National Post

Evicting Trump clearly a catastroph­e

- Conrad Black

Seven months into the Biden regime, the truism that dare not speak its name is now almost too obvious to bear stating. It was a catastroph­ic error to evict Donald Trump. No one, and certainly not I, would try to whitewash the stylistic infeliciti­es of Donald Trump. He said many things that were toe-curlingly embarrassi­ng coming from the holder of so great an office. But he proved in government as he had in the private sector that he was capable and forceful, and although he had the terrible handicap of personaliz­ing everything and escalating all disagreeme­nts, he had a clear conception of domestic and foreign national interests and pursued them very successful­ly.

Despite the frenzied, wall-towall, linked-armed internatio­nal effort to present Trump as a brutal, crooked, moron, he almost eliminated unemployme­nt and illegal immigratio­n, did eliminate energy imports, and by identifyin­g and incentiviz­ing “enterprise zones,” he created conditions in which the lowest 20 per cent of American income earners were gaining income in percentage terms compared to the top 10 per cent on the income scale. President Trump, without demagogy or hyperbole, attracted American attention to the commercial and geopolitic­al threat from China. He incited NATO to stop sponging off America and raise the national defence commitment­s to figures much more closely approximat­ing their long-standing promises to the United States. (Canada was one of the most delinquent countries and has been one of the most sluggish to respond-the Trudeau government dissented from and mocked virtually every position that President Trump took and now is probably the most egregious and ungrateful alliance freeloader. Trump was the first U.S. president since Herbert

Hoover not to visit Canada while in office.)

Because Canada is so close to the United States and more than 90 per cent of Canadians live within 200 miles of the U.S. border, and because most English-speaking Canadians are culturally almost indistingu­ishable from Americans living in northern states, Canada knows the United States better than other foreigners and is most profoundly influenced by the mobile currents of American public opinion. For this reason, Donald Trump naturally appeared to us as the apogee of the Ugly American: a braggart, a bully, a know-nothing, and the personific­ation of vulgar and avaricious American materialis­m: the ugly face of American capitalism and jingoism. This was a caricature, but like most recognizab­le caricature­s, there was an element of truth in it, and it was a particular­ly easily embraced caricature because of the almost universal hostility to Trump among the American national political media, and because of the natural Canadian tendency to discredit even slightly conservati­ve America and its leaders, (the better to sustain Canadian notions of national distinctiv­eness).

Virtually the entire Canadian media, and as far as could be discerned, the entire Canadian population, seized and swallowed whole the notion of President Trump’s venality, repugnance, and incompeten­ce.

The bipartisan American political establishm­ent was traumatize­d by the elevation in 2016 of a president determined to tear up

root and branch the complacent post-reagan Bushintons who squandered America’s great victory in the Cold War, produced the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression, tore up the Middle East expanding Iran’s influence and causing an immense humanitari­an tragedy, and were steadily suborned and outmanoeuv­red by China. In defeating, in their fashion, the president who frightened them, the Washington political establishm­ent elevated a hollow and unfrighten­ing candidate who has fronted a socialist agenda far to the left of the majority of the people he serves. The Biden administra­tion is proposing to naturalize millions of illegal immigrants, which would be in the current governing party’s electoral interest. It is squanderin­g trillions of dollars in socialist nostrums that have already torqued up inflation. The federal government has identified with and is largely propped up by the corrupt urban Democratic machines that have defunded the police and presided over an unpreceden­ted rise in violent crime. Large parts of urban America are no-go areas, unpoliced shooting galleries. Biden has squandered America’s status as an energy self-sufficient country.

And in Afghanista­n, inexplicab­ly, President Joe Biden and his entourage determined to leave Afghanista­n practicall­y as quickly as aircraft could remove American military personnel, without consultati­on with NATO allies who had three quarters of the internatio­nal forces in Afghanista­n, without a thought for the many thousands of American civilians in the country, and without any regard for the tens of thousands of Afghans who had worked with the Americans and are in mortal danger with the Taliban in power. As the operations swiftly degenerate­d into a cowardly fiasco and the American president was for the first time depicted by the British Parliament as a figure of shame, Biden and his principal colleagues lied to the public, contradict­ed each other, and magnified America’s monstrous humiliatio­n at the hands of a bunch of primitive and barbarous, flea-bitten, goatherd terrorists.

There is open discussion of trying to reconstruc­t the Western alliance without American leadership. Biden’s own partisans are silent as his standing in the eyes of his countrymen crumbles. Is there any sane person who in the dark and quiet of their bedroom in the dead, vast, and middle of the night would not prefer Trump with his gaucheries to this horrifying immolation of American national credibilit­y and of the unbroken right of the West over 2,500 years to be the preeminent influence in the world? Possibly, but they are no longer numerous or outspoken.

(BIDEN’S OPERATION) MAGNIFIED AMERICA’S MONSTROUS HUMILIATIO­N AT THE HANDS OF A BUNCH OF ... TERRORISTS.

 ?? JAMES DEVANEY / GC IMAGES FILES ?? “Virtually the entire Canadian media, and as far as could be discerned, the entire Canadian population, seized and swallowed whole the notion of President Trump’s venality, repugnance, and incompeten­ce,” writes Conrad Black.
JAMES DEVANEY / GC IMAGES FILES “Virtually the entire Canadian media, and as far as could be discerned, the entire Canadian population, seized and swallowed whole the notion of President Trump’s venality, repugnance, and incompeten­ce,” writes Conrad Black.
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