Careless democrats could hand election to Trump

There is a genuine hatred in America now, the kind most neutral observers have never witnessed

BACK in the more innocent days of October 2016, one of America’s presidential candidates warned of chaos on the streets and the outbreak of mass violence against innocent people. They predicted that their losing opponent would mobilise their disaffected supporters into roving bands of street warriors and vigilantes, dedicated to ruining the country in a fit of monstrous, self-indulgent pique.

It was impossible not to be reminded of those words – by the eventual surprise loser, Hillary Clinton, as it happens – while watching the failed candidate give numerous interviews over the weekend.

Clinton has been on one long misery-tour since the results came in on that fateful November night in 2016 and, while senior Democrats have privately asked her to accept her defeat with some degree of dignity, she has insisted on ramping up the tension at every available opportunity – which, of course, is exactly what Donald Trump wants.

When Trump said that every time she opens her mouth he gets another few thousand supporters, he wasn’t, for once, engaging in an empty, tiresome boast, for she has become the albatross around the Democrats’ neck.

Her open contempt for the system she gamed so successfully for so long is a reminder of why even those who have little time for the current incumbent held their nose and voted for him, rather than stumping for her.

She told CBS on Sunday that: “You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about. That’s why I believe, if we are fortunate enough to win back the House and/or the Senate, that’s when civility can start again.”

That statement was not only quite remarkable but, in this openly febrile climate, positively dangerous.

That there would indeed be violence by the losing side is perhaps the only correct prediction Clinton has made in years.

As she did the rounds of the Sunday morning talk-shows fomenting her war on civility, her supporters were declaring their own form of martial law across the country.

Antifa set up illegal traffic checkpoints in places like Portland and attacked those who objected. One particular instance provided a snapshot of a country which is becoming increasingly broken – when a bunch of white rioters attacked an elderly white motorist, hitting his windows and calling him ‘whitey’.

It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry at such obvious idiocy, but the media, both in America and on this side of the Atlantic, have been intent on either ignoring these cases, or simply pretending they didn’t happen.

However, the people who voted for Trump have paid attention. As have many moderate Democrats who voted for Clinton but are just as appalled by the anarchy on the streets as any Republican.

This is one of the many reasons why, against all odds and any prior expectations, it now looks like Trump is virtually a lock for 2020.

Of course, when it comes to Donald Trump you might as well throw some chicken bones on the ground and read in them what you will; it is true that if the Democrats can get a bounce in next month’s midterms, they will go hell for leather to impeach him.

But for all the highly publicised investigations into his past dodgy dealings, the Democrats have yet to find the proverbial smoking gun into the allegations of his collusion with Russia.

That’s not to say that the Mueller investigation won’t produce something the Democrats can use, but with those crucial midterms only a few weeks away, they were hoping to have a damning dossier ready by now.

The Democrats have become the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. A party which used to boast that its operation was so much more efficient than the Republicans has become riven with infighting, backstabbing and increasingly frequent bouts of hysteria – none of which is good for attracting those undecided voters who will, as always, determine the result in two years’ time.

What is particularly baffling is that not only have they failed to heed Michelle Obama’s stricture that “when they go low we go high”, they now openly repudiate it.

In the midst of the post-Kavanaugh meltdown, former attorney general Eric Holder suggested to a crowd last week that rather than heed Obama’s advice, they should adopt the approach that, “when they go low, we kick them”.

We have already witnessed one attempted political assassination, the shooting of Republican Congressman Steve Scalise by a Bernie Sanders supporter. Recent weeks have seen the emergence of a new trend of mob violence which has seen a number of Republicans hounded from restaurants and journalists chased into the Manhattan subway by proHillary supporters. The stakes have never been higher and still they refuse to learn.

While discussing the rise of Antifa-related violence and the urging from Democrat big-wigs such as Maxine Waters to her followers to “hound Republicans wherever you see them...in restaurants, at the store”, Scalise urged both his opponents and his own party members to lay off the violent rhetoric, but that seems an increasingly forlorn hope.

There’s a genuine hatred in America right now, the kind most neutral observers have never witnessed.

To make matters even more toxic, the Democrat-supporting mainstream media in the States seem determined to enable the rioters. For example, when discussing the scenes of violence in Portland and elsewhere, as black-clad rioters attacked people while the cops stood back, one CNN anchor took issue with a guest who referred to the thugs as a “mob”.

Mob, apparently, is now an insensitive and insulting phrase.

Trump didn’t win in 2016 so much as Hillary and the Democrats conspired to lose in the starkest political example of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory that any of us have ever seen.

Now, at a time when they should have already installed a front-running challenger to Trump – if only to start the all-important fund-raising – they still haven’t chosen anyone and, according to the weekend’s polls, the current favourite for the nomination is Joe Biden.

For a party that is desperately trying to harness the youthquake that has erupted in the States since Trump’s victory, that would be an open admission that they have run out of ideas.

Having said that, if the death of his son hadn’t prevented Biden from running in the last race instead of the disastrous Clinton, it’s quite possible that we’d now be talking about President Biden while Trump hyped his latest season of ‘The Apprentice’. Strange days, indeed, but they could yet become stranger – Clinton still harbours hopes for a 2020 rematch.

That there would indeed be violence by the losing side is perhaps the only correct prediction that Hillary Clinton has made in years