As usual, it is worth clicking over for Mr. Black’s mature, balanced and amusing commentary.
Conrad Black:
“…No president since Abraham Lincoln has had such a relentless sequence of crises to deal with as President Trump has had. Franklin D. Roosevelt had constant overarching crises: the Great Depression and the recovery from it, the approach of a world war, and the war itself. But never in his more than 12 years as president, even when he grappled with the collapse of the financial system and after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had severely damaged the U.S. Navy’s battle fleet, did he seem in the slightest beleaguered. Every day of his presidency, Abraham Lincoln was dealing with the horrible crisis of the secession of the southern states and the terrible war that ended the insurrection.
Some presidencies seem reasonably serene, like the folklorically resurrected Calvin Coolidge, who said little and spent little and did little. Dwight D. Eisenhower is remembered as the happy combination of the smiling, avuncular, golfing president of whom the nation twice said with their votes “I like Ike.” He was, after all, the victorious five-star general who conducted the greatest military operation in the history of the world and received the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany in the West. The 1950s seem now as they seemed at the time, an era of peace and prosperity despite the regular threats of recourse to nuclear war coming from the leaders of the unlamented Soviet Union: Joseph Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev. Bill Clinton, coasting on Ronald Reagan’s immense economic boom and his almost bloodless and complete victory in the Cold War, as well as on the very competent foreign policy of the senior President Bush, had the most carefree time of any president since Coolidge.
We now know that President Trump is the only holder of his great office whose election was schemed against at the highest levels of the Justice Department and intelligence services of the preceding administration, and who was the subject of a spurious special counsel investigation set up even after it had been established that the grounds for it—a possible conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government—were known to be complete fiction.
When that fraudulent enterprise collapsed, Trump was briefly the subject of the most ludicrous impeachment proceeding in American history…”