Still Dreaming of Watergate II

Conrad Black
https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/26/still-dreaming-of-watergate-ii/
March 26th, 2019

Of all the asinine and, at times, almost psychotic misstatements about the bone-crushing victory the president has won, the prize goes, with admirable historical symmetry, to John Dean.

It was Dean who led the destruction of lawyer-client privilege in the Watergate debacle, and with it, of much of America’s claim to be a society of laws. Having been the corrupt source of many of the most fatuous illegalities in the amateur obstruction put forward by members of President Richard Nixon’s entourage, John Dean was the first rat down the hawser, denouncing his client, employer, and benefactor with contemptuous disregard for the truth and in the supreme demonstration of the evil of the American plea bargain system.

This perversion of the justice system, more than anything else, has ensured that prosecutors in the United States, win a percentage of their cases about equal to those of North Korea and Cuba. They extort inculpatory evidence against the main target by threatening witnesses and give the denunciators immunity from perjury and a sweetheart sentence.

Dean’s performance exceeds in venality even the antics of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, American history’s most successful fiction-writers. (At least Gore Vidal acknowledged he was writing historical novels.) Odious though Woodward and Bernstein are, irritatingly imperishable though they are, as far as I know they didn’t break any laws and didn’t dishonor a learned profession. (Having employed thousands of journalists for decades, I can attest that they aren’t part of a profession and few of them are learned.)

With that preamble to remind us of what we are dealing with in John Dean, I cite his tweet on Friday night at 11:55, after news broke that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had given Attorney General William Barr his report and that he would recommend no more indictments: “Trump and his minions think they dodged a bullet. I have a notion—that Mueller delivered a bomb to AG Barr, who is now trying to figure out how to tell Trump in a way that doesn’t cause him to start World War III. Barr knows he works for a psycho.”
Thus are we reminded of the prescience and integrity of one of the sleaziest characters in American political history, the Michael Avenatti of his times, though thanks to the president he betrayed and traduced, he achieved an ostensibly serious position.

Democrats Vying to Embarrass Themselves

Others who inflict upon themselves more often than I do the cruel punishment of looking at the more egregiously bigoted news outlets are already presenting delicious examples of malicious and dishonest idiocy among the apostles of the Russian collusion fraud.
I cannot resist offering, however,  the two stupidest comments I heard from the bloated dunciad of Democratic presidential candidates. Naturally, the grand prize goes to the vapidest person ever touted as a presidential candidate in my 63 years as an observer of American politics, Beto O’Rourke. Just before the revelation that there would be no further indictments, Beto asserted his knowledge “beyond the slightest doubt” that the president was guilty, in effect, of high treason—that he would only escape the death penalty because the United States and Russia were not at war. (But neither were they when Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in 1953.) And the day Trump was completely cleared of the collusion suspicion, O’Rourke declared that the investigation of Trump must continue.
Close at Beto’s heels is the almost equally simple-minded and even more pretentious straw-haired airhead, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.). Standing in front of the Trump Hotel in Washington on Sunday, she called the president “a coward” and then Gillibrand (“I chose to be brave”) said he was still a prime suspect of collusion with Russia, 90 minutes before the release of the attorney general’s letter to the leaders of the Senate and House judiciary committees. I stop here, but not for any lack of other worthy contestants to win the sweepstakes for malice and foolishness.

In the convulsive aftermath of the sudden death of the whole impeachment fraud, the grievously outnumbered elements of the media who had kept their heads through the whole saga were severely overworked calling the witless majority of media assassins to account. The most durable and contemptible of all American media mythmakers, Carl Bernstein, claimed the role of the anti-Trump media was heroic and entirely admirable. He did so on CNN, and so was not asked by his co-defamer Brian Stelter, who although he is only 33, manages to look like he lost his hair fighting alongside Senator Da Nang Dick Blumenthal in Vietnam. Of course, Bernstein was not probingly questioned. He never has been. This mad and pandemical egotism of the Washington media is precisely the reason why this time, the almost suicidal failure of the media must be run to ground.

No Forgiveness Without Conversion

I am venerable enough to have been a publisher of small daily newspapers at the time of Watergate, and I was one of the very few who warned where the criminalization of policy differences would lead. Eventually, Richard Nixon will be seen as the troubled but courageous, talented, and irrepressible American hero and very successful president that he was, (and was always perceived to be by his scores of millions of followers). He has been short-changed in recognition of his greatness and over-penalized for his faults, but history will sort it out, as he knew. (I had the privilege of knowing him in his last five years.)

The same ghastly group-narcissism that showered media awards among the Watergate jackals flared up again, like Camus’ description of the Plague, with Pulitzers to the New York Times and Washington Post for their obscene campaigns of lies about Trump-Russian collusion. The president spoke nothing but the truth when he said on Monday: “It was an illegal take-down that failed.”

It need hardly be emphasized that the right to freedom of expression is sacrosanct, and any attempt to muzzle or intimidate the media would be anathema. Even so, as the almost certain crimes of Hillary Clinton and some of her inner circle and allies—former intelligence chiefs John Brennan (now desperately backpedaling), and James Clapper, the FBI’s own James Comey and Andrew McCabe, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch and her deputy Sally Yates, Yates’ successor Rod Rosenstein, and many lesser figures—are resurrected and charged, untainted elements of the media must conduct a process of chastisement and reinduction of their wayward colleagues. The mercy of forgiveness must await those visited by the grace of conversion, in this case to honest reporting and the separation of reporting of facts from tendentious personal opinion. (Both must be expressed, but not commingled.)

Having been the victim of the evils of the American criminal justice system, I would not have it inflicted on others. In any case, I do not believe in the incarceration of nonviolent, first-time offenders. I wouldn’t ask more than some community service for those who seriously broke the law in the 2016 election and its aftermath.

But it was an attempted coup that would never have come to light if Hillary Clinton had won. The perpetrators must be given the opportunity to atone for their crimes and expiate them, and American posterity must understand the sanctity of the constitutional process. Those who deliver great nations from terrible fates are not always people who seem to have been selected by casting studios. This president’s imperfections are not indiscernible, but he has shown himself to be a courageous and indomitable leader in excruciatingly difficult circumstances. And he is the president; those who want him out can vote against him at the next election.

Having expressed my wish for gentle sentencing, I proclaim what must now be the wish of the majority toward those who so gravely threatened the democratic republican system of American government. I am not a pious man, but so important is the proper outcome of this prolonged crisis, I am moved to cite Judeo-Christian Scripture: “God of Vengeance, God to whom vengeance belongs; show Thyself.” Then it will be time for mercy, even unto the most unworthy, who shall be nameless, such as John Dean and Carl Bernstein.

Conrad Black: The absurd collusion delusion goes up in smoke at last

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/conrad-black-the-absurd-collusion-delusion-goes-up-in-smoke-at-last
March 29, 2019

It was amply documented that the Russians meddled in the election and made repeated efforts to associate with the Trump campaign, but that all such overtures were rebuffed

As the Trump-Kremlin conspiracy vanishes in a flash and puff of smoke, the colossal absurdity of it suddenly becomes clearer. Former senior CIA and FBI officials — John Brennan and Andrew McCabe — said in the past two weeks that the president of the U.S. may be “an asset” of the government of the detritus of the old Soviet Union, a country shorn of more than half of its population and with a GDP smaller than Canada’s.

This was always an insane proposition. No U.S. major party presidential candidate would ever have considered colluding with a foreign government to rig an election, and no one who tried to would even get a security clearance. Yet practically the entire Democratic party and 80 percent of the American national media bought more or less fully into this Brobdingnagian canard.

The Clinton campaign commissioned a pastiche of defamatory falsehoods collected by a retired British spy and created an echo chamber between the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies, leaking parts of this spurious political assault document to the press and then citing the press references as evidence of its veracity. Even after it was fairly clear that this was what had probably happened, the collusion fable flourished imperishably. The majority of the U.S. national media constantly repeated the refrain for two years that the country’s elected leader had probably committed more grave crimes of national betrayal than those for which Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in 1953 (mere espionage).

Some of us who are published in the United States and appear on current affairs programs there sometimes warned that this was simply impossible and that the politicization of the intelligence agencies, including the FBI, was an extreme danger to constitutional government. Now the most comprehensive investigation in American history, surpassing even that of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, conducted by diehard Trump haters and Democratic activists who desperately wanted to find some truth in this mad fantasy, found, reassuringly, no evidence that any American colluded in any way with any foreigners to intervene in the election. It was amply documented that the Russians meddled in the election (ineffectually), and that they made repeated efforts to associate their efforts with the Trump campaign, but that all such overtures were rebuffed. The more high-minded American commentators recognized that this verdict was heartening to the whole country.

The attempt by President Trump’s enemies to cling to supposed ambiguity on the question of whether Trump obstructed justice is ridiculous. Attorney General William Barr explained in his letter to the Congressional judiciary committee leaders on Sunday that to charge obstruction (which special counsel Robert Mueller did not recommend), it would be necessary to be confident beyond a reasonable doubt that the suspect had committed an obstructive act with corrupt intent in regard to a judicial proceeding, and that neither he nor the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein (who had recommended the firing of the FBI director, James Comey, and had appointed Mueller in the first place), nor the independent counsel of the Justice Department, considered that there was any evidence of any of the necessary ingredients for an obstruction charge, and they had been examining the issue for the 30 days since Mueller had forewarned the attorney general of his findings. That turkey won’t fly any better than the Russian collusion fable.

This astonishing state of affairs arose because Donald Trump successfully attacked the entire political establishment for 20 years of fruitless wars and humanitarian crises in the Middle East, the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression, flat-lined living standards being the “new normal,” and a foreign policy that oscillated between George W. Bush’s trigger-happy foreign policy and Barack Obama’s declinist passivity and evaporating “red lines.” Such an election upset caused great stupefaction, especially because Trump had spent much of his career in shadowy, over-publicized, and often hucksterish activities that sometimes were outright flimflam. His career and public personality invited suspicion that he was ethically challenged. From these unique circumstances, the monster of the Russian collusion fraud was born and lurched about for over two years.

The imputation of base motives to Trump is not surprising, but the supreme defamation of treason is the most disgraceful character assassination in American political history. It was part of a largely uncoordinated scheme in which all of the men just named, and the former attorney general and deputy attorney general (Loretta Lynch and Sally Yates), as will be deduced from hearings and investigations that are in some cases already underway, politicized impartial national security agencies and attempted to influence a presidential election, and then to undo the result of that election. All the agitation and histrionics of Democratic committee chairmen in the House of Representatives about new investigations is just hot air.

The unearthing of the anti-Trump conspiracy will produce shocking revelations of misconduct by high intelligence and federal police officials; this is the last stop before the outright intervention of the armed forces: tanks on the White House lawn and generals and admirals commandeering television stations to announce the overthrow of the government. It will all be sorted out in a way that discourages a repetition. This is the scandal and the menace, not this unutterable bunk about collusion with Russia. Trump countered the hostile 80 or 90 per cent of the national media with his dominance of the talk shows, local media, social media, and the powers of communication of his office. He is, in his way, a very effective communicator, and he maintained his army of supporters intact in a very hostile media climate. He is already rising in the polls now.

Canada is, of all foreign countries, the most generally informed about American affairs, and it was almost monochromatically credulous toward these nonsensical charges against the president. It need hardly be emphasized that Donald Trump is a singularly un-Canadian personality. He is many things that Canadians are not and don’t generally admire. Nothing is wrong with that; he has no reason to care what Canadians think and Canadians have no obligation to like him. But we do have an obligation to ourselves to recognize and describe American political events accurately and even perceptively. No one seriously expects the Europeans to figure out American affairs. They generally stereotype Americans (along with Canadians) and even the British rarely have any concept of the U.S. apart from New York, Washington and Los Angeles, interesting cities which fortunately don’t much influence U.S. national elections.

The long-impressive magazine, the Economist, is utterly clueless and impenetrably condescending in its American political coverage. (Mercifully, my subscription of 60 years lapsed just after I read in the Economist that the president’s future would be determined by Michael Cohen.) Almost all foreigners missed the greatest American political story in 150 years — the attempted manipulation of a presidential election by the country’s intelligence and federal police forces.

There may have been other commentators than I in this country who warned what was really happening in these controversies, but I don’t recall many. Every time I appeared with other people on television discussing this, there were always complacent assurances that “the noose is tightening on Trump” and “the walls are closing in” and so forth. Our media failed. Our correspondents in Washington just took the feed from the Trump-haters and did precisely nothing to explain what was really happening, or to prepare the Canadian public for the outcome, or even comment intelligently after the collusion bubble burst. Dislike of Trump, I repeat, is quite understandable, but an almost complete failure of our media that focuses on Washington to grasp, even after the revelation of it, what was really unfolding there, is inexcusable.

Democrats - The Looney Tunes Party

The Emerging Democratic Minority

The party is doing its best to squander the limited victory it won in 2018.

Conrad Black
http://www.conradmblack.com/1457/the-emerging-democratic-minority
March 12, 2019

The biases of the media are so pervasive that there is little recognition of the steady disintegration of the Democrats, though it is occurring every day. Rational and intelligent members of the center-Left write to me every week with new concerns about where the Left is going. The Democratic National Committee’s decision not to allow Fox News to put on one of their candidates’ debates confirms the weakness of the party and of its leaders. The process of atomizing society into smaller and smaller bearers of less and less widespread grievances, on each of which the whole movement of protest, uproot, reveal, and punish is in constant paroxysms of righteousness, is becoming louder and faster and more absurdly overwrought by the day.

To take the most prominent recent examples, the Democratic leadership has declared the Trump tax cuts and reform to be a “disaster . . . the worst legislation in history . . . crumbs” (Speaker Pelosi) for the country, and a huge payoff for the rich. Economic growth has doubled, real incomes are increasing in the middle-class and working-class income levels for the first time in 20 years, and the country has more jobs to fill than unemployed people to fill them. The Democratic leadership has not just contested the existence of a serious problem at the southern border; it has flirted with proposing the abolition of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, and Beto O’Rourke, who outspent prominent incumbent senator Ted Cruz three to one in Texas and came close to winning last year, not only opposes building a defined border but urges that whatever fencing and other obstacles are now in place be removed. At the same time, most official Democrats support the legal effort to prohibit the Census Bureau, in pursuing its constitutional duty to determine the apportionment of state delegations to the House of Representatives and the Electoral College, from asking people about their citizenship, just as they have long waived the necessity of being a citizen to vote.

Democratic congressman Eric Swalwell (California) has sponsored legislation to protect the media from the purported threat of physical assault by President Trump and has made a television tour throughout the Cohen road-show saying that anyone who needed “a fixer” shouldn’t be president.

Donald Trump was a New York billionaire property developer, impresario, and reality-television star, not a librarian in Swalwell’s native Sac City, Iowa. Rich and active New Yorkers do need fixers (though Trump could have done better than Cohen). American presidents need to be worldlier than they recently have been, not moralistic yokels. Swalwell is a 38-year-old fourth-term congressman who, like much of the population, is contemplating a presidential run. Another Democratic congressman, whose name I decided I did not want to know or remember shortly after his soundbite began over the weekend, said that all the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees’ subpoenas of the Trump entourage would not have been necessary if Trump had published his tax returns.

This is the moronic level to which the opposition has excavated. Trump’s tax returns have been audited, and often contested, every year for over 40 years by the IRS. If there were anything substantial lying dead under his fiscal floorboards, Trump’s returns would be plastered and illuminated in Times Square, and Rachel Maddow would read them to viewers every night with the same breathy and then crestfallen excitement that she exhibited last year when reading from a questionably obtained Trump tax return that he had in one year paid “only . . . 55 million dollars.” It was 18 months ago that Senator Chris Coons of Delaware declared that Trump’s tax returns would reveal the Russian collusion to rig the election. The last Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Tim Kaine, on discovering that Trump’s son and son-in-law had met with a Russian woman at the Trump Tower, announced that treason may have occurred.

For two years it was thought Mueller would be the deus ex machina who would end the imposture and terminate the aberrant Trump presidency. Now that it is clear that this is not happening, the Democrats, completely shameless at having to start all over with a new canard about Trump’s illegitimate election, are calling for U-Hauls full of materials and scores of witnesses to again unleash the motor-mouthed non-stop-talking television airheads to tell us once more that we don’t know what we don’t know, and just because Mueller couldn’t do it in two years with 15 investigators (so rabidly anti-Trump that some were fired and all had to be brought into the office on leash), that doesn’t mean Trump isn’t a criminal. Elizabeth Warren, self-remade into one of the ludicrous figures of American public life over her claim to being a beer-swilling native, tells cheering crowds that Trump may finish his term in prison. Liberal high-mindedness has reached its coronation; the debasement of the Eleanor Roosevelt tradition.

Because this president had never sought or held any public office, elected or unelected, or a high military position, his presidential candidacy, which was the subject of such uproarious mirth until he was elected, has incited the inference that anyone, everyman (and woman), can be elected to that position. Thus the field of possible Democratic candidates has become absurdly crowded with absolute poltroons. It is like a New York City Marathon for the unfit. Governor Jay Inslee of Washington, who, when a guest in the White House, reprimanded the president for sending too many tweets, and who was chief judge-shopper for the initial fatuous district-court ruling purporting to exercise the president’s rights over immigration, is running for president on the climate-change issue. His own measures on the subject were rejected in his home state. Americans, rightly, do not consider this a pressing issue, but he wants to ride this hobbyhorse to the White House.

There are more than 30 possible or already declared Democratic candidates, and all but three or four tick at least three of the following high-explosive booby-trap boxes: a draconian green program based on Ocasio La Pasionaria’s intuition that without it the world will burn up in twelve years; personal-income-tax rates in the 70 percent range; legalized infanticide; completely nationalized health care; open borders and no attempt to distinguish citizens from noncitizens; and vast reparations to African Americans, Latinos, and native people.

The Trump-hating media are enablers of a fantasy game in which everyone pretends that the Democratic party has a large number of interesting, qualified, sensible people to choose from to knock off this president. The true evidence of what is happening is that the canaries in the mineshaft are falling over. There were only four putative candidates who had the position, recognition, and sensible perspective to make a serious race. Michael Bloomberg (who has drunk himself half-silly with the climate-change Kool-Aid) has gone to his default position of aiming for secretary of state, as he did with Jeb Bush and Hillary. He left the race, and Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio followed him. Amy Klobuchar is unlikely to have the flair to win, but she is a presentable candidate. The inevitable Joe Biden, who first ran for president in 1988 but was knocked out for cribbing a platitudinous line from defeated British Labour-party leader Neil Kinnock, seems likely to make the race.

In fact, Joe Biden is the man America needs. To be sure, he could not possibly win, and he does not have the judgment or moral authority to be an effective president. But he is an amiable old water buffalo who would make a somewhat respectable race and gather together the many Democratic constituencies that are now proliferating and multiplying like an aggressive virus, and by his honorable example, though failing to excite anyone, might also prevent every sane Democrat from voting Republican. Biden might spare his party a terrible fate and deliver it to a serious contender in 2024, when the country could be expected to continue its now well-established pattern of alternating parties in the White House every eight years. The polls are not now asking the questions they will in 18 months: Trump will have delivered on the economy, illegal immigration, trade, energy, and avoidance of foreign-policy fiascos, and his opponents are mainly quacks. America needs a two-party system with sane people at the head of each. Joe Biden is no world-beater, but he could spare the Democrats a world-historic beating at the polls next year.

The Cohen Fiasco

Conrad Black
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/michael-cohen-testimony-trump-impeachment-case-democrats/
March 4, 2019

Democrats are doing their feeble best to build an impeachment case against the president, but it won’t succeed.

The whole state of national political discourse has risen a notch, but not from elevated content, rather from a de-escalation of the tawdriness and vituperation of discredited allegations. As the abysmal, shaming failure of the Russian-collusion fraud reveals itself in the run-up to the production of the Mueller report, the president’s accusers, without even a subliminal hint of embarrassment, regret, or belated moderation, lower their sights.

Let us recall that two years ago, all manner of groups were staging sizable marches all over the world announcing, in Bruce Springsteen’s words (from Perth, Australia), the beginning of the Resistance. The New York Times’ Tom Friedman asserted that the Russian influence on the 2016 election was an infringement of U.S. sovereignty on the same scale as the attacks on Pearl Harbor and the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Hillary Clinton was putting the finishing touches on her book about the 2016 election, which explained that she had lost because of Donald Trump’s treasonable collusion with the Russians in the Kremlin’s tactical interventions in the campaign, and because she was “shivved three times by Jim Comey.” (Never mind that two of these applications of the shiv were exonerations and another was almost certainly a whitewash of illegal conduct.)

Two years ago, the congressional Republican party was sitting on its hands, waiting to see if the president who had run against them as much as against the Democrats would be impeached. Whole conversations between the president and foreign leaders were being leaked, and personnel were coming and going from important positions in the White House in a blur of constant change magnified by the rabidly hostile media. When President Trump spoke to the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) two years ago, he was received politely but tentatively, hopefulness tempered by astonishment and disbelief. At that time, Nathan Silver was predicting that Trump’s chances of impeachment were 50–50, and even the sober David Gergen said on CNN “We are moving into impeachment country.” An immense media effort was made to enhance his vulnerability by dragging his approval ratings down into the 30s. His following has been unshakable.

When the president returned to CPAC on Saturday, it was clear from beginning to end of his extraordinary appearance, speaking largely extempore for over two hours, that he was the head of a united Republican party and a conservative movement lined up to the last male and female combatant behind him. His leadership of the Republicans is now as unambiguous as that of Ronald Reagan and Dwight Eisenhower, an astounding feat in these uproarious circumstances, and given that he is much more of an outsider than Reagan was. (In the case of Eisenhower, the party grandees came caps-in-hand to the general and asked him to run, and Richard Nixon delivered the California delegates to provide the margin of victory in seating the Eisenhower delegates over those pledged to Senate leader Robert A. Taft in a number of contested states, in exchange for the vice presidency.)

Richard Nixon in 1972, on his way to what still stands as the greatest plurality victory in American presidential history (18 million votes in an electorate only about 60 percent the size of the present one), faced a primary challenge, and won only about 68 percent in the New Hampshire primary, though he swept everything after that. At this point, despite obscure audible ruminations in rural church basements by Maryland governor Larry Hogan and John Kasich, former governor of Ohio, not even a mouse is stirring in the Republican party, and the president’s tour de force at CPAC reinforced his position as the head of the entire country to the right of Joe Biden and Michael Bloomberg. If he is not running next year against either of those men, or possibly Amy Klobuchar or Sherrod Brown, that will be his likely percentage of votes cast next year, around 60 percent. If he is running against one of the few plausible centrists in the Democratic scrum, his margin could narrow to about 10 percent, which is still nearly 15 million votes.

As the Democrats take to the lifeboats from their foundering ship of impeachment, the unsinkables who have eschewed life vests are still declaiming on the tilting deck. Jerry Nadler is claiming the president’s 1,100 public references to the Mueller inquiry as a witch-hunt constituted obstruction of justice, and the unstoppable talking head Adam Schiff is still repeating the existence of evidence of Trump–Russian collusion (that he can’t identify and no one else has seen). Their fallback position, when they finally take the order to abandon ship on Russian collusion, is to make Trump’s entire career their province and try to paw through everything he ever did commercially, back to childhood lemonade stands. Of course, this will be a complete failure. The president can ignore these subpoenas and restrict compliance to specific issues, and endless trips up the court ladder could easily retard the progress of this nonsense until the public has entirely lost interest. These are not the same Nadler and Schiff of two years ago, who had thin lines of foam and saliva at the corners of their mouths as they solemnly announced that they had cornered the president.

The Trump-hating media did their best with Michael Cohen, a man who again lied to Congress last week, claimed to have flipped against Trump after Charlottesville nearly two years ago, and affirmed that there was no Trump–Russian collusion, although, while the president had never told him to pay off the stripper who was trying to blackmail Trump (Stormy Daniels), he had used a coded method of urging him to do so, which Cohen couldn’t describe. We have descended from hearsay from a self-confessed liar to hear-intuition from the same majestic source, and the Democrats are so desperate they are having him back in the days immediately preceding his incarceration. We have descended from the drama of the conceivable removal of the world’s premier officeholder to the squalid fabricated evidence of a pathetic plea bargainer, ground to powder by the partisan Mueller meat-grinder.

The Democrats and their media organ monkeys have done their best to sound unctuous and morally outraged and pretend that a credible witness has produced real evidence of a “high crime,” and that an unadmitted response to attempted blackmail constitutes a campaign-finance violation, which is itself a constitutional high crime. But no one believes any of it, and no one cares. This clunker will take the dead-cat bounce, like all the others, including the weekly bubble of rage about the president’s son-in-law receiving a security clearance. The country is tired of it. Those who detest Trump detest him. Those who like him are no less convinced or numerous than they were. But the modest no-man’s land between them is breaking in the president’s favor as he edges slowly up in the polls. There are no more plausible revelations; there is no doubt of the country’s economic performance, and the administration is clearly moving coherently and steadily in foreign policy.

In the absence of any new sensational or substantive anti-Trump argument, of anything to justify the howls of racism and misogyny of two years ago, the Resistance is doomed with their nonsense about Cohen and obstruction, and the Never Trumpers are mercifully silent. And those who merely disapprove of Trump, with sadness and nostalgia for more stylish and chivalrous times, such as Peggy Noonan, are back to the character issue. This is legitimate as a reservation about the president and a reason not to vote for him, but it won’t fly as grounds for impeachment, and is not claimed to be by those who articulate it.

The country knew in 2016 that it was gambling on a garish, financially checkered New York development wheeler-dealer television reality-show star and downmarket impresario. They gambled that someone as far out of the familiar mold of the OBushintons as Trump was could be justified to try to reverse the post-Reagan slide in America’s morale, economic competitiveness, and standing in the world. By a hair’s breadth, the gamble succeeded, and so far, Trump supporters are reassured. Every conceivable epithet and charge has been hurled at Trump, and there is almost nothing to any of it. We’re only 20 months from the next election and the Democrats, with no show-stopper to disqualify Trump, are scrambling to the left like lemmings to mount a radical alternative to the incumbent. If one of the few Democratic moderates can’t get control of the runaway bus, it will go over the cliff. If they can, it will still break down on its axles as the long-delayed inquiry into the skullduggery of the politicized Obama Justice Department and intelligence agencies oozes into the public’s nostrils. The Democrats have had their long turn at mudslinging. Now professionally and discreetly, it is time to unearth the real scandal from the last election.

7 Signs Trump Will Landslide 2020

7 Signs Trump Will Landslide 2020

Kevin McCullough, https://townhall.com/columnists/kevinmccullough/2019/03/03/7-signs-trump-will-landslide-2020-n2542498

March 3, 2019

If the 2020 election were held today President Donald Trump would win by a bigger margin than in 2016, carrying the most number of states since the Re-election of President Ronald Reagan.

I say this because like I did two years before Barack Obama was elected, I saw trends that added up to a significant win, I noted them in this column, and they occurred in near complete detail. 

In 2016 with polls and every media pundit, and even many of his own supporters doubting the outcome of the election, I predicted the map that would match the election night result minus one western state and one congressional district in Maine.

As in those two cases I’m not claiming some sort of prescience. Rather I’m saying the momentum on the ground seems to tell us something different than perhaps what social media, old media, recent history or even traditional political logic would seem to indicate will happen.

It won’t come without a major amount of hard work. (Something then Candidate Trump demonstrated in 2016 in greater abundance all while spending far less money than his opponent.) But the signs point to an enormous win.

Here’s some of what I see:

17 of 30 above 50.The latest Gallup polling data released this week indicates perhaps the most telling reason. President Trump won 30 states on election night. President Trump’s approval rating on the day he was sworn into office was 45%. For perspective Presidents Obama, Clinton, & Reagan were at 47%, 46%, & 40% finishing up February of the third year. All of them cruised to re-election. Trump’s approval in Gallup is 44% and continues to hover around 50% in Rasmussen where he spent almost the entirety of February. But in Gallup’s most recent survey the key is where his strength is centered. The top 30 states where President Trump’s approval is the highest, mirror the 30 states he carried on election night. With the top 17 of those 30 sitting above 50%, exceeding 60% in more than one. Simply repeating wins in these 30 states insures victory.

(Final Election Map 2016)

16 of 20 below 40.A deeper look reveals room for growth in additional states. On election night Trump lost 20 states (a couple of them by lower margins than Hillary’s closest state losses.) Yet in only 16 of those 20 does his approval rating sit below the 40% threshold. Colorado and Minnesota sit at 39%. New Mexico at 38%. Surely Brad Parscale strategically understands that 7 additional states are within reach. He is likely already on the ground and on the web targeting those pro-jobs, pro-growth, pro-commonsense pockets and developing effective messaging to reach them.

(Gallup Polling’s Current Job Approval)

The Complicit Media.The media has already convinced themselves of the impossibility of a Trump re-election similarly to how they were popping corks on the Hillary Presidency in 2016. The inability to react to their free market which continues to give them lower ratings and smaller audiences at every turn seems to point to a delusional run at coverage for 2020 that will be worse—not better—than 2016. And the more they do, the more Trump wins. The President has outpaced all who have come before him in understanding how to actually make the media work for him. And in his term it has simply been to allow them to demonstrate their abject deranged bias, while he uses the power of rallies and Twitter to not just respond, but to direct and redirect the news cycle. They are in a sense his greatest ally—simply because their hatred and bias seem undeterred.

The Corrupt New Guard. One of the most interesting things about Trump’s approval ratings is that they occur largely in the most biased media environment in history. Another item of interest is the lack of clear leadership from the opposing party. In addition, the voices that are the loudest stemming from the Democrats (so much so that they have been universally embraced by every Democratic presidential hopeful to date) are the most out of touch with swing states. The Ocasio-Cortez-Omar-Tlaib nexus is a crossroads to out-of-touch that the Democrats may have long believed but would never be foolish enough to campaign on. Americans do not have $93 trillion dollars to put toward the New Green Deal. Most American cities would welcome 25,000 new jobs and $27 billion in new taxable revenues. Most Americans do not align themselves with dictators, defend groups aligned with terrorism, nor argue that former citizens that have joined terrorist groups be allowed back into America. New scandals have emerged concerning Ocasio-Cortez’ hypocrisy in jet travel and questionable residency in her district. Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib have also both been implicated in questionable use of and laundering of donor money in payments to themselves or their boyfriend. Ocasio-Cortez is also prepping a hit list of democrats she will help primary in 2020 for the extreme offense of listening to their district as opposed to “her” in how they vote in the 2019 Congress.

The Known President.As a backdrop to the utter nonsense of the Democrats President Trump is demonstrating greater Presidential leadership than the media has ever indicated possible. Many fell into the meme that the Vietnam summit with the North Korean dictator would turn out to be like Obama’s extreme desperation in seeking the Iran deal. What actually happened was The President pulled a page from the Reagan playbook and walked out on a negotiation that he sensed was not productive. Many observers believe that the results will be similar: Reagan eventually disarmed Gorbachev. Trump may just disarm Kim. Additionally the domestic success of Trump policy has surpassed historic possibility. President Trump is having the transformational impact that President Obama so desperately wished he could have. More people of every race, sex, and background are working better jobs, making better wages, and living better lives than we’ve ever measured in history. The President is also making good on delivering a more secure border and in the process increasing his approval ratings with voters who The Democrats have long taken for granted.

The Unknown Candidate.Though we do not know who will face off against the President in the general election of 2020, some things are increasingly clear. They all represent a clear regression on the progress that the current administration has delivered. This is why they hope against hope that one of the many impeachment-priming committees will uncover something that both houses of Congress, multiple media outlets, and to date a broadly empowered Special Counsel have been unable to. The candidate will be forced to embrace socialism or face the wrath of the new hardliners on the left. And with California being such an early primary state in this cycle expect the wildest most extreme public policy positions to emerge. Hence it is important to remember that the “democrats” who vote in the general election in the entirety of the rust belt will have little in common with “The Democrat” who wins California’s presidential primary.

The Blue State, The Red Map. So how does he do it? With people like “@AOC” becoming every day faces (as well as the number two—only behind President Trump—influencer on social media) of The opposition party? Simple. The darker the hard blue states become, the easier it is for purple states to turn pink.

If held today... what KMC believes would happen.

The issue comes down to this: 

With the President holding 90% of his base, and with his best approval ratings occurring in the 30 states he already won…

With Democrats holding Congress and the 13% approval rating that comes with it…

With Democrats watching 4-7 additional states beginning to slip through their fingers because of an improved economy, higher wages, better border security, and a long list of presidential promises kept…

With Democrats proposing ill-conceived non-solutions that show (according to analysts) only marginal climate alteration after they warn us that we will die in 12 years and a $93 trillion dollar price tag…

It appears (pretty convincingly) that President Trump will earn a second term. 

And given the options, more people in more states seem to be coming to the same conclusion.

Trump’s Re-Election Chances May Be Better Than You Think

By Victor Davis Hanson
https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/16/trumps-re-election
January 17,  2019

What are Donald Trump’s chances for re-election in 2020?

If history is any guide, pretty good.

In early 1994, Bill Clinton’s approval rating after two years in office hovered around a dismal 40 percent. The first midterm elections of the Clinton presidency were an utter disaster.

A new generation of younger, more conservative Republicans led by firebrand Newt Gingrich and his “Contract with America” gave Republicans a majority in the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years. Republicans also picked up eight Senate seats in 1994 to take majority control of both houses of Congress.

It was no wonder that Republicans thought the 1996 presidential election would be a Republican shoo-in. But Republicans nominated 73-year-old Senate leader Bob Dole, a sober but otherwise uninspired Washington fixture.

By September of 1996, “comeback kid” Clinton had a Gallup approval rating of 60 percent. Dole was crushed in an Electoral College landslide.

Barack Obama was given a similarly dismal prognosis after the 2010 midterms, when Democrats lost 63 House seats and six Senate seats. Republicans regained majority control of the House, though Democrats clung to a narrow majority in the Senate. At the time, Obama had an approval rating in the mid-40s.

Republicans once again figured Obama would be a one-term president. Yet they nominated a Dole-like candidate in the 2012 election. Republican nominee Mitt Romney had little appeal to Republicans’ conservative base and was easily caricatured by the left as an out-of-touch elite.

By late 2012, Obama’s approval rating was consistently at or above 50 percent, and he wound up easily beating Romney.

What is the significance of these rebound stories for Trump, who had a better first midterm result than either Clinton or Obama and similarly low approval ratings?

People, not polls, elect presidents.

Presidents run for re-election against real opponents, not public perceptions. For all the media hype, voters often pick the lesser of two evils, not their ideals of a perfect candidate.

We have no idea what the economy or the world abroad will be like in 2020. And no one knows what the country will think of the newly Democrat-controlled Congress in two years.

The public has been hearing a lot from radical new House representatives such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.). Their pledges to deliver “Medicare for All,” to phase out fossil fuels and to abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service are occasionally delivered with snark. Tlaib recently used profanity to punctuate her desire to see Trump impeached.

But much of the public supports Trump’s agenda of deregulation, increased oil and gas production, getting tough with China on trade, and stopping illegal immigration.

What if the Democrats impeach Trump, even knowing that a Republican Senate would never convict him?

When Republicans did that to Bill Clinton, his approval rating went up. Some Republican senators even joined the Democrats in the effort to acquit Clinton. As a reward for the drawn-out drama around the impeachment, Republicans lost seats in both the 1998 and 2000 House elections.

We still don’t have any idea whom the Democrats will nominate to run against Trump. Will they go the 1996 or 2012 Republican route with a predictable has-been such as Joe Biden, who will turn 78 shortly after the 2020 election?

Well-known candidates from the Senate such as Walter Mondale in 1984, Dole in 1996, John Kerry in 2004, John McCain in 2008 and Hillary Clinton in 2016 have a poor recent track record in recent presidential elections. They are usually nominated only by process of elimination and the calling in of political chits rather than due to grassroots zeal.

Democrats can continue their hard-left drift and nominate socialist Bernie Sanders, or they can try again to elect the first female president, either Kamala Harris or Elizabeth Warren, both of whom represent the far left.

But going to extremes did not work well in 1972, when leftist Democratic Sen. George McGovern was crushed by incumbent Richard Nixon. The Republicans learned that lesson earlier when they nominated Sen. Barry Goldwater in 1964 and were wiped out.

Whether or not they like Trump, millions of voters still think the president is all that stands between them and socialism, radical cultural transformation and social chaos.

Many would prefer Trump’s sometimes-over-the-top tweets and hard bark to the circus they saw at the Brett Kavanaugh nomination hearings, the rantings of Ocasio-Cortez, or the endless attempts to remove Trump from office.

What usually ensure one-term presidencies are unpopular wars (Lyndon Johnson) or tough economic times (Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush).

If Trump avoids both, perhaps a majority of voters will see him as political chemotherapy—occasionally nausea-inducing but still necessary and largely effective—to stop a toxic and metastasizing political cancer.

Why Trump is Destined for an Historic 2020 Win

By Conrad Black
https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/28/why-trump-is-destined-for-an-historic-2020-win/
February 28th, 2019

Each week, as the thundering host of Democratic seekers of their party’s 2020 presidential nomination scramble for attention and try to outflank their rivals to the left, that party rolls out a new policy proposal that lurches further away from where the solid center of American politics has always resided. The most transformative presidents, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, to adapt a sports metaphor, moved center-field, 10 yards to the left under Roosevelt, and 10 yards to the right under Reagan, but always between the 30-yard lines.

In the five elections between 1876 and 1892, the popular vote was always very close, and the Democrats actually led four times, losing in 1880 by only 2,000 votes out of 9 million cast (James A. Garfield defeated Winfield S. Hancock). Even so, their candidate was only victorious twice; both times with Grover Cleveland. The Republicans ran as the party of Lincoln and Grant and victory in the Civil War, and kept expanding veterans’ pensions more widely among their families. The Democrats prevented the emancipated slaves from voting in the South, states they won en bloc, while they rounded up immigrant and working-class votes with their political machines in the great cities of the North and Midwest. Thus the popular vote was deceiving, as the Democrats won almost all the votes in the South and the Republicans won safely enough in the North.

But policy differences revolved mainly around the tariff—the Democrats wanted lower tariffs to get lower prices for the working and middle classes and the Republicans wanted higher tariffs to promote domestic manufacturing growth and profits.

Democrats then departed the center of the political field starting in 1896, when they nominated for the first of three times William Jennings Bryan, a Nebraskan who promoted a radical increase in the money supply by issuing silver as well as gold-backed currency: bimetallism. The Republicans won the next four elections easily, and only lost in 1912 when Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft split the vote, enabling Democrat Woodrow Wilson to win. His margin was over 3 percent (570,000 votes), because of the unrepresentative margin in the South, but it was still a hair’s-breadth election as he only won California (10 percent of the country’s population) by under 4,000 votes out of 1 million cast in the state. Wilson won on his slogan “He kept us out of war” but delivered his speech to Congress requesting a declaration of war less than a month after he was inaugurated the second time.

The Republicans won the three elections in the twenties quite easily and then, with the Great Depression and World War II, the Democrats won five straight terms under Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman.

Since then, the parties have alternated two-term presidencies, with the exception that Democrats receive a single term with Jimmy Carter, and the Republicans three terms with Reagan-Bush (1981-1993); the election of George H.W. Bush may be seen substantially as a reward for the public’s satisfaction with President Reagan. Thus, since Cleveland left office in 1897, there has only been one occasion when either party has not received at least two terms (Carter 1977-1981). Between Wilson and George W. Bush, the second term was one-sided, and usually a landslide: Coolidge in 1924 (25 percent margin), Roosevelt in 1936 (24 percent), Eisenhower in 1956 (15 percent), Johnson in 1964 (23 percent), Nixon in 1972 (23 percent), Reagan in 1984 (18 percent), and Clinton in 1996 (9 percent). George W. Bush and Barack Obama were narrowly reelected because—unlike FDR, Ike, LBJ, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan—they did not do especially well in their first terms.

For 2020, Democratic rhetoric and the conventional wisdom relentlessly inflicted on the country by the anti-Trump media claque holds that Trump should be easy to defeat, because his polls have never risen above 50 percent. This is meaningless chatter because it neglects to remember that Trump in 2016 was running against the Republicans as much as the Democrats. As someone who changed his party registration seven times in 13 years, Trump had no call on party loyalty. In the first six months of his presidency, the congressional Republicans sat on their hands and were not entirely averse to the voluminous musings about impeachment. In the only sensible sentence I ever heard from former Arizona senator and ardent NeverTrumper Jeff Flake, “It’s the president’s party now.”

In 2020 there won’t be a split such as that caused by Ross Perot to defeat the senior Bush in 1992 and probably Robert Dole in 1996; and Trump’s record seems certain to be much more successful that Carter’s, who had 20 percent interest rates, high inflation, unemployment, and taxes to deal with in 1980. Whatever happens with the current southern border state of emergency, Trump is putting a border in place and has won that argument. The country wants a border, without government shutdowns. Trump has worked the “Mexico will pay for it” nonsense into the facts of more favorable trade arrangements and has kept faith with his followers, unlike the Bush “No new taxes” pledge in 1988.

Trump is not going to be running as an unsuccessful president as Carter did, or even as a marginally successful president as the Bushes and Obama did. He has delivered tax cuts and reform and great prosperity, as Reagan did, and he is the first president to deal seriously with illegal immigration and oil imports and nuclear proliferation to rogue states (Iran and North Korea), since those crises arose. He has refused to be stampeded by the eco-Marxists while doing nothing to backpedal on the environment itself, and has partially delivered on trade imbalances and will almost certainly reach a much improved trade arrangement with China.

Contrary to the assessments of Trump-haters who supposedly know something about the economy, such as Paul Krugman and the Economist magazine (which on the subject of Trump is as drivelingly hostile but not as amusing as Vanity Fair or the Daily Beast), this economy is not going to cool out appreciably in the next 18 months. As was mentioned here last week, the Democrats are going to pay heavily for the disgraceful Russian-collusion red herring.

To return to the thought at the top of this piece, the Democrats now look more like the Republicans of 1964 (Barry Goldwater) and the Democrats of 1972 (George McGovern), as the reality sinks in that Trump has demolished the post-Reagan bipartisan tweedle-dee-tweedle-dum politics of sloth, a depressing “new normal” and foreign policy impetuosity (Iraq War) or defeatism (Iran, North Korea, Syria). In the aftermath of this shock, the Democrats are like a suicide case contemplating Russian roulette with all chambers loaded, and they are the ones loading in the cartridges: open borders, a top personal income tax rate of around 70 percent, nationalized health care; legalized infanticide; a green policy that bans cars, airplanes, oil, coal, and bovine flatulence; and now reparations for African-Americans, and perhaps, says Senator Elizabeth Warren (0.5 percent American Indian), for the native people. Unless a sensible person like Michael Bloomberg or even Joe Biden—or possibly Amy Klobuchar or Sherrod Brown—gets hold of that party, the Democrats will self-inflict mortal wounds and give Trump the greatest plurality in history, (breaking Richard Nixon’s record of 18 million in 1972).

In 1944, Roosevelt focused on the spurious claim of a Republican congressional candidate that the president had sent a destroyer back to retrieve his dog in the Aleutian Islands, while returning from his Pearl Harbor meeting with General MacArthur and Admiral Nimitz. FDR’s Republican opponent, Thomas E. Dewey, found himself running against the president’s dog. In 1940, Roosevelt just had to recite the names of three reactionary congressmen: “Martin, Barton, and Fish,” and the absurdity of the refrain helped to win him a third term.

Trump is no Roosevelt (either one), but the Democrats seem to be yielding to the ineluctable urge that possesses each party every other generation, to utter a primal scream of nonsense, get everything off their chest and out of their system, be dragged to the padded cell by the voters, and regroup back at center-field four years later. It may even be good for them—as therapy, not as government.

The Resistance is Everything They Accuse Trump of Being

By Jim Daws
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/02/the_resistance_is_everything_they_accuse_trump_of_being.html
FEbruary 27, 2019

The defining characteristic of today’s Democrats is that most unattractive of human failings, hypocrisy.  Since Donald Trump’s improbable election, Dems and their media mouthpieces have been demanding that the rest of us recognize the existential threat he poses to the nation.  Their demands are based on a litany of accused authoritarian character traits and fascistic conduct that Trump obviously doesn’t hold and in fact never committed.  The reality is the Democrats are projecting -- accusing Trump of the very outrages that they themselves practiced in their obsession to prevent and then overturn his election.

The most ridiculous of these accusations is that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the election. Setting aside for the moment the massive economic damage Trump’s energy policies have inflicted on Russia’s fragile economy, let’s examine the Democrat’s actions to protect us from the Russian Bear.

The fictitious dossier, written by a foreign spy citing unnamed Russian intelligence sources, was deployed to smear Trump.  When the dossier failed to defeat him, it was used to justify endless investigations, congressional hearings, and ominous news coverage that hobbled his presidency, wrecked his efforts to improve relations with Russia and greatly diminished voters’ confidence in our democracy.  Only after this witch-hunt was set in motion was it revealed that the bogus dossier was a product of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

In classic KGB style, Obama’s administration deployed our nation’s intelligence agencies to infiltrate and spy on their political opponents.  Using paid informants -- believed to include, at minimum, Joseph Mifsud, Stefan Halper, Henry Greenberg and Felix Sader -- the political appointees heading our FBI and CIA attempted to entrap Trump’s campaign with monetary enticements and promises of Russian kompromat on Hillary Clinton.

Fearful of being held accountable and panicked after Trump’s long-shot election, the deputy attorney general and acting FBI director then conspired to unconstitutionally remove the incoming president using the 25th Amendment, which was intended to facilitate succession in the event of presidential physical or mental incapacitation.  Since Trump suffered no such incapacity, and it was never the DOJ or FBI’s role to allege that he did, this conspiracy is rightly seen as an attempted administrative coup d’etat similar to those against Soviet leaders Nikita Khrushchev and Mikhail Gorbachev.

Having failed, the same Deep State actors that committed these outrages then appointed a former FBI director to cover up their unconstitutional misdeeds. Robert Mueller organized a team of zealous Democrat partisans who promptly began a series of selective, political prosecutions -- of matters unrelated to collusion -- designed and conducted to terrorize and silence Trump associates. Under threat of financial ruin to their families and spending decades in Mueller’s gulag, many of the targets of these selective prosecutions predictably negotiated guilty pleas.

While these outrages have gone on, our very own American Pravda -- the Democrat’s mouthpieces in the mainstream media -- have published a steady stream of disinformation and propaganda designed to turn reality on its head and portray Trump as Vladimir Putin’s puppet instead of the target of Soviet-inspired tactics employed by Obama’s police state.  Long after Russiagate has been debunked by the emerging alternative media, the legacy media and leftwing cable outlets continue to perpetrate this hoax.

As important as propaganda to the Soviet’s control of their citizens was suppressing dissident voices.  Silicon Valley’s Democratic tech titans are engaged is a similar effort to silence opposing opinions. Using their near-total control of internet search, Google and YouTube are downranking content that they deem noncompliant with leftist dogma.  On social media, Facebook, and Twitter now regularly deplatform and censor users who speak verboten right-wing thoughts. All the while the Democrat’s media “watchdogs” orchestrate well-funded campaigns to scare advertisers away from conservative broadcasters and internet sites.

When all else failed, the Soviets engaged in violence to punish and suppress political opposition.  In America today we have  a domestic terror group, Antifa, organized in all our major cities, and boasting scores of Facebook groups, assaulting Trump supporters in the streets.  Far from condemning their actions, the Democrats and their media shills have justified and even encouraged Antifa.  In the 2016 election, as documented on hidden camera by Project Veritas, Democrats sent paid provocateurs into Trump rallies to incite violence.

In their win-at-all-costs war against Trump, the Democrats have unduly divided America, created fear and loathing among her citizens and torn at the fabric of our democracy.  Soviet-styled totalitarianism is indeed a great danger to our free republic, but contrary to what you’re being told, that threat is coming from the Democrats and not from President Trump.

The Media Will Re-Elect Trump

They would rather believe tall tales about Russia than hear what voters said in 2016.
                 
By  Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. 
Wall Street Journal
February 26, 2019             

 Donald Trump’s tenure has been a pleasant surprise compared to expectations, which isn’t saying much. His administration has been as chaotic as predicted, driven by his habit of saying unscripted things. But it also has been productive of a few things: corporate tax reform, curbing regulation, injecting a semi-useful ferment into our foreign policy.

The remainder of his term was always likely to be dominated by the enormous baggage he brought with him—his business and personal history.

What was not foreseeable is the extent to which the FBI’s meddling in the 2016 presidential race, using Russia’s meddling as an excuse, would become a counter thread in the narrative of alleged Trump corruption.
       
There is a humongous irony here. Not expecting to win, Mr. Trump allowed his organization’s desultory pursuit of a Trump tower in Moscow to continue during the 2016 campaign. Make no mistake, though a report that he instructed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about this matter has been debunked by none other than special counsel Robert Mueller,  it remains true that Mr. Cohen lied to Congress. The lack of any other crime will not stop this episode from being central in a Democratic House impeachment hearing resting heavily on hints that there is something fishy about Mr. Trump’s attitudes about Russia.

But what is true of Mr. Trump is also true of James Comey. He also expected Mr. Trump to lose. The FBI’s own highly questionable actions during the campaign, which inadvertently helped elect Mr. Trump, were also supposed to go unexamined.

Thus we find ourselves in a place where the Mueller report will settle nothing. It can’t prove a negative, so the hunt by Democrats and the media for collusion will go on. Read any liberal pundit: Collusion now means if Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin both wanted Mr. Trump to be president, Mr. Trump is guilty. (Never mind that this stance essentially gives Mr. Putin’s trolls and hackers a veto over who can be president.)

Under Democratic leadership, the House Intelligence Committee is well on its way to becoming a Warren Commission for an alternative universe in which JFK spent a nice day in Dallas. Rep. Adam Schiff has signaled that he intends to rake through Mr. Trump’s business and bank records searching for the motive for collusion crimes that exist only in his imagination.

All this will be cheered on by backward-rationalizing pundits in the New York Times, justifying their own hysteria by portraying the routine, predictable and typically opportunistic partisan opposition faced by Mr. Trump as somehow exceptionally heroic.

A more honest rendition would notice that Mr. Trump—in many ways an accidental president—is also an unusually inexperienced and weak president, lacking even meaningful institutional roots in his own party.
Opinion Live Event

It takes no heroism to oppose him. His statements are easily mocked for not conforming to the expected hypocrisies. He supplies his enemies more extracurricular targets than Bill Clinton did. He is universally reviled by elite institutions, including the media. Except for his knack for turning their hatred into lemonade, his only asset is his rapport with an unrich, unconnected voter segment that falls far short of a majority.
Indeed, it is hard to explain how Mr. Trump can simultaneously be such a menace and such a pushover that every Democratic officeholder in the country thinks, “If only I can stumble into the nomination, I’m sure to be the next president.”

The answer, of course, is pundit vanity: Mr. Trump is a threat to democracy because writers opposing him then are very important people.

Our wonderful English language gives us a perfectly good word for major media interpretations of the Trump phenomenon. That word is fatuous. When historians weigh his well-advertised nature vs. the fantastic overreaction to his election, their first question will be: How did he become president? Voters must have had something in mind when they pulled the lever for somebody so seemingly unsuitable.

But even deeper into the night they will wonder: How did so rich and complex a society as ours survive a pundit class so devoid of judgment, so incapable even of identifying what was interesting about the times they live in?

So here we are. The media will eventually take notice of the strange acts of the U.S. intelligence community and their role in the 2016 election. Either that, or the story of the decade will continue to be told by alternative media outlets that, for all their faults, at least provide a venue for ignored realities to be taken account of.
In the meantime, imagine you’re one of the millions who thinks four years of the Trump show is probably enough. You can only marvel at the obliviousness with which his enemies are working to assure (and even necessitate) his re-election.

The Fatuous Democrats

by Conrad Black
National Review
February 21, 2019
http://www.conradmblack.com/1448/the-fatuous-democrats
     
As the revelations of political manipulation and malfeasance in the FBI and the intelligence agencies under the Obama administration and the early Trump days oozes out of the slowly accelerating investigation of those events, and from the self-serving books of people who are prime targets for indictments, the character of the Democratic opposition is evolving in unusual and even exotic ways. The Clinton party, founded as "new Democrats" who favored the original Gulf War and whose standard bearer declared "the end of the era of big government," has been renounced as abusive of women and generally insufficiently progressive. After 25 years as the Napoleon and Josephine of the Democracy, the Clintons have been banished to the broom closet, an embarrassment from another day.

The successor royal political couple, the Obamas, isn't faring much better. He presided over the deluge of slime that his Justice Department, FBI, and intelligence agencies poured over the 2016 election and its aftermath, and that is now finally being exposed. The extent to which the former president was involved in the Clinton-email whitewash and the false applications for surveillance of the Trump campaign will become a matter of high public interest. Practically the entire Obama legacy was Obamacare, Green Empowerment and the Paris Climate Accord, and the Iran Nuclear Treaty. All were disasters and all have been dismembered or repudiated. Mr. Obama was cranking up to being a long-term, high-prestige ex-president. There have not been such since Mr. Truman and General Eisenhower. President Johnson and President Nixon and George W, Bush left office in too much controversy; President Ford and President Carter were not successful enough to have great impact, President Reagan was elderly and in declining health, President Bush Senior enjoyed a bit of it, but not the great eminence of Truman and Eisenhower, two-term victorious war-time leaders identified with great enterprises such as the Marshall Plan and the founding of NATO.

The Democrats placed all their bets on Hillary Clinton, and kept raising the ante in the misplaced belief that President Trump could be driven from office as a traitor, a crook, and an incompetent. They bet everything and will lose everything, and some of their prominent personalities will be doing the tap dance before the grand jury in the run-up to the next election. Their vast media claque will suffer a severe lapse of credibility and ratings, given how heavily invested they are in peddling hatred and contempt of the president, which has vastly exceeded fair comment and any acceptable standard of journalistic professionalism.

It is as these facts impend that this astonishing public marathon of Democratic presidential candidates has swarmed out of the undergrowth. Even highly informed Americans can scarcely have heard of at least half of those who are tossing their headgear into the ring. It seems that the wrong lesson has been drawn from the first election in history of a U.S. president who has never before sought or held elected or unelected public office or a high military command. This has been translated into the theory that anyone can be elected, but it misses the point. Donald Trump had been one of the most famous people in America for 25 years. He had pulled over 25 million people to his television program every week for 15 years, and had gone to great and calculated lengths to be well-known to relatively remote echelons of the voting public, such as the followers of professional wrestling. And he had polled carefully for 20 years and was aware of an immense build-up of voter discontent on bread-and-butter and social issues, and on the defeatism and vacillation of foreign-policy direction. He identified a possible majority of voters and placed himself carefully to be able to pitch to them.

This desultory parade of chipper, chirpy, wildly implausible, and unknown people putting themselves forward as the 44th successor to General George Washington at the head of the American people, as the sun sets on the impossible dream of reeling back and overturning the 2016 election, has proved a teeming breeding ground of completely unfeasible policy advocacy. An absurd ritual has developed, as unknown people pop up on our television screens, apologize for something in their obscure pasts as inadequately politically correct, and then stake out uncharted political waters. Spurred on by the ubiquitous and demiurgically verbose Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an inexhaustible storehouse of naïve political opinions, these candidates outdo each other in policy fatuities. She proposed 70 percent tax rates on the highest personal incomes, and the venerable Bernie Sanders, two generations ahead of her, chimed in at 77 per cent. He and Ocasio-Cortez still fit the comparison I made recently of them with the old Marxist guru Herbert Marcuse and the Spanish Communist La Pasionaria.

California senator Kamala Harris took the plunge and confessed to smoking marijuana and being insensitive to some women's causes when she was attorney general of California, and surged to the front of the heave to the left by calling for the nationalization of all health insurance. Though he had no apparent interest in running for president, the governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, before his university-yearbook appearance in blackface or as a Klansman, preempted it — proposed the extinguishment of fully born babies, infanticide, if unspecified factors compromised their prospects. This got the more perfervid abortionists to their feet, eyes glowing and mouths ululating. Beto O'Rourke, defeated Senate candidate in Texas, the classic militant Irish-American choirboy, the bony, toothy, Bobby Kennedy look — frothing with self-righteousness like the parish boys' boxing champion — not only opposes President Trump's border, he wants such obstacles as there are removed. Y'all come to America.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez surged back into the lead, (not that she is a presidential candidate at this point, but why not?), with a fascistic green plan that declared war on all non-renewable energy, called for the retrofitting of every building in the country and the end of air and automotive travel, and incited visions of vast brigades (doubtless from what would be the innumerable masses of the unemployed), diapering the nation's cows to save the eco-system from their flatulence. The other candidates embraced "the aspiration" although the authors of the report only deviated out of environmental matters to give a fully livable minimum income to everyone, regardless of whether they had any ambition to work or not. The congresswoman was also among those New Yorkers who opposed a $3 billion tax concession to Amazon for building a technical center in Long Island City that would employ 25,000 people earning an average of $125,000 a year. She should go to night school to brush up her arithmetic. Even the socialist mayor, Bill de Blasio, took his place with the reactionaries and sided with Jeff Bezos (Amazon owner and America's wealthiest person), who may wonder if he doesn't have more in common with his fellow billionaire Donald Trump than with the gang of loopies he has been promoting among the Democrats through his ownership of the once respected Washington Post.

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who has no qualifications whatever to be president, announced the establishment of her "committee" while holding hands with the moronic late-night motormouth Stephen Colbert. Sherrod Brown and Amy Klobuchar have been less inane than their rivals, though Klobuchar had some trouble explaining on Fox News how Minnesota had to do better than it was under Trump because of its labor shortage, i.e. the absence of unemployment (2.8 percent), not normally a sign of distressed times. New Jersey senator Cory Booker seemed to spend a whole week wearing the same t-shirt in the same classroom in Iowa talking at the same seven people and comparing climate change to Nazism. Mercifully, Pocahontas is talking to herself.

Michael Bloomberg, almost the only one of them who has had a serious career, has periodically referred to the dangers of political insanity that can arise on Election Day. The third of the septuagenarian section of the Democratic marathon, with Bloomberg and Sanders, the inevitable Joe Biden, well described by my colleague on this site Jonah Goldberg as having "a hot-air balloon for a brain," announced at the Munich Security Conference that he was "embarrassed" by President Trump. The same person at the same place said nine years ago that the new Obama administration would "reset" relations with the Russia. That idea took some strange turns, but Biden knows that American political candidates don't attack their opponents when in foreign countries. It is one of those things that aren't done.

If whoever limps through the Democratic nomination process looks and sounds anything like this group and is weighed down by the hare-brained nostrums the party worthies have been spouting in the last few months, they will provide an entertaining variation on what will then be the lengthy and numerous legal trials of some of the stars of the Clinton and Obama administrations.

Never in American history has a political figure been so underestimated as Donald Trump, as will be very clear on Election Night next year. 

Thank You, Tax Reform

Kevin Hassett was right about growth in 2018. Larry Summers wasn’t.

By The Editorial Board
Wall Street Journal
February 28, 2019

Chief White House economist Kevin Hassett was right about growth in 2018. Former Obama and Clinton adviser Larry Summers wasn’t. Image: Getty

The American economy is a tremendous engine of prosperity when politicians get out of the way, and for proof look no further than Thursday’s report on fourth-quarter growth. It’s clearer than ever that business investment has rescued the U.S. economy by shifting into a higher gear. Tax reform and deregulation, take a bow.

Growth in the fourth quarter came in higher than expected at 2.6% after a December financial-market scare, and the internals were better than the top line. Consumer spending declined a bit but was still strong. Growth from government spending was negligible—so much for claims of a deficit-led boom in “demand.”

The best news was business investment, which contributed 0.69-percentage points to GDP growth. This is even better than it looks because housing subtracted 0.14. Housing has now been flat or worse for most of the last two years, but that may be a silver lining.

This means the expansion isn’t marked now by ever-rising housing prices, which means growth hasn’t been driven by unsustainable home building. If interest rates don’t keep rising, and assuming the labor market stays strong, the housing market should return to modest growth.

Nonresidential business investment leads to healthier growth by increasing production and labor productivity. Wage gains follow, and the expansion is able to build on itself. The savings rate increased in the fourth quarter.

The nearby table shows the growth and investment trend over the last three years. Housing and consumer spending helped the economy dodge recession in 2016, but the expansion was tired and needed a lift from capital investment. That arrived in 2017, helping to offset a housing drop-off, and accelerating into 2018 when housing growth was negative.

Thank You, Tax Reform

So what changed in 2017? Well, there was that change of Administration that brought a major policy shift—specifically, an end to willy-nilly regulation and harassment of business. Deregulation reduced the political uncertainty that had caused businesses to delay or reduce investment.

Tax reform arrived in 2018, removing the roadblock of the highest corporate tax rate in the world and inviting companies to repatriate profits held abroad. Investment picked up almost exactly as chief White House economist Kevin Hassett predicted it would. He predicted growth for the year would rise by 3.1% in 2018 on a fourth-quarter to fourth-quarter basis, and growth came in exactly at 3.1%.

Mr. Hassett made these predictions in the heat of the 2017 tax reform debate and was ridiculed by progressive economists. One quote that doesn’t age well came from Larry Summers, the former Barack Obama adviser, who wrote in the Washington Post that tax reform would make no difference unless “you believe in tooth fairies and ludicrous supply-side economics.”

When Mr. Hassett pushed back to defend the tax proposal, Mr. Summers said, “I am proudly guilty of asserting that it is some combination of dishonest, incompetent and absurd.” There are other redolent quotes, but we’re compassionate conservatives.

Modern Keynesians have somehow come to believe that tax rates and regulatory bottlenecks don’t matter to growth. This gives economists like Mr. Hassett an advantage as policy makers because they look both at economic demand and the supply created by more investment and work.

Donald Trump’s tariff policies continue to be a risk to investment and growth, and the Federal Reserve is a wild card. But the evidence of the last two years is that deregulation and tax reform spurred private capital investment exactly when a long-in-the-tooth expansion needed it to avoid recession.