President Donald Trump’s greatest sin was threatening the power and privilege of the ruling class.
For that, it will never stop seeking to bludgeon him, those seeking to carry his mantle, or their tens of millions of supporters—those icky, intransigent, irredeemables, judged as such because they refuse to submit.
In so doing, it has shown that it presents the very authoritarian threat it claimed he did.
The ruling class raved that Trump was a tyrant, madman, and traitor in part because it believed it needed to delegitimize him, to neutralize a threat to the racket it’s had going at the expense of the American people for too long, but also in part because he really broke them.
One need not play armchair psychiatrist to see both elements at play in the latest revelation, in an endless stream of them, of the opinion of Trump held by one of his senior-most military officials.
But let’s for a moment entertain them. For starters, were Trump everything his political adversaries accused him of being, he would have sought to exploit the coronavirus tragedy to usurp maximum power, ruling by fiat, controlling speech under the guise of health and public safety, seeking to manipulate 2020 election laws to maximize his odds of victory, and so on.
Instead, even as pressure mounted to act unilaterally in response to the coronavirus, Trump largely respected federalism—redounding to the benefit of the millions who lived in the few states that remained relatively free during the pendency of the crisis—and dramatically reduced regulations to enable a vaccine to get to market in record time.
This is to say nothing of course of the myriad ways Trump reduced centralized power during his Oval Office tenure, from the bevy of initiatives he undertook in defense of American life and liberty, to his related tax and deregulatory policies, judicial appointments, and beyond.
Trump, who on many issues arguably acted in a restrained manner, and ranks among the most checked, sabotaged, and stymied presidents in American history, yet who was still able to implement such a conservative agenda, was anything but the dangerous autocrat his adversaries slandered him as.
For this cadre, Trump’s greatest crimes were a willingness to end blood-and-treasure-sapping military boondoggles; to ask basic, commonsense questions about whether the status quo was really in America’s national interest—to look upon the conventional wisdom with skepticism; to dispense with diplomatic niceties and dubious deals driven by illusions of utopic progressive globalism and greed, and to grapple with foreign powers as they were, not as we wished them to be.
This was simply intolerable because it would have put much of the ruling class out of business.
In working to smear, target, and criminalize up to millions of intransigent deplorables, treating such political dissenters as dangers to society, our ruling class is emulating the bogeyman it warned of who never materialized over the past four years.
Is there any silver lining?
When everything that doesn’t comport with the official regime narrative is cast as misinformation, nothing is misinformation.
The ruling class doth protest too much.
But unfortunately for our country, in its desperation to perpetuate and grow its power, freedom-loving Americans will bear the brunt as it lashes out in uniquely disturbing and dangerous ways.