Establishment’s Threat of Impeachment a Confession of Failure

Supporters of President Donald Trump flock to the National Mall by the hundreds of thousands for a rally in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021. (Samuel Corum/Getty Images)

Commentary

The whole world is now witnessing the most lethal episode to date in the national bipartisan political establishment’s effort to destroy Donald Trump.

Approximately half the country believes that the presidential election was rigged, and no honest person can deny that there are legitimate questions about the vote in five or six states. The fact that the election went off smoothly in the other 44 states highlights the irregularities that may have determined the result.

Now, practically the entire media and social media have locked arms in an airtight pretense that any question of the legitimacy of the election is “nonsense” (veteran Fox News commentator Brit Hume), and any suggestions to the contrary are banned on the major social media outlets. This is a totalitarian suppression of legitimate public concerns; it's unconstitutional, and it's not a demonstration of confidence by Trump’s tormentors.

The pretense that it has been fairly and judicially determined to have been a just election is required to make the case that the great Trump meeting on Jan. 6 in Washington was a criminal enterprise, and not what it really was: a peaceful gathering of some of the scores of millions of people who feel that the election was stolen from them.

Trump didn't incite violence, as anyone can ascertain by listening to his remarks. The trials of the chief perpetrators will reveal who among them were professional hooligans and who were really active Trump political supporters. But in either case, what occurred is the last thing Trump himself wanted. (There’s no excuse for the insufficient security protecting the Capitol.)

But in order to try once again to destroy Trump and disperse his immense following, his enemies have had to try to stamp out any public airing of the continuing doubts about the validity of the election, and to confect the demonstrable fraud that he incited violence.

This was necessary to promote the applicability of the 25th amendment, which deals with presidents who have lost their mental capacities, and impeachment, which requires egregious and generally criminal behavior. All of this is lacking, and the president will not be removed from office other than on the expiry of his term next week.

Distraction and Fear

It all begs the question of why Trump's enemies are still so fanatical in their efforts to separate him from his huge following and destroy him politically, in Stalinist fashion. In part, the Democrats seem now to be addicted to the practice of distracting the public from the political unacceptability of their own program and record by a febrile defamation of the president.

He is not and never in his adult life was a racist or sexist. He has a number of annoying mannerisms. They can be seen by everyone, and voters decide for themselves whether they outweigh the president’s better qualities and achievements.

The obsessive desire to destroy Trump even as he leaves the presidency cannot be based on anything but fear of a man who has successfully defied the political establishment, exposed it as substantially a failure, and exploited the fact that the pre-Trump status quo was despised by a majority of Americans.

The logical and creditable response to the collapse in the prestige of the country’s orthodox leaders is to raise their game, put up better candidates in both the parties (not the dismal selection of senatorial candidates available to Georgia’s voters last week), and produce some original policies. Instead, they have just tried to stone to death the person who did produce original policies.

Serving the Country Well

The political establishment has tragically missed the point: if it had been serving the country well, Trump would not have been elected four years ago. If he had not been a capable president, most of his policies would not have been effectively endorsed in the congressional and state elections across the country. Those whom he displaced would not have had to resort to such extremes to evict him from the White House.

Polls indicate uniformly that barely 10 percent of Americans respect the legislators in Congress and no more than 15 percent of Americans believe their media. Even the questionable election revealed that 48 percent of Americans preferred Trump to the candidate of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, academia, and the media and social media, despite the Democrats’ huge financial advantage and wall-to-wall media defamation of the incumbent.

The pre-Trump decades brought endless, fruitless war in the Middle East, with an accompanying humanitarian disaster; the greatest economic crisis in the world in 80 years; more than 10 million unskilled illegal migrants flooding across the southern border; immense trade deficits; alarming advances by China at America’s expense; and Trump’s predecessors were swindled by North Korea and Iran.

Trump addressed these problems; the dire predictions of his dangerous incompetence came to nothing, his vote total grew by 20 percent between elections, and his party did well in congressional and state elections.

Yet his opponents didn’t respond with better candidates or policies, they exhumed the defeated candidates Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and set them atop a Sanders-Warren far-left program, ignored the worst rioting in the country for over 50 years, apart from defunding police and engineering huge spikes in violent crime, and exploited the COVID crisis to adopt election laws that incite the inference that the election has been stolen.

And they got a free pass when the Supreme Court declined to hear the complaint from Texas, supported by 18 other states, that four states had failed to assure a fair presidential election. Trump’s 74 million supporters were left with nothing to do except protest.

Only Alternative

In falsely accusing Trump of inciting insurrection, they have again ignored the public desire for better government and have effectively confirmed Donald Trump as the only alternative to the present familiar source of poor government. Joe Biden’s response to the outrages at the Capitol were that Trump had deliberately incited it, that the motives of the rioters were racist, that the Capitol Police were racists, that Trump was reminiscent of Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels, and then Biden called for national unity.

Trump made a serious mistake in imagining and publicly asking that Vice President Pence reject the determination by the Senate of the Electoral College vote. Pence had no authority to do anything of the kind. But Pence’s election was as much violated as Trump’s, and if he attends the inauguration now, Pence will be choosing the Democratic antics over his own party and needlessly compromising his political future.

Impeachment is nonsense, Trump won’t resign, and an inept government won’t be able to use defamation and dirty tricks as a substitute for public service for long. If Trump is the only person who can defend the people against incompetent administration, cowardly legislators and jurists, and a system that has become largely rotten and doesn’t run honest elections or even fair trials, (98 percent conviction rate and a quarter of the world’s prison population), while a totalitarian woke media and dictatorial censors of social media silence dissent, his influence will rise and not be dissipated.

Conrad Black has been one of Canada’s most prominent financiers for 40 years, and was one of the leading newspaper publishers in the world. He’s the author of authoritative biographies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, and, most recently, “Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other,” which has been republished in updated form.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.