by Conrad Black
The latest polls again show President Trump pulling ahead of Governor DeSantis for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. It now appears that all of the other candidates are effectively running for vice president; it is a strong field.
Mr. Trump’s position has undoubtedly been hampered by the failure to present the issue of the fairness of the 2020 election result correctly. It is clear that prior to that election, Mr. Trump should have met with Republican state legislators intensively in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin and urged them to override state Supreme Court or executive changes to voting and vote counting rules.
Mr. Trump saw and frequently publicly denounced the dangers of sending out large numbers of unsolicited ballots and having them collected and cast by people other than those whose votes they ostensibly were. A moron could see that it was a matrix for massive electoral fraud that would be impossible to undo after election day.
These votes could not be verified and if the issue had been presented forcefully, the majority would have seen the nonsense and the hypocrisy of the Democrats’ claim that verification was discrimination against African-American voters. The absurdity of this argument was shown in Georgia.
As the then president should have conducted a serious counter-offensive against ballot-harvesting, he should simultaneously have led a maximum Republican ballot-harvesting counter operation to ensure that Republicans were as competitive as possible in this field, where the Democrats’ union support gives them an advantage.
As it was, he was a sitting duck. The former president has a legitimate grievance but he also has himself to blame for serious tactical errors that facilitated the Democrats exploitation of exceptional rules, under the cover of promoting voter turn-out in the midst of a pandemic. The Republican difficulties were compounded by the easily-ridiculed efforts of Rudolph Giuliani.
The former New York mayor conducted himself with his customary vigor, but he was objecting to mistreatment of individual voters, which even if entirely proved could not have seriously influenced the election result. If 50,000 votes had flipped to Mr. Trump from Mr. Biden in Pennsylvania and any two of Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin, Mr. Trump would have won the election.
Instead of making the public relations argument on ballot harvesting from the beginning, hammering it constantly and challenging it comprehensively, the entire Republican operation looked like an amateur sour grapes operation, a crybaby scream-in.
This was the media-confected background for the events at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. Mr. Trump had a legitimate grievance; he explained his grievance quite comprehensively to the huge crowd that listened to him on the Ellipse, and he urged them to act peacefully.
Almost certainly, the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and Washington’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, deliberately declined Mr. Trump’s offer of additional security and his warnings because they saw the potential damage that blaming hooliganism on Mr. Trump could do to him after what at that point appeared to be a traditional cliff-hanger of an election.
Because Mr. Trump was late on January 6 urging his followers to leave the Capitol, the Democrats and their media echo chamber, and the returning Republican Never-Trumpers like Senate leader McConnell, were able to stir up an immense and fraudulent charge of attempted insurrection against him.
It is a testament to the imperishability of Donald Trump’s political popularity that despite an election in which he was outspent two to one, 95 percent of the national political press opposed him, often in the most acidulous and defamatory fashion, and he was constantly reviled as perfidious and dangerously lawless, all problems amplified by some of his own tactical errors, that he retains his following.
It would be an unwise political observer who discounted his possibility of reelection. There has never in American history been a renegade that has taken over one of the major political parties and been so durable and mounted such a formidable challenge to the political establishment as has Donald Trump.
William Jennings Bryan led the bimetallist forces of rural discontent to three Democratic presidential nominations but was comfortably defeated by pillars of the then incumbent Republican establishment, William McKinley and William Howard Taft.
Mr. Trump seems to have learned from the episode and is trying to regain the initiative by his promises to conduct a massive voter registration drive and counteroffensive in ballot harvesting. Most of the vulnerable states have amended their voting and vote counting rules and we saw their success in Georgia.
It will never be known exactly how much advantage the Democrats derived from the special Covid arrangements of 2020, but those advantages will not be replicated in 2024. Mr. Trump has been very effective, as have most of the prominent Republicans, in exposing and denouncing the countless policy failures of the Biden administration.
While there is no precedent for dumping an incumbent elected president seeking renomination, nor was there any precedent for suddenly rescuing a failed candidacy of a superannuated also-ran and parachuting him into the nomination because the frontrunner (Senator Sanders) was judged too extreme, and despite another generally well-regarded candidate spending $937 million to gain five delegates from American Samoa (Michael Bloomberg). There had been no precedent for Mr. Trump either: a man who changed parties seven times in 13 years and had never sought or held any public office, elected or unelected, or held any military command.
The dismissal of many of his worst enemies in the media, (Jeff Zucker, Brian Stelter, Chris Wallace, et al), the cleanup of Twitter, and his own much less undisciplined recourse to hyperbole and inflammatory attacks on other candidates have all reduced the extreme toxicity of his political personality to millions of otherwise rational American voters.
The greatest danger to his candidacy at this point would be if Mr. Trump went too far catering to the paleoconservative isolationists over Ukraine. As long as he emphasizes increasing arms supplies to Ukraine while jaw-boning with the Russians about a peace that does not completely humiliate Russia and begins the restoration of civilized relations with the West, and doesn’t fall into the trap of the Neanderthal isolationists who want to simply cut arms sales to Ukraine like Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats did to South Vietnam 50 years ago, Mr. Trump should not lose on the issue.
It is encouraging that the candidates have so far avoided excessive mudslinging. Mr. Trump wrenched the Republican Party loose from country clubs and the perennial loser status of the post-Reagan Party. He probably has a greater reservoir of support among Republican voters than Governor DeSantis.
The smart move would be to renominate Mr. Trump now on the understanding that Mr. Trump would support Mr. DeSantis in four years, when he will be 50. I don’t believe the Democrats will renominate either Mr. Biden or Kamala Harris; they can find some reasonably presentable and relatively new face, but they will not be able to defend the record of this administration. Twenty months before election day, I still say Mr. Trump comes back.
First published in the New York Sun.
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12 Responses
Donald Trump is a demagogue, and Conrad Black is a shameless peddler of falsehoods and lies. You can bet everything you own that if a Democratic candidate had gotten his supporters to attack the United States Capitol he’d be howling that it’s The Crime of the Century.
A hugely perceptive article. Mr Black has excelled once again with his grasp of the facts & knowledge of history, presented in well-written prose.
This is in stark contrast to the mud-slinging commenter, “Koolaid” whose only skill is crude invective. The good news is that very few people, on these pages or elsewhere, take people like “Koolaid” and other purveyors of misinformation & hate seriously anymore. Everything which the corporate media & the rest of the political class said about Trump, Russia “collusion”, the Hunter Biden laptop, covid, the J6 “insurrection” etc. etc. has long been proven false. And those pedlars of disinformation have had to admit, grudgingly, that their accusations were entirely baseless.
Of course no-one has apologised for all the lies. But the better news is that not many folks take these people at all seriously anymore. A recent poll shows only 17% of Americans believe the MSM get things right most of the time. Of course, too, as in any cult, some diehards & deniers hang on long after the show is over; and like old Nazis in South America, they will go on spewing their lies & worshipping their false gods.
But life moves on. And at this point, as the Biden administration continues to run the country into the ground, Mr Trump, for all his faults, is a far better choice than anything the opposing party has to offer.
Man, you’re spouting a lot of uneducated demagogic nonsense. A horde of Donald Trump’s supporters violently storm the Capitol right when Congress is meeting, and right after listening to him give an incredibly inflammatory speech, and you wanna absolve him and them of all blame and point the finger at the “MSM” (moronic term, by the way) instead? What kind of thickskulled imbecile are you?
Hey Koolaid Drinker,
You do realize the January 6th at the Capitol was led by the FBI right? It was an inside job. Then again, if you are a Democrat or a RINO you would be too stupid to comprehend that.
That’s the stupidest thing I have ever heard in my entire life. You are utterly deranged if you believe such a thing is remotely within the realm of possibility.
Ha, Ha, Ha !.
You really ought to try and get full employment as a propagandist. It’d beat trolling for sure. What with phrases like “hordes”, “violently storm”, “incredibly inflammatory speech”, Dr Goebbels himself would have been proud of you. But perhaps Vladimir Putin can help you today?
Of course the twin brother of propaganda is censorship. And that is the real story of J6: deny people access to all the facts and blast them from the other side with a fabricated version of the “truth”.
So instead of slinging dried mud in all directions, it might be productive for you to try and answer some simple questions :-
■ Why were all those videos of middle-aged people walking peacefully through the building reminding others to “stay inside the ropes” removed from YouTube?
■ Why was the “extremely dangerous” Ray Epps, who was captured on video exhorting people to enter the capitol, removed from the most-wanted list of “insurrectionists” & everything about him subsequently swept under the carpet?
■ Why was capitol security withdrawn in spite of warnings that it might be prudent to increase it?
■ What about all the informers present? The FBI has admitted it had 9 in just one of the groupings present. There were clearly others, including Mr Epps & his team. If the protest WAS a violent insurrection in the making, why did the FBI then allow things to go so far, instead of intervening directly?
■ Why were the Capitol security videos never released, until now that we have a Republican house? They represent real-time, uncorruptible evidence of what did (and didn’t) happen.
■ And why, despite the most vigorous effort, has not a single person been convicted of “insurrection” after 2 years?
Something like 76% of Americans polled now think that J6 was a protest which got a little out of control and this number will only increase as more facts come out.
In short, no sane person buys the “insurrection” nonsense anymore.
Of course society is not made up solely of sane people who base their judgement on verifiable facts. So it’s not a surprise that the same dwindling band of people who still push the fantasy of an armed “insurrection” and “attempted coup” thinks it’s OK for activists to publish the addresses of SCOTUS justices & blockade their homes for months on end; and to openly incite others on social media to join such activities. It’s fine to attack churches as “opponents” of abortion. And if a zealot decides to assassinate a supreme court judge, why that’s no big issue. Nothing to report here. No censorship needed.
Old Nazis never die. Fully brainwashed, needing a cause and revelling in the “rightness” of it all, they go on and on unto death. But the beautiful thing is that, as they become less and less relevant, they provide the rest of us with some humour.
So thank you!
For Koolaid, in appreciation of his new-found skill of managing to make us all laugh!
https://spectator.org/why-j6-transparency-frightens-the-democrats/
So you’ve discovered Conrad isn’t the only Trump propagandist out there. Very impressive, have a cookie.
Bluster is not a route to the truth Koolaid. Try and answer the simple questions posed above. I can’t. And nor can 90% of Americans.
Try convincing us. But make it plausible please.
Because these days the only people still buying into the J6 “violent, armed insurrection” fantasy are the kind who believe the 2016 election was rigged; Trump was a Russian agent; Trump (bizarrely) is also literally Hitler; the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation; covid originated with a stray bat; Trump hid nuclear secrets in his wife’s underwear after he left the White House; and Joe Biden is the greatest communicator the White House has ever seen, so far ahead of the game that he can wander off podiums and shake hands with what mere mortal folks think is thin air.
And I’m sure you don’t subscribe to these kinds of conspiracy theories.
I would love to take the time to answer your dumb questions, but I’ve kind of already answered them before and and I get the distinct impression that you’re a clown who just wants to live in a fantasy world, so I think I’ll pass.
_________________________
“In the four years since, Fox viewers had become even more accustomed to flattery and less willing to hear news that challenged their expectations. Instead of understanding his narrow win in 2016 as the upset it was, they were told forecasters were going to be wrong again. Me serving up green beans to viewers who had been spoon-fed ice cream sundaes for years came as a terrible shock to their systems.”
Of course you’ll pass Koolaid. We understand. Your business is propaganda not reason. Your rude, crudely written response simply underlines the point.
The fact is that the majority of Americans no longer buy into the J6 “violent, armed insurrection” fantasy. You can’t fool all the people all the time, most especially without evidence. And the same applies to all the other points I raised. Isn’t it ironic. The “conspiracy theorists” of a few years ago have all been proved right.
Well, Ukraine is not South Vietnam, presuming the RVN was even itself an ally worth defending, and Putin’s Russia is not the USSR, still less is modern Europe the shrunken, vulnerable western Europe starting at the Elbe of the Cold War. So analogizing the Vietnam war is a little strong. This isn’t a New Cold War, and even if it is the Russians are in a vastly weaker overall position. So is all the moralizing in which Ukraine has nearly assumed the status of eternal American ally on the level of Britain, or Israel, depending on one’s taste.
I’d be satisfied if an American president just decided that Russia is a strategic rival with interesting mix of weaknesses and abilities, second to China, should be played as such with both carrot and stick, and that a proxy war in Ukraine up to a point is an excellent way to do that. No need to go to extremes in either direction. Basically, keep it dragging on as long as Russians are dying, and the war can be kept confined to Ukraine, and pursue various negotiation tracks in the meantime.