I excerpted quite a bit, but it is worth your time to click over and read it all.

The Problem With Peggy

Conrad Black:

“…Peggy Noonan’s column in the Wall Street Journal on Saturday is a very clear exposé of the profound political division in America today. Her position is that Donald Trump is a deadly combination of crazy, dishonest, and incompetent, that there can be no possible question that he was and is unsuited to be president, and that he was unquestionably honestly defeated in the presidential election. More, he deliberately incited a violent assault upon the U.S. Capitol on January 6, his party is afraid of him even though his support is thin and diminishing, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s investigation into the events of January 6 must be pursued with energy and thoroughness, for the chief purpose of ensuring that Trump never returns to public office.

This is the epiphany of the comparatively civilized Trump-hater and it is almost entirely false.

At no point does Noonan dispute the accomplishments of the Trump Administration, and I do not recall that she has ever disputed them. The near elimination of illegal immigration and of unemployment and the sharply rising incomes in low-income ethnic minority areas, reduced taxes, the identification in sober terms of the Chinese challenge, the elimination of oil imports, the extermination of ISIS, shaping up of NATO, the Abraham Accords in the Middle East, and the pressure on Iran and de-escalation of the confrontation with North Korea; to the best of my recollection as a regular reader of hers, Noonan never disputed any of this.

And yet previously she has compared Trumpism to metastatic cancer. This and similarly extreme strictures establish her as one of the most perfervid of the respectable Trump haters

President Trump’s stylistic infelicities grated on all those who were not so disgusted with the former Bush-Clinton-Obama bipartisan triarchy that they found Trump’s rollicking style a refreshing change from the malapropisms of the Bushes, the sleaze of the Clintons, and the somewhat anti-American flippancy of Obama. An undoubted majority of Americans approved of Trump’s policies but enough of them were so appalled by his public personality that an apparent bare majority of Americans rejected him at the last election.

But Noonan knows as well as anyone that there is real doubt about the integrity of voting and the fairness of the vote-counting system in key parts of six swing states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. On the pretext of addressing the COVID-19 pandemic, 44 million ballots were mailed or dropped with seriously inadequate or no verification; millions of these were “harvested,” meaning they were collected and submitted by people other than the voters themselves. Election Day was extended to weeks. The vote-counting procedures were absurdly inadequate in a number of key polling places. In many cases, the changes to the electoral rules in these states were taken by the executive or by courts and not by the state legislatures to whom the Constitution entrusts such changes.

Noonan also knows as well as anyone else that the judiciary ducked crucial legal questions. There were 18 lawsuits on matters of the integrity of the election itself plus the action of the attorney general of Texas supported by 18 other states and for process reasons, some of them spurious, none of these lawsuits was tried on the merits.

Instead the entire national political and social media, unable to face the prospect of an overturned election, particularly one in which Donald Trump would be the beneficiary, locked arms and declared that the election result had been duly judged in peerless impartiality and the apparent result had been sustained. For good measure, a great deal of gratuitous obloquy was disgorged onto Trump’s admittedly somewhat undermanned and unserious legal team.

In fact, it is an election whose genuine result is more open to question than any in American history except that of Rutherford Hayes and Samuel Tilden in 1876, which was resolved by a commission and by agreement between the candidates, both men of unquestioned stature and integrity…

…The real problem for Noonan is that she begins to realize Trump’s support is not fading; the Republican Party is his party now, and she and the other NeverTrumpers have lost everything: they were useful idiots for the Democrats and must now wear their responsibility for the probably dishonest election of the most incompetent administration in American history…”