image credit: tothedeathmedia
Conrad Black has a sobering if scary take on the minefields and treachery that President Trump has to deal
with every day. Here are a couple of paragraphs (and considering the “Never
Trump” bias of National Review, I am somewhat surprised that NR published the piece
in the first place):
Trump
opponents need to understand what the alternative is. The battle lines have
been so sharply drawn, in what is now a bloodless civil war for direction of
U.S. public policy, that the two sides cannot really communicate with each
other. There is a commendable candor in Kellyanne Conway’s statement: “They
hate us and we hate them.” . . .
.
. . There is now unfolding what must be
the last civilized debate about the trajectory of events in Washington before
the civil war moves from the heavy and frequent skirmishing that has
intensified since the election to the fight to the death that seems inevitably
to impend. The president said in a powerful address to a very enthusiastic
audience in West Virginia last week, where he received the grace of conversion
to the Republican party of the formerly Democratic governor, Jim Justice, that
the entire special-counsel investigation into relations between the Russian
government and the Trump campaign is “a total fabrication” and “an attempt to
[reverse] one of the greatest political defeats in American history.” So it is.
.
. .
Whether
[Robert] Mueller conducts himself professionally or not, there is no excuse for
a special counsel to have been appointed, and the president was (as he need not
have mentioned publicly) badly let down by Sessions. The scramble of nominal
Republicans such as Lindsey Graham, and drooling partisan Democrats such as
Chris Coons, to pass redundant, grandstanding legislation to protect Sessions
and Mueller is nauseating. Trump ran against and defeated both parties, the
Clintons, the Bushes, and Obama, and most of their close collaborators in the
Congress. The war continues and until the president has enough economic
progress, or enough time without gaffes that the hostile media can amplify into
a wall of noise, or a sudden foreign-policy success such as with North Korea or
even Venezuela, if he wants to start moving the needle of the polls upwards, he
will face the problem of cowardice and lethargy in his own party. Senator
McConnell’s statement in Kentucky this week that Trump was responsible for the
almost total failure of the Republican Congress to achieve anything in the past
six months was just more self-serving claptrap from a familiar and very
tiresome source. . . .
.
. .
This
is a civil war and the apostate conservatives should realize that, if Trump
loses, they don’t get a new Reaganism in the Republican party and renewed
importance and self-importance for themselves; they get the semi-permanent
return of those responsible for the decline of America, the sleazy
transformation of America into an ineffectual force in the world and into an
inert, economically stagnant welfare state. The choice, for sane conservatives,
is Trump or national disaster. . ..
Read the whole thing here.
# # #
