Conrad Black:
“…They are failing to make the distinction between Trump’s policies and his mannerisms. No serious person can dispute the president’s economic successes (especially the virtual elimination of unemployment and energy imports), his revival of a viable policy of nuclear nonproliferation, taking serious measures to stop mass illegal immigration, moving decisively to address dangerous disadvantages in some trading relationships, and shaping up the Western alliance from an association of freeloading beneficiaries of an American military guaranty. He is the first businessman to be president, and he engaged in a policy form of zero-based budgeting. The underlying premise for climate policy is unproved and almost certainly largely false; he scrapped it. The notion that the U.S. performed a service for international development and world harmonization by allowing the Mexicans, Chinese, and others to pick America’s pockets and export unemployment to the United States was false. He is scrapping that. The idea, cherished by Democratic politicians and Republican employers of low-skilled workers, that masses of people could swarm into the country undocumented, be exploited in the labor market, and not be counted anywhere, but still vote (Democratic) and use the welfare and education systems is an outrage. Trump is scrapping that, too. The country is tired of spending billions more every year on education to destroy freedom of expression in the university and produce ever-less-well-educated students in the unionized state school systems. He is attacking those problems, too.
The enemies of the status quo that Trump was attacking in 2016 were barely numerous enough to put him in the White House, but the number of those who are starting to appreciate the progress that is being achieved in critical policy areas is growing. Last week I wrote that the Democrats, who had been counting on the fatuity of treasonous Trump–Russia collusion, were now reduced to snobbery and myth-making, since they had no substantive arguments to make. That is true, but not the whole truth. Tens of millions of people in both parties loved the OBushinton declinism, both the randomly militaristic version of George W. Bush and the feckless cult of national self-doubt of Obama. It worked for them, and since it was a bipartisan arrangement, they had no idea how vulnerable it was. The Trump victory and his success in office have profoundly shaken those dependent on the sluggish, state-dependent ethos that gradually took hold between the Reagan and Trump presidencies, and have won Trump a creeping rise in the polls. The confidence that he could be evicted from office, if not in midterm, at least after one term, is evaporating; the fear and hostility of his enemies (and most of them are enemies, not merely opponents) is genuine, if not creditable, and it drives them to their own extremes of hyperbole…
…What is astonishing and unprecedented is that instead of fudging their differences with the president where he has clearly succeeded (as Landon, Willkie, and Dewey did with Roosevelt), almost all the Democrats have retreated into a more extreme dissent from the administration in every area and have amplified their personal attacks on him to a level unheard since Watergate, and apart from that, since the Civil War. The Democratic party has now pretty well locked itself into an inescapable confinement of commitments to open borders, free health care for everyone including those who enter illegally in their millions; a green terror that will disemploy millions and achieve nothing useful; open-ended reparations for about 80 million African Americans and Native Americans; a doubling of upper-level personal income taxes; and a definition of “reproductive rights” that extends to the killing of live, born, and separated children. There is no chance that the voters could possibly support any of this; it makes George McGovern seem like Boss Tweed, and Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda in the 1960s like George and Martha Washington…”