Conrad Black:
“…In the United States as in Great Britain, the political system has been so strained by issues of such immense controversy that they cross party lines, immobilize the system, and can only be settled by the voters as a whole.
There will be no other determination of whether President Trump gets to finish his task of grinding to powder and replacing the ruling bipartisan elite that he believes grievously misgoverned the country in the post-Reagan years. In 2016, he neither won a mandate for revolution nor incurred a cause to be denied or removed from office. Almost half the voters substantially agreed with the president in 2016, and this remains the principal issue: that the previous four presidents and their Congresses misgoverned the country.
This view holds that the elder President Bush allowed the Republican Party to be split by a charlatan (Ross Perot), bringing in the Clintons, who brought on, with George W. Bush, the subprime mortgage debacle and the world’s greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression; and that Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama produced a series of Middle East-related foreign policy disasters. There was a faulty intelligence response to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, a completely misconceived war in Iraq, an immense humanitarian disaster generating as many as 10 million refugees, the premature departure from Iraq which helped produce ISIS, and the abandonment of nuclear non-proliferation with respect to Iran and North Korea (where all four presidents were swindled).
According to this view, the Bushes allowed the Republican Party to be shamed and jostled into insane notions of self-impoverishment over completely speculative notions of climate management, and Obama was allowed to get away with a defeatist and corrupt economic policy that provided slightly more survivable welfare arrangements and a flat-lined “new normal” of 2 percent economic growth despite immense deficits and a shrinking workforce, though the Obamas’ rich chums on Wall Street, in Hollywood, and in the Silicon Valley were well taken care of fiscally.
And all four previous presidents are accused of pursuing trade policies that imported unemployment into the United States and doing nothing while up to 20 million illiterate peasants poured into the country illegally or while oil imports increased and the manufacturing sector was farmed out to other countries by companies that repatriated unemployment but not profits.
It is a powerful indictment of bipartisan policy and while sometimes overstated, as often happens in politics, it cannot easily be refuted. Instead, the president’s opponents in both parties have described him as a boorish mythmaker, a crook, and a pathologically dishonest egomaniac who is tarnishing the whole constitutional process by abuses of office…”