked by crowds, but normally the officials responsible have the intelligence to ensure an adequate level of security. The damage was not particularly serious and the only fatalities were Trump supporters and one Capitol policeman whose fate was grossly misrepresented by the anti-Trump media. 

The most accurate reflection of the spirit of the occasion was the image of the senators hiding under their desks wearing ludicrous protective headgear: the apotheosis of the “world’s greatest deliberative body.” 

“We Are Crossing the Desert”

The most asinine legislative initiative in the modern history of the country ensued: the impeachment of the president for an incitement he did not utter to an insurrection he did not seek—and, indeed, one that did not occur—in order to remove him from an office he no longer held. It is now clear that the morale of the bipartisan McRom-OBushinton post-Reagan Washington political class was so shattered by Trump’s victory in 2016 that they obsessed on driving him from office, to the exclusion of everything else, and they were prepared to overlook anything, associate with any group no matter how disreputable, completely destroy any traditional, professional concept of responsible political reporting, and shred the Constitution. 

The FBI and senior echelons of the intelligence services were politically compromised, a massively illegal and fraudulent investigation of the elected president was conducted, two utterly spurious impeachment attempts were thrown at him and the coronavirus pandemic was invoked to produce the most seriously tainted presidential election result in the country’s history. The Supreme Court may have made the correct political decision when it declined to adjudicate the case, given how tempestuous the response would have been if it had overturned the result of the election, but it was still an abdication. They presumably acted as they did to assure that there would be no move to pack the court with Democrats, and they may now be in a position to reassert the Constitution as the controversies generated by the new administration percolate up to it.

The Trump-hate coalition is crumbling. There will be no further serious pursuit of him legally or pseudo-legally and the wheels are coming off the rickety anti-Trump coalition in all four directions. For absolutely no plausible political or humane purpose (other than to admit millions more illegal voters), the administration has opened the southern border while failing to be able to offer one truthful answer to questions about its border policy. The United States is now directly complicit with the Mexican drug and slave gangs in opening up access to the country and is deliberately importing unskilled labor to undermine the standard of living of American lower-income citizens.

The African American militants who were allowed by the Democratic big-city mayors to ransack urban America all summer and were rewarded for their murder, vandalism, and looting with the defamation and defunding of the nation’s urban police forces, are agitating and threatening with redoubled vigor. The rabid Democratic media outlets that made the campaign for the semi-comatose candidate are largely in a state of upheaval. Leading media Trump-haters such as MSNBC president Phil Griffin and CNN head Jeff Zucker have gone or are going, and despite frantic attempts to appease them, many of the great anti-Trump newsrooms are being overrun by belligerent white-hating minorities.

They drove Trump from office and then they turned on themselves and they are ruining the country. But as Adam Smith famously said, “There is a lot of ruin in a country,” especially a great country like the United States. Trump was often outrageous but was a good president.

In four years this self-destructive Americaphobic nightmare will be over and a regime led or at least supported by Donald Trump will be back. In a phrase of General de Gaulle’s in the dark days of France, “We are crossing the desert.”   

First published in American Greatness.