These are among the darkest days of American democracy. With nearly airtight totalitarian uniformity, the American media robotically repeat that there is no possible argument to be made that the 2020 presidential election produced an unjust result. In the same magical spirit of post-electoral unanimity, President Trump has been condemned for his remarks to hundreds of thousands of his supporters in Washington on January 6, and it is now a political commandment that he is responsible for the ensuing illegal forced entry and fatal violence at the United States Capitol.
He actually told his supporters that they should “peacefully and patriotically make your voices be heard” when they proceeded on to the Capitol; this is a minor inconvenience to the confected consensus that the president shouldn’t serve out the last week of his term.
There remains no conclusive evidence that Richard Nixon broke any laws in the Watergate affair, though some members of his entourage did. But it was not hard to foresee that driving him from office (a very capable president who had been reelected by what remains the greatest plurality in U.S. history) would addict the American political system to the criminalization of policy differences.
As the patriotic traditionalist he was, Nixon resigned rather than put the country through the humiliation of an impeachment trial, an extremity that had only occurred once in U.S. presidential history, a silly and unsuccessful action against Andrew Johnson in 1868. President Clinton was impeached in 1998-1999 over a dishonest answer to a grand jury about his extramarital sex life, tawdry but inadequate grounds for removing a president from office. The impeachment of President Trump last year over an innocuous telephone conversation with the president of Ukraine was fatuous: the charges were not impeachable offenses and there was no evidence that they actually occurred.
No honest and informed person can doubt there is room for skepticism about the accuracy of the presidential vote in five or six states in the November presidential election. As with the elections of 1876 (Rutherford Hayes), 1960 (John F. Kennedy), and 2000 (George W. Bush), we will never know who really won, but once the system has produced a result, it doesn’t matter, except to the individuals involved.
The Democrats generally assumed that after four years of constant defamatory mockery of Trump by 95 percent of the national political media and with a two-to-one campaign spending advantage, in the midst of a pandemic, they would bury Donald Trump and take the Congress and the country easily. They only won by a whisker after recourse to questionable voting methods under cover of the pandemic, and with Joe Biden invoking the virus as his reason for staying at home while the rabidly partisan media campaigned for him. They lost ground in the Congress and the country. Instead of a tidal wave generated by Trump-hate, almost half the country believes, for the first time in American history, that they were cheated.
Last Wednesday, there was no audible complaint about the president’s lengthy and detailed recitation of the irregularities in the election when he addressed a crowd of approximately 300,000 people. But when a small fragment of that crowd assaulted the Capitol, the Democrats saw the opportunity to hang it around the president’s neck and impose a morally imperative myth through their sycophantic media and social media allies that Biden had won a clear-cut victory.
Democrats replicated the opportunism they exhibited last year when they reversed the president’s lead in the polls by demanding a politically destructive economic shutdown to fight the coronavirus (that only endangered the lives of just over one percent of the population). That gambit, and the electoral dirty tricks division with the mighty media chorus and censorship by the social media cartel, enabled them to squeak through to victory.
We have seen this week the complete suppression of any acknowledgment of legitimate questions about the election outcome, along with the persecution in the U.S. Senate and by the social media cartel and many corporations across American industry of anyone supporting Trump’s claim of an unjust election. And we have had an orchestrated demand that the president resign because of his alleged responsibility for the Capitol violence, failing which he should be removed for mental incompetence, or that he be impeached and removed for incitement of insurrection.
Trump said nothing illegal, though he blundered badly in publicly demanding that the loyal Vice President Mike Pence, unto himself, reject the Senate confirmation of the choice of Electoral College members who formally choose the president—a mad idea.
Trump was addressing representatives of the 74 million Americans who voted for him, most of whom felt the election had been stolen, and felt that both the Congress and the Supreme Court were completely indifferent to their grievances. He was urging peaceful anger, not the months of arson, vandalism, and destruction of federal buildings, monuments, and billions of dollars of assets of small business owners across the country that the Democrats considered to be “peaceful protest” in favor of civil rights last summer. All polls show only about 11 percent of Americans respect the Congress (and only 15 percent believe the media), and what Trump was asking did not affront current public opinion.
The Democratic Party and national and social media (now coextensive), used the misrepresentation of Trump’s remarks as grounds for the suppression of freedom of expression on the subject of the recent election: the Trump-voting 48 percent of the country was canceled. Not only is Trump to be impeached for an offense he did not commit, but the Senate is to be asked to try the issue of his removal from an office after he has, at the expiry of his constitutional term, retired from the office. This meets Napoleon’s description of history as “Lies agreed upon.”
The imagination beckons: if Nixon was driven from office without serious evidence of criminal wrongdoing, and Trump can be impeached and removed from an office he no longer holds for offenses he did not commit, and if the unsettled vagaries of recent American political history are to be suppressed everywhere in the media, then let us revisit the previous 43 presidents.
George Washington may have been too severe in suppressing the Whiskey Rebellion (1791-1794, 15 Americans dead); Thomas Jefferson had no business imposing his Embargo Act on all foreign trade in 1807, and besides, both men were slaveholders. Abraham Lincoln had no right in 1861 to suspend habeas corpus just because there was a genuine insurrection in progress during which 750,000 people eventually died. FDR’s order to the U.S. Navy to attack on detection any German ship a year before the country was at war was certainly impeachable. Let’s airbrush them out, remove them, and rename the memorials in Washington to them in favor of the leading personalities of Black Lives Matter.
That, to use one of the more tiresome clichés of last week, seems to be “who we are,” and the incoming “head of the American people” (FDR’s description of the presidency), on the crest of his blue ripple of electoral chicanery, sounded a stirring call for national reconciliation last week. Joe Biden said that the mob at the capital were white supremacists, the Capitol police are white racists, Trump is reminiscent of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels . . . and then called for national unity.
The Democrats are not going to be able to hide much longer behind their Trump hatred.
An inept, banal, unprincipled, shopworn waffler has been pushed and carried by his managers to the nation’s highest office. His party has the ability to enact much of its socialist program. In the next year, we will see from them a spectacle of incompetent federal administration that will make the most unsuccessful presidents of the past look like candidates for Mount Rushmore—assuming Biden’s peppier followers do not blow up that monument.
They have made Donald Trump the leader of all who object to government-restricted freedom of expression, corrupt election practices, and the transformation of America into a socialist commune. At the moment of Joe Biden’s ultimate triumph, he and his ramshackle coalition of contending (and in some cases disreputable) interests are exposed in their ghastly infirmity. The totalitarian woke media will not be able to disguise this macabre farce for long.