Those who are still predicting that
Donald Trump will be impeached and removed from office are now like exotic and
endangered creatures.
It is like an absurdly slow dance, in which the steps are
so infrequent and tentative that it is hard to remember how far participants
have come since the music started.
Two years ago, virtually the entire
commentariat, and most of its readers and listeners, were splitting their sides
at the gigantic impending farce of the Trump candidacy for the Republican
nomination.
Eighteen months ago, those same people had almost entirely shifted
their immense mirth to the mighty Hillary Clinton avalanche that was already
starting to rumble down whatever it was that President Obama renamed Mount
McKinley.
The BBC was asking itself (i.e., its
viewers, including any Americans watching its World Service) whether Mr. Trump
was going to pull out then, to avoid the unprecedented thrashing he was about
to receive at the polls (which none of the polls, even the more rabidly
anti-Trump polls, then predicted).
Wacky leftist filmmaker Michael Moore, with
the unshakeable confidence in mind-reading that seems never to desert such
people, announced that Trump would quit because he never wanted or expected to
be nominated, and it was all a joke that had got out of hand.
These were not unrepresentative
opinions.
Mr. Trump was attacking the entire political establishment, the whole
Washington sleaze factory, all factions of both parties, all the Bushes,
Clintons, and Obama, the national press, the lobbyists, Wall Street, Hollywood,
and the limousine Left from the Hamptons to Silicon Valley.
Of course the Trump
campaign was insane and impossible, and was doomed to be a ludicrous fiasco, a
gigantic, comical clown act that misfired horribly.
On Election Night, Nobel
prize-winning (for economics) New York Times columnist Paul Krugman said the
stock market would “never recover” from the Trump victory. (It has set a new all-time high more than 90 times since.)
The alarms about effective Russian intervention in the election and the
confected creation of the Trump collusion myth were born with indecent haste.
The ranking Democrat on the Senate
Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner of Virginia, was soon solemnly announcing
that there had been a thousand Russian agents actively assisting the Trump
campaign in key swing states and that they had delivered Wisconsin, a complete
fabrication (if he really believed this whopper, I have some oceanside property
in Oklahoma to sell him).
A year ago, efforts were still
underway on recounts, especially in Wisconsin (which resulted in increasing
Trump’s margin of victory by 131 votes), and there was national television
advertising, costing millions of dollars, directed at the 306 people who had
been chosen to cast Electoral College presidential votes for Trump, to break
their pledges. (Seven electors did so and voted for third candidates, but five
of the defectors were from Mrs. Clinton.)
Plans were underway to disrupt the
inauguration, and engage in widespread civil disobedience; the new Democratic
National Committee chairman pledged “scorched earth” obstruction; Bruce
Springsteen, singing to bemused Antipodeans in Perth, Australia, crooned, “We
are the Resistance”; Madonna (who had generated a slight rise in Trump’s poll
numbers by promising to fellate wavering male voters who went for Hillary
Clinton) spoke of wanting to “blow up the White House.”
Veteran black-activist congressman
John Lewis said President Trump was “illegitimate,” and the ancient and
unfeasible congresswoman Maxine Waters screamed “Impeach 45,” for causes that
would become apparent as the process proceeded. Talk shortly turned to that option.
As the president and his wife and
party left Washington on May 19 for Saudi Arabia, Israel, the Vatican, and
Brussels, ABC political commentator Nate Silver rated the chances of
impeachment at between 25% and 50%, and David Gergen — a former assistant to
Presidents Reagan and Clinton, and a knowledgeable man until he joined CNN and
was infected by acute Blitzeritis — said, “We are moving into impeachment
territory.”
A long sequence of crises was
fanned by the Trumpophobic press: Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer
and the Statue of Liberty were (according to Mr. Schumer) weeping over the fate
of Yemenis and Libyans not allowed onto aircraft bound for the United States.
The president’s expressed thought over the Charlottesville riot — that Antifa
and the extreme section of Black Lives Matter that applauded the killing of
white policemen might be as odious as the Klan and American neo-Nazis — was
proof that Mr. Trump was a quasi-genocidal racist and apologist for slavery.
Mr. Trump virtually dismantled NATO
by not specifically mentioning the collective-security clause in his speech
there; was signing the death warrant of the planet when he pulled out of the
asinine Paris Climate Agreement; was going to blow up the world with Kim Jong
Un; and so forth, ad nauseam.
All the while, the Russian-collusion
fraud festered and grew, born of Clintonian denial and frenzied
finger-pointing, and reinforced by the Steele dossier — a pastiche of
scurrilous gossip and malice from the most dubious sources, including in the
Kremlin, cited by Mrs. Clinton in her absurd memoir of the election as proof of
her opponent’s treason.
Mrs. Clinton writes how she was
betrayed by the country and most people in it, but not by the husband with whom
she has enjoyed a storybook Pleasantville marriage.
It only emerged after the
publication of her book that Mrs. Clinton’s campaign had commissioned the
Steele dossier, and had spent $10 million on it from Democratic campaign funds.
(According to former party chair Donna Brazile, Mrs. Clinton had rigged the
nomination from her rival Bernie Sanders.)
The Clinton campaign desperately
shopped the Steele dossier to the American press in the last days of the
campaign. This was the all-time dirty trick of U.S. political history, and when
the rock was lifted and she was exposed as the sponsor of it, Mrs. Clinton
instantly switched gears and called it “campaign information.”
This last year, after the year of
his nomination and election, has been the second round of Donald Trump’s war to
crush and expel the American political establishment.
This year he has won over
the congressional Republican party, which had almost entirely opposed him, to
toil in the enactment of his program.
Together they have achieved the
greatest tax reform and reduction in over 30 years, largely emasculated
Obamacare, put a rod on the backs of those states that elect incompetents like
Jerry Brown and the Cuomos and lay the resulting state income taxes off on the
whole country, repatriated trillions of dollars of corporate profit, exonerated
over half the people from personal income taxes, reduced the return of 80
percent of taxpayers to a postcard, and produced conditions for 4% GDP growth
next year.
The Obama apologetics that a
flatlined economy with a shrunken work force and a burgeoning multitude of
Medicaid-sedated idleness was the new normal has been debunked; it is the
abnormal recent past.
For all of these and many similar
reasons, the assertions of even fair-minded and perceptive commentators that
Mr. Trump has done poorly in holding only between 37% and 40% popular approval
is mistaken. Considering the sustained assault of 90% of the press, in which
the normal honeymoon for a new president has been replaced by a daily press
assassination squad, he has done well.
In the post-Watergate era of the
criminalization of policy differences, instead of waiting a while before firing
the nuclear option as accusers had with Nixon, Reagan, and President Clinton,
Mr. Trump’s enemies fired this blockbuster after a few months.
Undismayed, he has
ripped open the facade of the Justice Department and the FBI and exposed
morally corrupt hacks within, while heaping praise on the FBI rank and file.
At year’s end, his enemies, battered
and almost unrecognizable from reruns of their gamecock assurance of a year,
let alone two years, ago, are reduced to the shabby jobbery of claiming he is
about to fire the special counsel.
Mr. Trump has cooperated entirely with the
special counsel, who has illegally seized evidence from the General Services
Administration, recruited and tolerated hysterically anti-Trump people on his
staff, and relied on the unspeakable Steele dossier, while a senior Justice
Department official has been caught red-handed in improper contact with Steele,
with whom the official’s wife worked during the election preparing the
anti-Trump dossier.
Donald Trump was a joke until
nominated, unelectable until elected, incompetent until he succeeded on most
fronts, and about to be impeached until he debunked the collusion nonsense; he
has had a very successful year.
His enemies have been weighed in the balance and they have been found wanting.
They shall have their reward.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all
readers, especially the president and Mrs. Trump.
