Conrad Black:
“…Despite the heavy pressures on it from Right and Left, the American political system is in fact functioning moderately well. This must be counted as evidence of its fundamental strength, given that there remains serious doubt about the outcome of the last presidential election, and the dictators in Big Tech and Big Media continue to show complete disregard for freedom of expression and for traditional criteria of unbiased, professional reporting.
As has been amply publicized—though it has also been the subject of a great deal of obfuscation—Joe Biden undoubtedly won the popular vote by 5-6 million, but he only won in the Electoral College by fewer than 50,000 votes. If those votes had flipped in the right numbers in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, they would have given the election to President Trump. Trump’s policies were generally approved in the congressional and state elections, but a clear—though narrow—majority of Americans could no longer endure the controversy of his incumbency.
Given the sandbag job conducted against him by 95 percent of the national political media, 98 percent of the social media bosses abusing their positions as supposedly impartial platform operators, and the fact that Trump was outspent in a horrifyingly expensive election campaign by a margin of two-to-one by his opponent, it is remarkable that he almost won.
The majority of Americans found the endless tumult and recriminations insufferable, and in its almost magical way, the American political system has succeeded: the tumult has ended but the president who was possibly cheated and in any case hounded from office by dishonest media and corrupt magnates of technology and finance, remains a formidable political presence. After such a clangorous term in the White House, bracketed by the uproarious election campaigns of 2016 and 2020, he lives to fight another day and remains unambiguously at the head of the greatest single bloc of voters ever bound to an individual by personal voting loyalty in the history of the country.
A number of the most popular presidents in the past undoubtedly had larger followings as percentages of the numbers of voters: both Roosevelts, Reagan, and possibly Eisenhower. All of them enjoyed what it is now fashionable to call almost cultish popularity, but it was a smaller electorate in those times, and all of those leaders followed traditional paths to the White House, up the political ladder, or by earning the gratitude and admiration of the nation through high distinction in supreme military command at a critical time—General Eisenhower was a world-historic figure before he was elected president.
There is a new president and there is also what only occasionally occurs in the United States—an inter-election, de facto, leader of the opposition. The last time that someone lost a presidential election in circumstances that enabled him to campaign plausibly as the almost certain challenger of the person who defeated him was Andrew Jackson in 1824, after he led the polls but without an electoral college majority. His opponents in the election, John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay, combined to elect Adams in the House of Representatives and Clay, the speaker of the House, became the Secretary of State.
There has never been such a prolonged and frenzied hostility to any president from the political class as President Trump faced throughout his term, and next week, there will be an unusual political turning point as Trump’s enemies have a final parting with Trump-hate as a substitute for government and politics. The narrow victory of his enemies at the election will be countered by the abject failure of this insane attempt to impeach him.
Trump did not incite the 300,000 followers whom he addressed in Washington on January 6 to do anything except “peacefully and patriotically to make (their) voices heard” by the Congress. No one was attempting an insurrection, even the hooligans who led the assault and vandalism.
In attempting to remove the ex-president from an office he does not hold for incitements he did not make to an insurrection that was not attempted, Trump’s enemies confess to an obsessive irrationality. They are unable to emancipate themselves from their hatred of the former president and to execute the razor-thin mandate to govern they have been given…”