“Give me the man, and I will find the crime [for him].” Stalin’s chief prosecutor, Andrey Vyshinsky, or Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s head of the NKVD (secret police)
Which one made the historic quote from the 1930’s in Bolshevik Russia? Possibly both, but it doesn’t matter. It’s the official governing philosophy of a country that long ago aborted the rule of law. The law is whatever those in power say it is, a classic definition of tyranny. Welcome to the USA, circa 2023.
Beria and StalinAndrey Vyshinsky
Execrable people do execrable things, such as pretend to use the law, absent any law, to target a person, just like the Stalin gang. To be honest, though, Donald J. Trump is an execrable character. Well, to be honest, Jack Smith, Special Counsel, is an execrable character. Well, to be honest, the entire cabal of talking heads of the Democratic Party and their media sycophants are pretty execrable characters. If for no other reason, this is damning proof of our descent to the level of governing respectability of the Assad regime (without the barrel bombs and poison gas) or Burma, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan (from Freedom House’s list of the worst of the worst). Execrable potentates produce execrable government.
As such, banana republic may not go far enough in describing our fall from grace.
“Execrable” behavior, it must be admitted, is not necessarily a crime. Marriage infidelity is not a crime (ergo Bill Clinton and Donald Trump), but it certainly is ruinous to the pocketbook in divorce court and lawsuits. Ask them. Politically, the only decent way to remove execrable characters is to vote them out of the way, and hopefully not empower other execrables in the process. If a narcissistic, self-serving blowhard is not to your liking, here’s a clue, don’t vote for them. But don’t take a law and stretch it to the breaking point around the necks of the detestable-but-politically-viable, as is the habit of Jack Smith and his discreditable Washington, D.C., grand jury.
But such is the modus operandi of the Democratic Party. In the latest episode of the execrable targeting the execrable, Smith laid before us a third indictment of Trump. Read the monstrosity here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.232192/gov.uscourts.dcd.232192.275.0.pdf.
In the plethora of Trump verbalisms since the 2020 election, Smith (er, Vyshinsky) thinks that he found the smoking gun of Trump’s state of mind, because Smith’s overly distended application of the law demands clairvoyancy of the inner recesses of Trump’s brain. In a discussion with senior advisers, Trump alludes to a matter being turned over to the next president. What a thin reed to hang a political rival. Do I really need to go over this flimsy thread of legal mishmash?
Yesterday (8/2/23), Bill Barr, Trump’s ex-AG, went on CNN to declare that the indictment has validity. Hogwash. Entering into state-of-mind divination is a dubious gambit, and doubly so when aimed at one’s political rivals. Now, Barr may be right in that the indictment presents only a bare-bones preview of the case against Trump. Regardless, the appearance of impropriety will do more damage to our national reputation than any actual impropriety. If actions aren’t clearly illegal, delving into the equivalent of psychological augury won’t make them smell any better.
The administrative state’s open Democrat favoritism, the Russia Collusion hoax, the chicanery of the tech biggies and politicized intel heavies to shove Hunter’s laptop down the memory hole, the obvious double standards so numerous as to boggle the mind, etc., should make any sentient adult cringe. We have disqualified ourselves as assessors of any other nation’s governing practices. We should be under international observation, not be the observers. And I don’t need Barr’s mumbo-jumbo, whatever Barr’s state of mind might be, to mask the stench oozing out of this indictment.
The second impeachment had legitimacy, mostly because impeachment is as much a political act as anything. Trump’s behavior post-election was, and continues to be, reprehensible. Reprehensible behavior is impeachable. For all practical purposes, a legal pretext is nice but not necessary. Not everything can be innocently written off as Trumpiness.
The documents indictment similarly has legal legs. But prosecution for expressing a belief about some set of circumstances, whether actually believed or not, takes us into very dark and unsavory places. It’s the stuff of governance in most countries of the UN General Assembly and Putin’s Russia. Are poisonings and mysterious falls from 15-story windows next?
Are we a banana republic or something worse? What’s even more troubling is the fact that many of the people on the public stage and with ultimate authority are either supported or elected by us. Is this the best that we can come up with?
If you’ve listened to someone often enough, you might already know what they’re going to say before they say it. This is not necessarily a criticism – heaven knows, it’s true of me on many subjects (talk to my wife and adult children). But sometimes the monotony repetitively takes you to some unacceptable opinions. This is my predicament with Victor Davis Hanson (VDH). It is well-known that Hanson is an unflinching supporter of Donald Trump to such an extent that any Trump criticism is heavily muted, when there’s ample grounds to be critical from any perspective, while other of Hanson’s views appear newly adapted to momentary Trumpisms and the meandering and muddled political movement that has recently come into being around him. It’s disturbing to me.
For the record, I am not new to VDH. I own and have read many of his books, attended to his commentary on Fox News, and have been an avid listener of his podcast, The Victor Davis Hanson Show, among others. I am well-versed on VDH’s positions; however, the Trump boosterism of late has been taken to absurd lengths.
How absurd? The movement attached to the Trump banner is a protectionist one, an opponent of entitlement reform, near isolationist in foreign policy, and will turn on a dime at the behest of the latest self-serving political burp of its leader. So, if DeSantis stands in the way, Trump will dust off the Left’s tax-cuts-for-the-rich and charge the Florida governor with the sin that he’s out to get your Social Security, and the legion of Trump parrots soon erupt in unison. If, as in 2016, Jeb Bush stands athwart Trump’s path, bash the Bushes, their “forever wars”, and the ill-defined “establishment”, going so far as to come close to imitating the abuse of returning Vietnam vets by anti-war activists. Trump’s loathing of John McCain, for instance, approaches those spittle-laced lows when he said, “He [McCain] is not a war hero” and “I am not a fan of people who surrender”, quite a statement from a candidate for commander-in-chief and later an occupant of that office. The fact that many vets remained loyal to this man is unfathomable.
John McCain’s courage, braving attacks over the skies of North Vietnam, refusal to be released ahead of his fellow Americans in the Hanoi Hilton, and torture at the hands of his communist jailers deserves more than “I am not a fan of people who surrender”. And all this coming from a man who benefited from five draft deferments. Go figure. The behavior hasn’t daunted Hanson’s Trump-praise.
Hanson’s silence over Trump’s protectionism is absolutely befuddling from a man of such a stellar academic background. There’s simply no recognition of the potential devastation that tariffs and other trade-protectionisms has wrought. His commentary avoids the role that homegrown government regulation, taxes, and union favoritism at all levels has played in hallowing out America, creating the Rust Belt. Reagan disbanded PATCO (the air traffic controller union) and fired its striking air traffic controllers; Trump masks the unions’ complicity in their own demise by patronizing them with a blame of foreigners.
Any Econ 101 student knows that a foreign company doesn’t pay a tariff, but apparently not Donald Trump or Hanson, if Hanson’s silence means anything. We hear plenty about “globalization” and “bi-coastal elites” from Hanson but nary a word about Trump’s blathering economic incoherency. Let me set the record straight, even if Hanson won’t: when taxed, companies are pass-through agencies – the new taxes (tariffs in this case) descend on the consumer, and always will, always with price increases, sometimes with fewer choices, and many times with the loss of jobs in other sectors. It’s a classic example of self-inflicted foot-shooting. Remember Smoot-Hawley? Look it up.
Then, how do you reinvigorate blue-collar work, a key interest of Hanson’s – and mine? Start by cleaning your own house. Answer this question: Why are American companies fleeing our shores? Or maybe this question: How is it that an illiterate peasant from the Chinese outback is more appealing than an American with generations of advanced cultural and human capital? The answer lies in more than labor costs. Hint: the first flight of American fabrication was to destinations below the Mason-Dixon line, thereby escaping the clutches of the AFL-CIO and the big-government and big-tax/regulation Democrat regimes above it.
Or, how about the devastating effect of our fascination with college-is-for-everyone? Taxpayer grants and student loans, with taxpayers on the hook, were fire-hosed to make it happen. Consequently, working with one’s hands became construed as placing a person barely above the apes in evolutionary development. It’s all so crassly dopey. Yet, the practical corollary to the largesse is a turn to the labor of semi-literate Chinese peasants so Americans can enjoy student loan debt, Sociology and ****-studies courses, their meth and the dole in depopulating neighborhoods, or extended adolescence in a growing number of failures-to-launch. Education in America is as much a disaster as Detroit. All of it homegrown.
In this respect, though, Hanson can be spot-on in his condemnation of the condition of our schools, K to grad school – but, Victor, please connect the dots. Tariffs and protectionism will do nothing but mask this glaring deficit. If you care about expanding opportunities in the “dirty jobs” sector and making the made-in-America chant more than a cover for union featherbedding, I suggest that we make our bed, clean our room, and, by God, make ourselves competitive rather than wallow in perpetual whinerhood. And it begins with classical curriculum, classical instruction, accountability, and the rejection of government as helicopter parent.
Speaking of government as helicopter parent, Trump has staked his name to hostility to entitlement reform, and particularly the two biggest ones, by far: Social Security and Medicare. They’re both headed to insolvency – Medicare first, soon followed by SS. Trump, as Hanson prostrates in silence, is waiting till we saddle every American child with unrecoverable future debt, or we can no longer defend ourselves with the two domestic fiscal behemoths gobbling up more and more of the nation’s purse. And to think that it’s only a cynical ploy to buy the votes of the seasoned citizenry with fiscal foolishness and outright lies. The Third Rail of Politics had better be reformed or we’ll have to get used to an America with the military gravitas of Canada. Reform is not an option.
No area is more infected with Trumpisms than in thoughts about America’s role in the world. In this respect, Trump’s “America First” chant has morphed into a cover for a new isolationism on the right. No issue exposes this new feature on the right more than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As a historian, Hanson must realize, in the current circumstance of a hyper-aggressive Putin, that the parallels with 1939 Europe are straightforward. Yet, Hanson dismissively expresses a quick and offhanded support for Ukraine as he muddles this backing with the new right’s pessimism about Ukraine’s longevity and our dwindling military stocks.
The incoherence should knock a sane person over the head. The lack of Ukrainian endurance could be a self-fulfilled prophecy by the incessant complaint about our “dwindling stocks”. More than the Ukrainian drain of our own military readiness, unwittingly, the new right is admitting that our superpower status is a joke. It’s an admission that we can’t defend our interests and supply a country the size of Uganda in their fight against being gobbled up. It’s 1938-9 Czechoslovakia and 1939 Poland all over again.
The Soviet Union kept the communist North Vietnamese in the field for a couple of decades, and we can’t aid a Uganda? What makes people like Hanson think that we can defend Taiwan against the #2 economy in the world with the largest army and navy? Ineluctably, this line of argument is a quiet admission that the “pivot” to face the CCP threat is a suicide mission.
Actually, Ukraine is a wakeup call. Stopping one leg of the new Axis in Ukraine is directly tied to stopping the other leg in the Pacific. Don’t think that for a moment that Xi and his minions aren’t watching our enfeebled internal debates about Ukraine. Instead, we ought to be alerted to getting our act together by injecting steroids into our defense industrial complex and conforming our defense capabilities to the new reality of “quantity has a quality all its own”, and stop grousing about our lack of 155 munitions. We can do that, first, by stopping our deficit-spending-till-bankruptcy, and restraining our utopia-searching and robbing-Peter-to pay-Paul domestic fiscal schemes. Our fiscal balance sheet can only tolerate so much greenie nonsense, equality-mongering, and blank checks to the elderly and everyone else “oppressed”. At least Rush Limbaugh had the temerity to call the AARP “greedy geezers”. Instead, with Hanson and Trump, we get fiscal insanity. Come on, Victor, speak up, make sense.
Rush Limbaugh at National Review Institute’s fall gala, 2019. (Lila Photo)
Making sense is what we need at this stage in our country’s history, and all-to-frequently we aren’t getting it. The reign of incomprehensibility even affects the language that we use to discern the difference between liberal and conservative. Check this out: Hanson labeled as “liberal” conservatives who are still conservative but weary of Trump. His charge that National Review is “liberal” is particularly stunning. One can only conclude that Hanson’s distinction between liberal and conservative hinges on a person’s or organization’s stance toward Trump. So, Victor, which one of these articles in the July 31 issue of National Review is “liberal”?
• “Family Policy Meets Deficit Politics: For solutions, consider the supply side”: a call for the use of conservative economics (supply side) to assist families.
• “Throwing Off China’s chains”: a defense of those in and outside of Communist China who risk their lives – many already lost them – to resist the tyranny.
• “Our Chosen Chains: Smartphones, handguns, and the destructive use of freedom”: an article on the debilitating effect of modern media, especially social media, on ourselves and our children.
• “The Restrained Roberts Court: Pace their critics, the justices respect precedent”: a retort to the leftist complaint that the Robert Court is “activist” as well as a defense of originalism, the conservative jurisprudence.
• “Supreme Modesty: Conservatives have saved the Court from itself”: the piece speaks for itself.
• “Elite Universities’ Affirmative-Action Reaction: Biased admission practices are no way to address historical injustice”: a defense of the Court’s Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision that banned racial favoritism in college admissions.
• “A Year after Bruen: The current Second Amendment test leaves questions”: the article defends the Court’s protection of the Second Amendment in recent cases but admits there are problems that still need clarification.
Et cetera.
A conservative position is manifest in every issue. I’ve been a subscriber since the early 1980’s.
The same is true for National Review Online. Don’t take my word for it; go see for yourself (https://www.nationalreview.com). The woke would go ballistic. But here’s the crux: on the whole, the magazine is no fan of Trump and is mostly pro-Ukraine. I can only conclude that since Hanson is at least modestly pro-Ukraine, the decisive factor for being “liberal” is whether one is a Trump fan or not. If you can’t countenance Trump’s appalling behavior, narcissism, incessant capacity to make foes of friends, and gross immaturity to blame others for his own misfortunes, you must be “liberal”. What?!
I’ve had enough of Trump after voting for him twice. Am I now a “liberal” by Hanson’s metric? Funny, I don’t think and feel like one.
For want of a better explanation, Hanson appears to have fallen victim to presentism, what I call the tyranny of the present. Strange for a historian of antiquity. In the minds of many people, current happenings and concerns are of overriding existential import, more so than anything else … ever! Some people get caught up in the cognitive and emotional fevers of the moment, like a social contagion. Today, the personage of Trump looms large … undeservedly so. Trump is too small a vortex to cram the actual meaning of conservative/liberal. Trump is only the fascination of the moment. He too will pass. One more GOP election disappointment to add to the growing list ought to perform the cure.
A stone-faced Donald Trump pled not guilty to a 34-count felony indictment in a Manhattan courtroom in April 2023. Trump is the first U.S. president, former or current, to be charged with a crime.
I’ve been a Republican for almost the entirety of my adult life. As a conservative, where else is one to go?
Now, my party has a love-struck teenage fixation on Donald Trump. Regardless of the reason for the infatuation, he stands head and shoulders above the rest in the Republican 2024 field, according to polls. But that’s a sampling within a minority of the total electorate. While Trump is dearly loved among a majority of that minority, he is thoroughly detested in the general electorate. Nominating Trump will make the Democrats’ task so much easier.
The fact of broad disgust toward Trump is only one part of the bad political calculus for the GOP. The majority of a minority seems intent on making Trump the face of the party at a time when he faces multiple criminal investigations across many fronts – namely Atlanta and Special Counsel Jack Smith – some of them more serious than others. The majority of the minority callously sweeps aside these legal threats as if they were Russia Collusion all over again. That would be a mistake. Expect these existential threats to more fully hit the fan after he secures the nomination. For the three months of the 2024 election season, the party will be saddled with a criminal defendant at trial and quite possibly a perp-walk post-election, whether he wins or loses the election.
As for his down-ticket pull – remember the results of 2018, 2020, and 2022? – a criminal defendant to lead the charge only worsens the party prospects across the board, state and federal. An improbable win on election day would mean immediate impeachment and removal from office, with criminal sentencing later, by a decidedly hostile Congress. Thinking beyond the momentary thrill of the political lust, a GOP trainwreck looms.
The guy is abhorred in the general voting public, and that isn’t just an opinion. FiveThirtyEight lays out the evidence. In eight polls from June 27 to July 11, Trump’s unfavorables outrank his favorables by no fewer than 12 points. By July 18, the level of detestation ballooned to 16.1 points. He’s no more likeable than Biden (see below). For Democrats, if you’re saddled with political dead weight (Biden or any of the other substitute lightweights), bring your opponent down to your level, and that means assisting the Republicans in seppuku (suicide) – nominating Trump. A bad hand quickly becomes a winnable one.
At this moment, Republicans are choosing seppuku while the Democrats face their own existential threat from No-Labels. The group has a greater potential of siphoning off votes from Democrats uneasy about adolescent genital mutilation (gender-affirming care) without parental consent or knowledge, abortion at any time prior to the exit from the womb (maybe after), boys in girls’ bathrooms, locker rooms, sports, kowtowing to the CCP, the crime, the crime, and more crime.
No doubt, though, the Republican base is intent on making it possible for the Democrats to escape their vicious wrongdoing. The Democrats have to live down their noxiousness, but the great leveler is Donald Trump. Look at the numbers. They haven’t changed much and will only get worse for the GOP as we proceed to election day 2024.
Yep, Donald Trump is the Democrats’ best friend . . . and maybe their only hope.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “Latest Polls”, FiveThirtyEight, July 18, 2023, at https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/favorability/donald-trump/
Reagan had policy chops having spent decades reading, thinking, writing, and engaging with policy pundits to establish what he thought and why. Not so with Trump. Yet, he is the darling of strident and nuttier elements on the right.
Complexity at almost any level isn’t high on the list of those things appreciated by many people, maybe most, especially if the forces at work don’t stare the average person in the face. A popular default position is the childlike reduction of circumstances into a single person, such as the economic boom that is attributed solely to Trump by his congregation of worshippers. Don’t bother them with the details.
Like the Age of Augustus for Rome, we have that “Trump” economy (’17-’19), the “Bush” financial crisis (’07-’08), the “Reagan” boom following the “Reagan” recession, the “Hoover” depression (’29-’32), etc., etc. The adolescent fantasy is particularly acute when considering economic matters. It’s almost as if, in presidential elections, that we are choosing a god to deliver us from the vagaries of life. Quickly, millions of economic actors as free and independent producers and consumers, technological trends, social disruptions in the form of the decline in public morality and the family, huge government incentives and disincentives to be both unproductive and productive, and misbegotten popular beliefs are erased in a mad rush to praise a group’s patron saint. No wonder that we get so much wrong because many of us understand so little. Now isn’t that a clear condemnation of our system of education?
Nature abhors a vacuum, and the same is true in a person’s head. A lack of knowledge leads to the resort to the equivalent of magic. For instance, one person is our savior or master villain. Seldom is it that simple. A classic example of this mass psychomotor tic is the so-called “Trump” economic boom. Trump boosters reduce everything to the “genius” of Trump. In fact, the guy was more of a braggadocious surfer than a George Washington or reincarnation of ancient Rome’s Cincinnatus.
Trump benefitted from two years of united Republican control of the elective branches of the federal government in the first half of his only term as president. To address the huge government discouragements to be productive, the Republican playbook was unleashed. Not long after Trump took the oath, Congress under a Republican majority and Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Leader Mitch McConnell set to work to reverse the neo-socialism of the prior Pelosi Congress and Obama administration. The Congressional Review Act was dusted off to veto by congressional vote the Obama rampaging Leviathan’s regulations in the workplace and EPA. Trump had no idea, but he was around to sign the repeals. See, deregulation works, as predicted in the free-market sermons of the Chicago school economists (Friedman, Stigler, etc.).
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2018 was festooned with the free-market, small-government ideas that have been bouncing around Republican circles and conservative think tanks since Reagan. If a nation wants to keep its businesses, stop beating them over the head with one of the highest capital gains tax regimes in the world.
If you want your people to be productive, put down the tax lash that was applied to their backs too. Republicans for years were slammed with “tax cuts for the rich”, so this time around, most of the benefits accrued to the middle class while additional slices of the population were removed from the tax rolls entirely. These ideas bounced around the Republican caucus for decades, long before Trump came down the escalator to bash “the swamp”. Trump showed and expressed no interest or knowledge in the intricacies of tax policy, except maybe what directly affected the family real estate empire. He had no idea about the strategic triad in national security nor supply-side economics. He’s not a reader nor deep thinker. He just happened to be the man behind the Resolute desk to hector the Republican caucuses to give him a trophy (a win) so he could revel in the Roman-like triumph of a signing ceremony. In that sense, narcissism proved useful.
Paul Ryan, Speaker of the House, and Mitch McConnell, Senate Majority Leader, in 2018 at the time of the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
Trump’s ubiquitous self-aggrandizement has been routinely applied to increased domestic energy production during his term. Simply put, Republicans don’t have the Democrats’ fossil-fuel phobia, which is a healthy beginning. It’s not necessarily a Trump thing; it’s the Republican Party platform of many iterations past. They’ve always wanted to open up ANWR, and I don’t know of many Republican leaders opposed to pipelines. They got through without a hitch when the GOP was in charge, pre-Trump. Ditto for approving domestic production on public lands. Trump only did what was established GOP doctrine.
The GOP was itching at the chance to rescind the donkey party’s draconian fuel-efficiency standards, which was a sleight-of-hand way to coerce you into a frivolous electric vehicle and ditch the far more practical piston-driven family sedan. Expressing the GOP’s longstanding faith in free markets, when the GOP is in power, the free-to-choose philosophy has dominant sway. The dictat was lifted like some of the other near-totalitarian nonsense of the donkey party. Not necessarily a Trump thing, a free-market GOP thing.
The results were a repetition of the Reagan-era boom, which is just shorthand for the implementation of the outlook coming out of the Hoover Institution, Heritage, and the American Enterprise Institute, the free market Club for Growth, etc. – some of them predating Reagan, and some bashed today by Trump for insufficient toadying.
The Federalist Society, the source of many of Trump’s judicial picks, dates back to the second year of Reagan’s first term. Without that Federalist Society list, who knows, we might be faced with Trump’s older sister, Mary Trump Barry, sitting on a federal circuit or the Supreme Court. To no surprise, Trump relied on the originalist Federalist Society to secure the support of an originalist GOP in order to appoint originalist judges. Even an ill-read Trump could figure that one out.
Speaking of Mary Trump Barry, appointed by Reagan as a US Attorney and later elevated by Bill Clinton to a district judgeship, she has some misgivings about her brother. Obviously with some animus, Trump’s niece, Mary L. Trump, recorded Mary T. Barry in a conversation about her brother. Speaking of a hot mic, this one sizzles. Mary Barry:
“All he [Trump] wants to do is appeal to his base. He has no principles. None. His goddamned tweeting and lying… oh my God. I’m talking too freely, but you know. The change of stories. The lack of preparation [he doesn’t read]. The lying. Holy shit…. It’s the phoniness of it all. It’s the phoniness and this cruelty. Donald is cruel.”
If this was an episode of Family Feud, it would be a civil war with the direct family offspring versus the extended one.
The country was rewarded by the GOP’s Reaganomics in the two years of unified Republican control of the elective branches of government. From Jan. 2017 to Jan. 2019, Trump was one of 290 Republicans in the 115th Congress and the 45th presidency: 238 R congressman (majority) + 51 R senators (majority), + the R chief executive. The “I”, “I”, “I” of Trump is such a gross exaggeration that it borders on a lie.
The Pelosi House that took office in Jan. 2019 couldn’t stop the positive wave of Reaganomics through the economy. Average family income grew by $4,600 in 2019 alone, and all racial groups benefitted; the poverty rate plummeted; inflation hovered around the fed’s target; unemployment for all groups hit historic lows. Frequently, the quarterback is accorded the limelight, but how many weren’t the next Tom Brady because their career ended with an ambulance trip to the hospital due to a porous line, or their receiver corps was plagued with slow feet and stone hands? Trump just so happened to benefit from a great offensive line and receivers. And there wasn’t a Hillary around to protect the donkey party’s entrenched collectivism.
It didn’t take long for that self-proclaimed “winner” to be outed as an inveterate loser. In 2018, he lost the House. In 2020, his antics cost the Republicans the presidency and the Senate. In 2022, a Trump endorsement was the kiss of death, except in the deepest blood-red precincts.
Now, a good portion of registered Republicans seem prepared to trade their party identity for that of a lemming. What didn’t work in 2018, 2020, and 2022 is enthusiastically embraced for 2024 according to polls. Einstein’s formulation of insanity keeps coming to mind – doing the same thing and expecting a different result.
The truth is that the Electoral College doesn’t choose a god. It elects a chief executive to carry out the laws, and that’s it. Trump didn’t invent sensible economics. Heck, the little that he knows was given to him by the constellation of Republican advisers that attend to every Republican president.
Even Trump couldn’t screw up what was handed to him in 2017 to 2018. What he did manage to do was to see to it that it didn’t last beyond Jan. 2019. First, Pelosi seized the House gavel, then Schumer took the one in the Senate, and at the same time, a senescent oldster campaigning from his basement rest home bested him and moved into the White House. That orange-haired “winner” is a loser, loser, loser, thrice over.
Trump tries to take all the credit that rightfully belongs to a throng of conservative pundits, think tanks, and public figures. Instead, a bombastic clown dominates the scene. Four charges from Mary Trump Barry keep resonating: “lack of preparation”, “lying”, “cruel” and “phoniness”. That says about it all.
And to think that a large number of Republicans want to do it all over again. Amazing, absolutely amazing.
RogerG
Read more here:
* The comments of Mary Trump Barry can be read in a Wikipedia post, and in the Washington Post (Aug. 22, 2020), “In secretly recorded audio, President Trump’s sister says he ‘no principles’ and ‘you can’t trust him’”, Michael Kranish, at https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/maryanne-trump-barry-secret-recordings/2020/08/22/30d457f4-e334-11ea-ade1-28daf1a5e919_story.html
* The success of Trump’s unacknowledged Reaganomics can be read in “The Biden Economy and How It Could Be Fixed”, Andrew Puzder, Imprimis, Hillsdale College, March 2023, at https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Imprimis_Mar_3-23_8pg_4-3Web.pdf
* Please read John McCormack’s rebuttal to “2,000 Mules” at https://www.nationalreview.com/…/06/12/sorry-trump-lost/
John McCormack
I have been asked to watch Dinesh D’Souza’s “2,000 Mules” by people who believe it to be gospel on the November 2020 election. I didn’t because spending the money elsewhere mattered more to me. Heaven knows, I got the gist from a host of Trump-friendly publications and websites without the added expense. Being a man on the right, access is no problem. After reading about many of the same sources referenced by D’Souza in the film, D’Souza’s argument ranks up there with anything written by the author Dan Brown (“Angels & Demons”, “The Da Vinci Code”, and “Inferno”, etc.). The only difference between the two D’s is that Brown acknowledges his work to be fiction.
There is a debate here that needs to be aired. Trump, the leading contender for the Republican 2024 crown, is running on … what for it … November 2020. His contention that the election was stolen is the centerpiece of his campaign, along with the long trail of verbal abuse directed at anyone he doesn’t like, normally people who haven’t shown sufficient obeisance. He made it the focus of his return to the center stage, so it deserves a careful examination. John McCormack gives one of the best and most concise critiques of the Trump claims that I’ve come across.
First, from the get-go, the notion that a massive, sprawling plot mostly across five states, maybe more, involving hundreds of thousands of fellow conspirators with none of this huge crowd being detected or slipping up boggles the mind. That alone, without seeing the film, should cause a person to be very leery. There are millions of spine-tingling stories across the internet of mysterious dark forces bringing down the world. How is this one any different? They, like all tall tales of expansive conspiracies, have to maintain an inhuman level of operational secrecy. The absence of at least a few dufuses to spill the beans among the hundreds of thousands of participants (voters, couriers, organizers) simply can’t pass the smell test.
Here’s one rule for rationally assessing conspiracy claims: believability is in inverse proportion to the number of participants.
The “mules” in the film are the 54,000 couriers (not 2,000) who allegedly stuffed ballot boxes in key locations. None has been fingered by Trump’s army of independent bounty hunters, nor law enforcement, to prove the existence of the plot. Nor will the producers and publisher divulge the names of the left’s NGO’s who are supposedly at the center of the scheme. Dominion’s $787 million lawsuit award hangs over the producers and publishers who might be inclined to name some. Apparently, millions of dollars for over-priced attorneys and the need to bribe some in the jury pool is a bit too daunting to run the risk.
The database for the story consists of cellphone pings and security camera footage on adjacent buildings. I’m reminded of the techie acronym gigo: garbage data goes in, garbage comes out. Data doesn’t stand alone; it is massaged by prior assumptions. So, if you go into the issue assuming something is fishy, don’t be surprised that in your imagination a fish pops out. But it’s not a fish; it’s the lingering smell in your nostrils from cleaning the garbage cans the day before. The pings could be delivery and Uber drivers and the surveilled clutches of ballots at drop boxes turn out to be a family member legally depositing ballots for the family.
Not that fraud doesn’t happen. Of course, it does. It occurs in every election, and is made easier by ballot harvesting, no voter ID, and shot gunning ballots through the mail turning election day into election season. But it doesn’t happen like this. When you have elections like this, elections begin to lose respect and you end up fanning the imaginations of the already unhinged. That’s the real lesson of 2020.
Let’s go back to election day being . . . election day, and 70% of the ballots cast in-person. Add voter ID and we might have more people accepting the results. We don’t need to follow a self-serving narcissist into another electoral defeat. The GOP’s self-preservation should trump Trump.
Donald TrumpOedipus, King of ThebesMAGA/Trump supporters, 2023Dr. Faustus selling his soul to the devil
In 2015, I had this sinking feeling that once Trump sunk his tentacles into the GOP, he’d be hard to cleanse from the party’s bloodstream.
He is a tabloid personality with a harsh mouth and revels in political theatrics. Republicans, as it turned out, were in a mood for a drama queen in 2016, and many still are. They wanted somebody to “own the libs”. Trump first gave them drama about Obama’s birth certificate and followed it with a litany of juvenile banter in “crooked Hillary” (honestly, she may be), “slow/low energy/clueless/not a man” Jeb, “I’ve never seen a human being [John Kasich] eat in such a disgusting fashion”, and now he’s progressed all the way to “coward/weak/lazy/low life/gutless pig” Bill Barr. And to think that there are people who still defend this man and his behavior to this day. According to recent polls, he’s the overwhelming choice to be the Republican nominee. Disgusting. It’s enough for a rock-ribbed Republican such as myself to rethink my party registration. Is this what it means to be a Republican?
He’s embarrassing. I’m embarrassed.
The latest Trump dust up is his federal indictment under:
• 18 U.S.C. § 793(e), “Gathering, transmitting or losing defense information” (31 counts)
• 18 USC §1512, “Tampering with a witness, victim, or an informant” (3 counts)
• 18 U.S. Code § 1519, “Destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in Federal investigations and bankruptcy” (1 count)
• 18 USC § 1001, “Statements or entries generally” (concerns false statements, coverups, etc.) (3 counts)
The first 31 counts draw from Section 793 of the US Code which relates to parts of the old Espionage Act. If you look at the kinds of documents that were bouncing around at his Mar-a-Lago estate and elsewhere – intelligence briefings, contingent US military plans, foreign and domestic military assessments, etc. – this is much more than diary entries, gifts from one head of state to another, personal letters, etc. The highly sensitive nature of the documents demands a different treatment in law. That’s one of the reasons for Section 793 and not the Public Records Act.
The other 7 counts, if true, are evidence of Trump’s pure hubris. I suppose that if you’ve dodged so many bullets, you might come to think of yourself as immune. It’s as if he thinks that he is wearing an invisible Lakota Sioux ghost shirt which makes him invulnerable to the bullets from DC’s henchmen. Like other forms of magic, it works till it doesn’t (the one surviving ghost shirt from the 1890’s has dried blood around holes in it). In this case, there is an evidentiary basis in the indictment for obstruction of justice. They’ve got Trump on tape discussing attempts to mislead investigators and hide the documents, suborning others to commit perjury. Then there’s the corroborative testimony of people in Trump’s inner circle. Granted, the prosecution’s evidence will have to withstand cross examination and counter arguments by Trump’s legal eagles, but if the evidence is valid, it should raise more than a few eyebrows, with the possible exception of the most committed diehards.
Most troubling is the reaction of the media on the right. The commentary can be summed up in “double standard, double standard, double standard”. Very little of it focuses on the contents of the indictment. Some of it is silly in the extreme. Hugh Hewitt, a radio host that I respect for his generally calm and reasoned demeanor on air, expressed his disappointment that a rumored selling by Trump of classified information to the Saudis didn’t materialize in the indictment. His reaction after reading it: “Is that all there is?” Upon hearing that, I said, “What!?” Is the fact that the indictment failed to live up to the wildest speculation on MSNBC or the ladies on The View a real argument against it? Hewitt, you’ve got to be kidding.
He was dismissive of the first 31 counts, the claimed Espionage Act violations, ostensibly because of the unprosecuted transgressions by Biden, Pence, Hillary, and Clinton proteges like Sandy Berger – the double standard argument morphed into an excuse for the mindlessly casual treatment of highly sensitive national security papers. In effect, may as well shred this part of the US Code. This Hewitt response was without seeing the exact nature of the documents, which will come out in court. The prosecutors know this; Trump knows it; the legal eagles know it. If it turns out that all they’ve got is love letters between Trump and “rocket man”, or some such, the DOJ will be wiping egg from its face and providing one more reason to defenestrate the FBI and defang the Garland gang. If these documents prove to be extremely sensitive, the raw egg will be dripping down the face and all over the casual attire of a good portion of the right’s punditry class.
One of those in need of a washcloth will be Mollie Hemingway, a noted commentator in the conservative, pro-Trump firmament. Today (6/13/23), on Hewitt’s show, she ostentatiously proclaimed in hyperbolic bombast, “For me to take this [the fed’s Trump indictment] seriously . . . I need to see hundreds of Russia-collusion-hoax people in jail.” Ruminate on that rant for a moment. Until we retroactively correct for all those who got away, we cannot enforce the law. It’s ludicrous. She’s making the case to selectively not enforce the law à la Alvin Bragg or any of the other Soros-backed DA’s who have been recently inflicted on us. She does this while also admitting that the case against Trump in the indictment is troubling. Is she an advocate of ignoring the evidence till enough Democrat scalps are tied to her lance? Where does this line of illogic stop, at the point where the US Code is effectively eviscerated? Ignore the evidence against Trump till we get Hillary in chains?
If the highly classified nature of the documents proves genuine, while honestly not a fan of Karl Marx, his famous dictum will apply to this current crop of the right’s commentariat: “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”
The second batch of charges – those involving obstruction (of justice) – at least causes a pregnant pause for some of Trump’s past stalwart defenders. The guest lineup on Fox News was left with stumbling admissions of Trump in serious trouble. That’s when they were forced to elevate their assessment beyond their “double standard” shibboleth and into the details of the indictment. All the talk about “double standard” will ring hollow if in court the highly classified nature of the documents is born out and evidence of Trump’s perfidy and irresponsibility is shown to be valid.
The main problem for the media on the right is that they have manufactured a pickle for themselves. They have not cultivated a conservative audience but instead nurtured a Trump one. The creation of a base reliant on such an unstable personality is asking for trouble. This media runs the risk of alienating this base if they are forced to deal honestly with the facts. That audience is likely to be siloed in their own echo chamber and not appreciative of the exposure of their demigod emperor as not wearing any clothes. For most people, including Trump, nudity will not enhance their appearance.
The media on the right, right now, acts as if they are sitting on pins and needles. They reach for the thin reeds of silly arguments. They fail to come to grips with their central problem: they hitched their wagon to a wild horse. Or more accurately, they made a bargain with the devil. So, Trump is a reincarnation of Sophocles’ Oedipus, King of Thebes (see “Oedipus Rex”), experiencing the wages of his pure hubris, and the Trump base is impersonating Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, selling one’s soul for instant gratification.
RogerG
Read more here:
* Jack Smith’s indictment can be found at https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653.3.0.pdf?fbclid=IwAR0A-iRN3cPhLLJJwVT7jbt8WOR6ymkohVTX0v7r634xtVjR5SeHV7SeMp0
A photo published by the U.S. Justice Department showing boxes of documents stored in a storage room at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida in 2021. (U.S. Justice Department/Handout via Reuters)
Well, it’s done. Trump is officially indicted by federal prosecutors. Yes, again, but this one may stick. One thing has always been true about Trump: he’s reckless in his language and behavior. He’s so provocative that his opponents want nothing more than to bury him. They tried in bogus impeachments and the outrageous Bragg indictment. But the Jack Smith indictment may be something different. Sometimes braggarts have the mental capacity to be stupid. If you read the indictment, if proven in court before a jury, Trump is not only mulishly stupid but quite possibly criminally so.
Read the indictment for yourself. Here it is: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653.3.0.pdf
I should have been more reserved in condemning the FBI’s raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home on August 8, 2022. I was furious at what seemed to me to be just another DC hit job on Trump. Regardless, they discovered a treasure trove of classified documents that covered military plans, capabilities, military assessments of our friends and foes, etc., and rashly shared by Trump with friends and apologists like Kid Rock.
If established in court, the double-standard defense quickly loses its force. The acts are so egregious. Anyway, since Hillary, Comey, and Biden avoided prosecution, it is no defense for Trump. It’s an argument to throw the book at Hillary, Comey, Biden . . . and Trump. Constantly, our criminal justice system is wracked with a few convictions in a sea of non-prosecutions and acquittals of nearly identical circumstances. At a certain point, in flagrant situations, the law must be enforced. It’s too bad, though, that the feds, who have soiled themselves so blatantly in the recent past, are now tasked to bring Trump to the bar of justice.
I can understand the skepticism on the right. But we are now duly warned about putting our faith in a man who has the awful habit of being his own worst enemy. Maybe he actually believed his own rhetoric: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”
The ancient Greeks called it hubris which led to nemesis and on to personal destruction. The Trump saga reads like Sophocles’ tragedy, “Oedipus Rex”. Go ahead, go online and read a few synopses of the play. Trump is Oedipus, King of Thebes.
* Please watch the entirety of Chris Christie’s presidential announcement below. It’s a hoot. It shows a guy with the capacity to talk extemporaneously, with good sense, and without the juvenile rhetoric of the man from Mar-a-Lago.
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Today’s pundits frequently refer to America’s political scene as one composed of tribes. Actually, “cults” is more accurate. We have the woke cult (neo-Marxism), a gender fluidity cult, climate cult, the Gaia cult, etc. Well, for some on the right, let’s add the Trump and nonsense cults. Frequently, those two overlap.
So, what is a cult? Words such as “excessive admiration”, “a fashionable person or thing among a particular group”, “veneration or devotion for a particular figure or object” stand out in the dictionaries. Putting it together, it’s a siloed group of people who are transfixed by a person or idea and revel in confirmation bias (seek only information that supports their biases).
Regarding Chris Christie, he has stepped forward to call out the cult in the midst of the Republican base – the cult of the orange man. Prior to him, all Republicans in the Republican presidential derby, and before, pranced around like they were walking on egg shells, afraid to upset the delicate sensibilities of Trump’s rabid followers. Quite frankly, it’s about time the cult was challenged. Thanks to his fortitude, Christie jumped to near the top of my score card.
And Vivek Ramaswamy leaped to the bottom. There is a crazy element in the right’s “populist” base – another aspect of the orange man’s cult – that believes our fiscal problems are driven by excessive spending on . . . foreign aid. Not only that, they think that appeasing aggressors leads to peace. Hmmmm, where have we heard that before? No “Si vis pacem, para bellum” of the Roman general Vegetius for this panderer to the mob – er, cult. If you’re interested, it means, “If you want peace, prepare for war”.
Vivek Ramaswamy
No sure path to appeasement can be imagined than knee-capping the victim by ending their access to U.S. foreign aid. Foreign aid, though, represents less than 1% of our federal budget ($39 billion). That’s 1.7% of our two biggest drivers of the federal budget – Social Security and Medicare – at $2.2 trillion annually. We are not even talking about peanuts. More accurately, we are talking about a particle of a peanut that unhappily fell under the track of an Abrams tank. So, Vivek will lead the charge against the smallest budgetary particle of a particle going to Ukraine on his way to bootlicking a thug, Putin. He’ll have to share the other boot with Trump.
As Christie says of Trump, the man of Mar-a-Largo would quickly end the Ukraine War by giving Ukraine to Russia. And Vivek would be cheerleading the entire way. This duopoly of demagoguery is an insult to rationality. Get this: show your spine to the CCP by showing how quickly you cave to a thug, an ally of the Beijing thug. And this on the heels of the Afghanistan bugout. Abandonment and surrender are a show of strength? How does that work? Chairman Xi must be shaking in his boots, the same boots that Xi shares with Putin, the same ones dripping in Vivek/Trump spittle.
Hooray for Christie bringing all this lunacy to light. I hope that he keeps it up. He’ll steal the stage from a man whose sole theatrical tact is to bully. As for Vivek, fresh from the taste of leather in his mouth, Christie in comparison shows himself to be the adult in the room.
RogerG
Read more here:
* Vivek Ramaswamy’s appeasement policy: “Vivek Ramaswamy willing to give ‘major concessions to Russia’ to end Ukraine war”, Ryan King, Washington Examiner, 6/4/23, at https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/vivek-ramaswamy-give-concessions-russia-ukraine
. Frederick Keller’s “The Curse of California”, which appeared in The Wasp on August 19, 1882, is the likely origin of the depiction of the Southern Pacific Railroad monopoly as an octopus.Archibald Cox, first Watergate Special Prosecutorames Comey, FBI Director, and Hillary Clinton. Her campaign originated the Trump-Russia Collusion hoax.John Durham, special counsel into the Trump/Russia charade
*Grab a cup of coffee, sit awhile for I have much to get off my chest. My readings during my recent 10-day eastern Mediterranean cruise have given me much to ponder.
***************
Frank Norris in 1901 had his “The Octopus: A Story of California” published, a novel of crafty control of state government by a railroad monopoly. Today, a different octopus has a grip on the federal government in Washington DC and the blue states. This one has personality traits that are a mixture of the ideology of progressivism with its obsession for perpetually fungible oppressed classes (neo-Marxism) and an overweening administrative state, mindless immersion in the FDR and Kennedy auras, deeply entrenched, and a proven capacity to drain the vitality of a once-great civilization. Ours!
One can get a whiff of the putrefaction (decay) just having to go through TSA/customs at San Francisco airport (SFO), without having to actually step out onto the filthy, crime-plagued streets of the city-by-the-Bay. The labyrinth is mind-boggling, and in stark contrast to the relative ease in old world airports in cities such as Frankfurt, Munich, and Athens. I kept thinking to myself as we were navigating the SFO maze, “This is what civilizational decline looks like”: the meaningless scurrying through an array of channels and corridors, checks and rechecks, picking up luggage and hauling them to additional check-ins, and the near strip-search to add to the one already performed by the German federal police in Munich. And this is for people who never left the confines of airport security walls from Munich to the gulag-type walls of SFO – not much opportunity to acquire a cache of weapons and bombs to further the jihad. It’s reminiscent of the late-stage Ottoman sultanate, and look at what happened to them in 1919. It disappeared, and so is the population of San Francisco and California.
The nation is quickly resembling the condition of California: a society living off the fumes of the past. Its essential infrastructure is crumbling as the state, and now the country, pursues the suicide pact of substituting high-density energy (fossil fuels, nuclear) with low (solar, wind). There’s plenty of money for subsidized abortions up to infanticide, transgender mutilations of tweens absent parental cognizance, the effective repeal of the nation’s immigration laws leading to immense social costs, and million-dollar payments to descendants of ancient relatives of a distant history’s wrongs, but nary a cent to expand water deliveries or clean up the streets of the crime and the mental- and drug-addled. Prices go sky high, nothing seems to work, and that scent of social decay overhangs nearly everything like a suffocating blanket of smog. Welcome to our modern, putrefied sultanate.
The reason why nothing seems to work is that we are governed, essentially managed, by a class apart: the minions of the administrative state and assorted interconnected functionaries in allied institutions – a socially incestuous tribe of Ivy League graduates and academics, the media, and a cadre of self-appointed arbiters of culture. They operate like a hive but resemble an octopus like the railroad monopoly in Frank Norris’s “The Octopus”. It’s an octopus of and for the octopus. Benefitting society’s citizens runs second to power, protections, and rewards for it. They do well, we don’t.
It is vengeful when challenged. We see how it operates by examining the Trump saga and, going back further, to Watergate of the 1970’s. The recently released Durham report draws back the curtain on partisan chicanery targeting Trump by the FBI and Obama holdovers in the Justice Department and lesser minions in the national security agencies. Nearly an entire presidential term was handcuffed in meaningless impeachments and massive investigations. No evidentiary predicate existed to support them. They were efforts of the octopus to remove an interloper – really, the American people through their electoral choices.
It’s the same template used against Nixon. Geoff Shepard in his book, “The Real Watergate Scandal”, from 2015 performed the role of John Durham in exposing this older skullduggery from the early 1970’s. What has come to light since those heady days is a tale of judicial and prosecutorial collusion, serious beaches of due process, and the octopus of mostly networked Democrat operatives from Ivy League campuses filling power positions in DC. They’re amazing in their nearly homogeneous partisan makeup, with only a sprinkling of publicity-hound Republicans joining the phalanx. They form a Praetorium Guard protecting the interests of the Democratic Party and its ruling progressive orthodoxy in the upper reaches of power that is DC.
On Shepard, he was a second-tier assistant to the president, not in any way connected to what came to be called Watergate. He’s got two letters from Watergate prosecutors clearing him of any involvement. As a member of the administration, he knew many of the principal players in the story and oversaw efforts to comply with court orders on such matters as the famous White House audio tapes. On what later came to be popularly referred to as the break-in and cover-up, he had intimate knowledge of the indicted and the so-called evidence. The popular story didn’t compute to him back then and has only been drawn into more question as more information has since come to light.
Foremost, the octopus – or hive if you will – that swarmed Nixon and his people. A cursory examination of the key players in what can only be described as an anti-Nixon jihad would illustrate the workings of octopus. The principal presiding judge, the publicity hound John Sirica, a nominal Republican, barely passed the bar exam. He floundered as a U.S. attorney, went into private practice and faced an even more dismal experience (his “starving time” in his own words) before he was rescued by the eminent Democrat lawyer, fixer, and influencer Edward Bennett Williams. Riding in the wake Williams’s prestige, Sirica got himself appointed to the DC District Court by Eisenhower. The Williams connection and friendship would benefit him for the rest of his life. The DC social Borg at work.
What of the first Special Prosecutor, Archibald Cox? Here’s a who’s who from the Ivy League/Kennedy nexus. From Harvard College to Harvard Law to the law school faculty, a lifelong Democrat and Kennedy clan confidant, he advised JFK and wrote many of his speeches in the 1960 campaign. He filled the slot of chief federal litigator as Solicitor General under Attorney General Robert Kennedy, JFK’s brother.
If Cox’s prosecutorial team – often called Cox’s army – faced the inevitable appeals from Sirica’s gung-ho, get-Nixon style, waiting in the wings to handle the appeals was the chief judge of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, David Bazelon with a judicial majority on the Circuit to back him up. A veteran of the Truman administration as assistant attorney general, he was known to harbor a dislike of Nixon since Nixon’s days on the House Committee on Un-American Activities investigating Alger Hiss, another Democrat/FDR protégé but since proven to be a Soviet spy. Compounding the octopus’s Nixon antipathy is Nixon’s 1950 elevation to the Senate through his upset win over the much-loved, former star of stage and screen, firebrand progressive, and favorite, Helen Gahagan Douglas. Nixon was the bête noire of the Democrat DC octopus in an obvious Democrat town.
That’s just a sampling. There’s more, much more. The lineup of hired guns in the Special Prosecutor’s office under Cox and Jaworski exhibited the same partisan and social affinities.
The city’s demographic profile displayed, and continues to display, the same hard-edged partisanship. For instance, the city’s overwhelming electoral base for the Democratic Party is a prosecutorial force multiplier for any judicial proceedings with Republicans in the dock. DC is a Democrat city run by and for Democrats. The city’s growth owes much to FDR’s centralization of power, the patron saint for all subsequent Democrat administrations. Back in the 1970’s, grand and trial juries were drawn from the city’s three-quarters Democrat voter base. Today, it’s worse; 90% is more like it.
The galling Nixon 49-state sweep in 1972 didn’t faze the 78% DC election count for the humiliated Democrat candidate George McGovern. This presents a tricky problem for Republicans elected from the hinterlands and who now must reside in a sea of hostility. Partisan crusades – think Sen. Ted Stevens, Russia collusion, civil proceedings against Trump, anything drummed up against Republicans – will have a good shot at convictions and seeing Republicans in pin stripes. The maw of DC awaited Nixon and still lies in wait for any Republican officeholder today.
The Constitutional protections for a fair trial, fair jury, fair, balanced and conscientious prosecutors, and due process are trampled under foot in this one-party city. If you think that legal mechanisms such as preemptory challenges to remove biased prospective jurors are adequate protection, think again. There aren’t enough challenges to compensate for a 78%-90%+ Democrat jury pool in an atmosphere ginned up by a longstanding local Democrat-friendly media.
A change of venue to a more balanced jurisdiction is laughable when the DC appellate and trial courts collude with prosecutors to ensure prosecution-friendly presiding judges and appellate judges who are noted for their progressive proclivities. Appeals are stymied and so is due process. Once in a DC court, you’re never going to be allowed any other place. Republicans beware if you find yourself before a DC jury.
Washington DC is an obese city gorging itself on the extracted wealth from the provinces – er, states, as in fourth-century Rome. Its output is government, and more government, and has no relation to the generation of goods and services that compose real economic life for the nation’s citizens. It grew and benefitted from the party of government, the party’s progressivism, the party of the administrative state, the Democratic Party. The city’s denizens vote as if they know their benefactors. From this lair, the octopus extends its tentacles to encompass nearly all facets of national life.
The situation has deteriorated to the point that for the nation to thrive, Washington DC must not. The chances of national prosperity improve if DC fell into a deep commercial and residential real estate depression. We have too much government rooted in abstract, ideological crusades, and possessing too much power to interfere in daily life. Shrink the government and acquaint some of the federal workforce to the pink slip. Strip the city of all operatives except for the minimum necessary for physical proximity to the heads of the three branches of government. The functioning headquarters of the Department of Agriculture in Wichita, the base of the FBI and Justice Department in Columbus, Missouri, the operational centers for the four military service branches scattered from Mobile, Alabama, to Minot, South Dakota, might be just a thought, but certainly an appealing one. Oh, how about the headquarters of the EPA ensconced somewhere in Ohio or West Virginia, surrounded by the victims of its regulatory excess?
Strangle the octopus and reinstitute popular sovereignty. The type of people of Archibald Cox’s background have too much sway, and have only proven to possess the capacity to muck things up. How’s that for a path to “make America great again”?
RogerG
Read more here:
* Of all the books that I have read on Watergate, this is the one that resonates: “The Real Watergate Scandal: Collusion, Conspiracy, and the Plot That Brought Nixon Down”, Geoff Shepard, 2015. By now, in light of the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, the tale ought to sound like a familiar one. Of particular note, refer to pages 184-5, “The D.C. Jury Pool”, to understand the ingrained partisan prejudice against Republicans in D.C. Please go to “The False Heroes of Watergate”, page 12-17, for a deep dive into the backgrounds of people pursuing Nixon and his people.
* Geoff Shepard’s Watergate account reads like John Durham’s 316-page report of May 12, 2023: “Report on Matters Relating to Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016 Presidential Campaigns”, John Durham, at https://www.nationalreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Durham-Report.pdf
Some people like to compare Donald Trump to some sort of hero who doesn’t conform to the dominant social norms, a kind of heroic anti-hero commonly found in movies and generals who are constantly running afoul of their superiors and the media, but are necessary to set things right. Think of John Wayne’s Ethan in “The Searchers”, Gary Cooper’s Sheriff Will Kane in “High Noon”, Yul Brynner’s band of lovable rogues in “The Magnificent Seven”. Think of Patton, MacArthur, Matthew Ridgeway, William T. Sherman in uniform. Truth be told, Trump is no Ethan, or any of the others. More accurately, “populist charmer” works better, or maybe “demagogue”, and certainly not a “genius”, political or otherwise.
The characterization of Trump as the admirable renegade was used by Victor Davis Hanson to explain Trump’s appeal and his usefulness (see the Hanson video below). It’s an awkward description. The distinctive factor that separates history’s successful outsiders from the man of Mar-a-Lago is the former’s uncanny genius for success, and Trump’s lack of it. Trump won in 2016 not due to any unique insight but to a highly unusual set of circumstances that can only be described as a black swan event. A constellation of factors came together that hasn’t happened since. Trump has failed to repeat his success, having floundered in 2018, 2020, 2022, with prospects not any better for 2024.
The reason is simple. He’s been the center of attention for the past seven years and is too well-known, and repugnantly so. He’s no longer the fresh face that many people were going to take a chance on, as they did in 2016. The 2016 Trump was the new kid on the block facing a notoriously infamous one. Even with that advantage, he lost the popular vote by 3 million and could have fallen short in the Electoral College if 107,000 votes in three states had gone the other way. After that, it has been downhill for Trump. That’s hardly the genius of Patton.
It’ll be more misery if the 2022 midterms prove to be prophetic. Ferreting out the easy Republican victories and those with universal GOP support, and focusing only on the hotly contested races, Trump endorsees were either lackluster or dismal failures. Their poor performance is more than old news because it’s nonetheless real. From Georgia to Arizona to Pennsylvania to eastern Washington State, across the country, Trump monotonously helped snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. This guy is no Matthew Ridgeway stabilizing the lines in Korea after the longest retreat in American military history, recapturing Seoul, and promising more than the one million Communist Chinese casualties that he and his men already inflicted on them. Trump is no Patton who could engineer the dash across France after the Normandy breakout and turn on a dime to rescue Bastogne in the Battle of the Bulge. Instead, Trump is channeling William Travis at the Alamo.
Patton (second from left) reviewing a map in his dash to rescue Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge
Already, 2023 polling in dribs and drabs points to a looming GOP disaster in 2024 if Trump headlines the Republican ticket. A massive poll in April of this year shows Trump to be a loser to Biden and DeSantis a winner (see below). Yet, Trump registers a 20+ point lead over DeSantis among Republicans while at the same time Trump remains slightly more repellant in his high unfavorables than Biden to the general electorate. A Nevada poll puts DeSantis ahead of Biden in the state and Trump a loser (see below). Wait for the gauntlet of legal troubles that the Democrats have in store for Trump, of course delayed till after he secures the nomination for maximum effect. Trump will smell worse than the remains of yesterday’s fish catch in a warm garbage can.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis
Clearly, an unflattering image has crystallized about Trump, one that has turned the reliably Republican suburbs into fertile grounds for Democrat votes. Whoever he attracts is more than offset by the numbers who run away. Plus, the Democrats won’t be caught again with their pants down. They have rejiggered voting laws to the advantage of their base’s massive cohorts of the apathetic with the wild expansion of lazy mail-in voting, ballot harvesting, and blocking voter ID and efforts to clean up registration rolls of the dead and moved. What could go wrong? Lots, and none of it to the advantage of Republicans and Trump.
All Trump has to offer is the same stale act: juvenile insults, narcissism, patronizing platitudes, bragging, and bluster. The bragging centers around accomplishments that were impossible without the canniness of others, like the much-abused Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell. Trump benefitted from a brief two-year period of unitary GOP control of the elective branches. The economy took off after job-destroying regulations were repealed in a series of Congressional Review Act vetoes in the Ryan/McConnell-led Congress. What Republican wouldn’t greenlight pipelines and expand energy leases on federal lands during the era of the fracking technological revolution? The tax cuts were not Trump’s ideas but were germinating in the Republican congressional caucus for years. Ditto for the judges. The nominees were originalists, the official judicial philosophy of the party, whose prospects would be fruitless without McConnell’s procedural smarts. If you’re a Trumper, please leave room in your praise for Ryan, McConnell, and the Republican “establishment”.
If not, it’s another sign of blinkered cultic behavior that joins the Left’s climate cult ruining livelihoods and the neo-Marxism clan of the woke. Yes, they’re often called tribes, with the Trumpkins becoming just another one as obvious as the Yankton Sioux on the Missouri bluffs encountered by Lewis and Clark in 1804. If not treated very gingerly, a calamity will ensue. Better yet, try to reroute around them, or convince them of the wisdom of abandoning their daft ghost-dancing shaman.
RogerG
Watch and read more here:
* Victor Davis Hanson’s mention of Trump as the useful renegade: “George S. Patton: American Ajax”, Victor Davis Hanson at Hillsdale College, 2/13/2020, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJsC-buIkSE
* An April polling assessment in FiveThirtyEight: “Latest Polls”, FiveThirtyEight, May 4, 2023, at https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-primary-r/
* The Nevada poll: “DeSantis leads Trump in Nevada, GOP poll says”, Jessica Hill, Las Vegas Journal-Review, April 24, 2023, at https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/politics-and-government/nevada/desantis-leads-trump-in-nevada-gop-poll-says-2767010/
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