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A recent poll found that 56 percent of Republicans would support Trump in 2024. They like Trump, and there is much to like: his administration was exceptionally effective — unless you’re a woke, racial-equity, New York Times-loving, neo-fascist … Democrat. But will that support survive four years of a Biden–Harris administration bent on undoing everything Donald Trump accomplished?

Under Trump, America became great again: the middle class went back to work, with women and black unemployment figures reaching record lows; Trump appointed more than two hundred constitutionalists to the federal judiciary; our enemies, primarily China, took an economic hit; NATO members started paying their dues; major agreements were signed in the Middle East; the US got out of the silly Paris Accords. And the list goes on for pages. Even on Google.

Many who like what Trump did objected, and still object, to his style. They seem not to realize that without that style he never would have been elected. The accepted wisdom in 2016, that anyone could beat Hillary Clinton, matured (in those people whose thinking was still capable of maturing) into the realization that only Trump could have beaten her. Partly, and perhaps primarily, he beat her because he did what no other candidate had ever done — he smote the media and trampled them under his feet. Yes, Trump appealed to the forgotten middle class, but it’s not clear that that appeal would ever have gotten through to his supporters without his public and signature disdain of the pointy-headed media gurus and apparatchiki.

Nor is it clear that any Republican can ever win again without the same constant smiting and trampling — activities requiring a combination of courage and skill not traditionally found in Republican officeholders.

So, yes, there was, and is, much to like in the iconoclastic Donald Trump. But there was, and is, a disconcerting stubbornness in Trump: a stubbornness that led to missed opportunities, opportunities that may not come this way again for a generation. Disrupters like Trump are rare: which means the missed chances to disrupt (and then accomplish) become understood as signal failures. And in 2024 those failures, along with his age, may well disqualify Trump, leaving the Republican Party with — who?

Did Trump have a single strategic failure that outweighed the rest? Yes. He never understood the importance of personnel. His failure had two parts: not hiring the people who could have helped him achieve (more of) the successes on offer; and not draining the swamp — cleaning out the civil service when he had the chance.

If you let the fox stay in the coop, it will eat the chickens when you leave, as we are now seeing. Where is the John Durham report on the legendary FBI misdeeds? Where is the prosecution of the Hunter Biden laptop case? Why is the FBI talking incessantly about a threat to national security coming from the right? Who will prosecute James Comey for misleading the FISA court? This column recommended in November that Trump fire the top one hundred people at all the agencies. At the FBI it should have been two hundred.

By the time of the 2016 election, the Heritage Foundation had prepared a list of a thousand or so people who were competent, ready and willing to join the Trump administration at all levels. Former Heritage Foundation president Edwin Feulner was even on a transition team, suggesting he had access to the Trump organization, and had that access because someone inside appreciated his extraordinary talents: Feulner is a first-class manager and a scholar as well (he has a PhD in political science from the University of Edinburgh).

Also waiting in the wings, not to go into the administration but to advise on personnel matters, was Donald Devine, head of the Office of Personnel Management under President Reagan, known affectionately by his friends as Reagan’s Terrible Swift Sword. (The civil service undoubtedly had a different name for him.) Devine’s book, Reagan’s Terrible Swift Sword, was a manual, waiting to be read, on how to run the US government.

Did anyone in the Trump administration read Devine’s book? Whatever happened to the Heritage Foundation’s list of a thousand people? Who knows? One rumor was that Reince Priebus (dismissed after only six months as Trump’s White House Chief of Staff) and former New Jersey governor Chris (“bridgegate”) Christie deep-sixed it. Another was that Trump’s son-in-law, New York liberal Jared Kushner, disposed of it. We don’t know, but it doesn’t matter: The buck stops with Donald Trump.

Trump’s skills were well publicized in 2016: his renovation of the Wollman skating rink in New York City is legendary. But his skills were not those of the head of a Fortune 500 company. He may have had a fortune of $3 billion, but he inherited most or all of it. There’s nothing wrong with that — unless you’re a woke, racial-equity, New York Times-loving, neo-fascist … Democrat. But inheriting a fortune doesn’t require quite the same skills as making one.

Trump was essentially a small-business man, a family businessman, not a corporate titan with a critical board of directors second guessing every decision. He was not a titan at all, not of any kind. He certainly has skills: only a fool, or a … Democrat, would deny that. But one skill Trump did not have, probably because the business he ran didn’t require it, was understanding the importance of personnel. At least in government, people are policy, because the president can’t make all the policy himself. Trump’s lack of understanding that point makes his successes, hundreds of them, all the more remarkable.

But it also, as we have already seen, makes his many successes less permanent. And that means that the 56 percent of Republicans who say they would support him today may feel differently in 2024.

Still, if it’s true that you can’t beat somebody with nobody, Trump has the edge, now, and is likely to keep it unless somebody comes along who is willing to engage in political battle the way he does.

Published:

February 24, 2021
The Daily Caller

What a disaster!

Even sensible people are calling on President Donald Trump to resign. The gravamen of the complaint against him seems to be that he repeatedly said the election was fraudulent—and that those comments stoked the fury that was on display at the Capitol last Wednesday.

To which the most succinct reply is: nonsense! Trump has only been saying what about a third of the country also thinks. That means Trump is in good company—good company if you like Americans. Of course, if you think Trump supporters are just a bunch of deplorables, then you don’t care much about them, and you probably think they should all go too.

But go where? Not to Hell, because most of the people who don’t like deplorables don’t believe in Hell. Guess they’ll all have to go with the Trumps to Mar-a-Largo.

Of course, the “woke” left don’t really want him to resign: they’d rather impeach him.

But truly, leftists must have no god: Newsmax reported that a source close to the Rasmussen polling company told them that Trump’s approval rating went up, to 51 percent, the night after the breach of the Capitol.

It’s important to focus on what’s actually going on here. The left don’t care about Trump: he’ll be gone in a week any way. What the left want to do is discredit what Trump has accomplished. And they want to discredit his supporters as well. And a lot of weak-kneed Republicans, many of whom never wanted Trump to be president to begin with, some of them in Congress, will go along with it—unless it interferes with cocktails.

Of course people shouldn’t break into the Capitol. But people shouldn’t have looted all across America following the death of George Floyd—who actually may have died of a fentanyl overdose. The refusals, month after month, of the left (the politicians and the media) to condemn the rioting by Antifa mobs and their hangers-on were teaching moments. But what they taught was Rioting 101—or maybe Rioting 301 (a graduate course). We were told, all summer, ad nauseam, that the rioters were just peaceful demonstrators expressing their frustrations with the system. Nothing to worry about here. Keep moving.

Please.

But now—of course!—last Wednesday’s demonstrators are criminals. And surely many of them were. But the left-wing politicians and their media allies have no credibility on the matter, which suggests the mob will return. Someday. Perhaps someday soon.

Meanwhile, the left will try to discredit everything Trump has done and everyone who supported him.

His foreign policy successes are significant, but they’re deeply resented by the foreign policy establishment. When Trump told NATO’s member countries to meet their financial obligations, we were told by the left that it would wreck NATO. It didn’t. It made NATO stronger.

His peace-promoting initiatives in the Middle East would have won a Nobel Prize, perhaps several, for anyone else. But not for Donald Trump.

His solicitude for downtrodden blacks in this country was historic. His policies produced the lowest unemployment numbers for them ever. Did you see that praised by the New York Times? Please. We’re being serious.

Trump won about 8 percent of the black vote in November, which was a 2 percent improvement on his 2016 vote. That is a problem—for the left. How do you get away with calling Trump a racist (no, a RACIST!) when more blacks voted for him the second time around?

In September 2019, the jobless rate for Hispanics hit a record low, about 3.9 percent. And in the 2020 election Trump got approximately 32 percent of Latino votes, about 4 percent more than he received in 2016. That’s another problem.

Of course the 2020 election was stolen, as the 1960 election, it’s widely agreed, was stolen: the point being that stealing elections is neither impossible nor new. Richard Nixon decided not to fight. He has been praised (though almost always very quietly, because after all he was, well, you know, Nixon) for not putting the country through the ordeal of that fight. As a result, we got Kennedy, and then Johnson and his Great Society programs, from which the country, and most especially blacks, have never recovered.

Nixon was wrong not to have fought, wrong to have abandoned the Americans who voted for him. Wrong to have set the precedent. Probably he was afraid of the press and their friends.

Trump is not afraid.

If the Republican Party is afraid now, it will disappear. And it will never be missed.

None of this is to condone rioting. But the riot was the sideshow. The main event is what the woke left Democrats (office holders, media baron accomplices, mega-billionaire monopoly tech giants) plan to do to this country: enact left-wing programs, and control the flow of all information.

Pay attention, America. We’re entering a Dark Age.

Published:

January 12, 2021
The Epoch Times