The long-awaited opening of the Democrats’ final desperate extravaganza of Trump-hate finally came on Thursday, June 9.
The battle lines are clear: One side claims to believe that the 2020 presidential election was clean and unquestionable and that the invasion of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was an attempted insurrection launched by former President Donald Trump to undo a fair election result and that it constituted a potentially mortal assault upon American democracy.
The other side believes that with 4.8 million harvested ballots, the absence of Republican observers at strategic moments of vote-counting in several swing states, the highly partisan influence of the infusion of hundreds of millions of dollars from wealthy and rabidly partisan Democrats such as Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, and the failure of the judiciary to address any of the constitutional challenges to the 2020 presidential election, it is at best unclear who the real winner of the election was.
This side regrets the indignities at the Capitol on Jan. 6 but considers that Trump specifically urged the large crowd that he addressed on the morning of that day to act peacefully, that he and his political organization had absolutely nothing to do with and certainly did not stand to gain from the invasion of the Capitol, and that the attempt to impute the inspiration for this hooliganism to Trump is just the last of the many outrages and grievous illegalities committed by Trump’s enemies during the election campaign, on election night, and subsequently.
Everybody accepts that Joe Biden was legally inaugurated and is the president, but if fewer than 50,000 votes, out of millions that may not have been legally cast, flipped from Biden to Trump in Pennsylvania and any two of Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin, Trump would have won in the Electoral College.
On the charges concerning Jan. 6 itself, the televised hearings on Thursday night confirmed the vacuous artificiality of the anti-Trump case. It’s acknowledged that no link has been established between the Trump organization and the rioters. It’s now clear that the most destructive of the vandals who entered the Capitol didn’t even attend the preceding Trump speech and used it as a pretext and went directly to the Capitol to form the vanguard of the advancing demonstrators.
Hundreds of arrested people were held in solitary detention for many months and were undoubtedly subjected to the customary techniques of American prosecutors: threatening draconian sentences but promising extreme leniency and a guarantee against any possible suit for perjury if the targeted suspects can produce inculpatory recollections of use to the prosecutors; even this notoriously abusive and widespread failing of the American criminal justice system didn’t produce anyone who alleged any significant improprieties against Trump or his campaign. It’s conceded that Trump urged the mayor of Washington and the speaker of the House to reinforce the Capitol and that he offered to mobilize 20,000 national guardsmen to do so, but that they would not hear of it.
The endless unfounded allegations directed at Trump are increasingly incongruous and ineffective. He has been out of office, constitutionally legally or not, for 17 months. Evidence piles up every month of a monstrous attempt by the Democratic National Committee in collusion with the FBI and senior intelligence officials to cheat him out of his 2016 election victory. And the regime that did take office settles each week more firmly into a quagmire of incompetence, unpopularity, and worldwide disrespect with no precedent in the history of the American presidency since before the Civil War.
The committee itself has no legitimacy. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) churlishly rejected Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) suggested delegation, and the Republicans she appointed are the two most outspoken Republican Trump-haters in elective office, Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, and neither of them is likely to be in elective office after next January.
The Democrats on the committee constitute a vanguard of the anti-Trump congressional assassination squad: Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), and Benny Thompson of Mississippi, whose irrational partisanship is such that in 2005 he voted, for no audible reason, not to confirm the George W. Bush Ohio electors to the Electoral College even though that election was not in the slightest disputed. Trump-hating committee member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who led the second impeachment of him, similarly objected to Trump’s Florida electors in 2016.
Whatever Donald Trump’s political future may be, the Democratic crusade to demonize him has failed. Despite massive attempts to publicize the television debut of the Jan. 6 events, the three principal networks, CBS, NBC, and ABC, which normally pull 18 million viewers between them in that time zone, were down about 35 percent with NBC and CBS down over 40 percent. CNN and MSNBC, the anti-Trump cable networks, were also down substantially, even though they'd already lost over half their viewers at the end of the Trump administration early last year.
The failure of the whole project was further illustrated by the rapturous words of approval of the most vociferous and consistent television news Trump-haters: One knew it had been a failure when Chris Wallace, who made the first of the 2020 presidential debates a two-to-one affair, in one of his few cameo appearances since the Titanic-like demise of the CNN streaming service, labeled Thursday night’s droning soporiferous farrago of anti-Trump nonsense a “very powerful” narrative.
It’s true that American democracy is under some threat, but the revelations of Hillary Clinton allegedly masterminding and Barack Obama approving the Trump-Russian collusion fraud, and the frenzied Democratic allegations that a sensible verification of ballots, which the great majority of the country favors, constitutes a return of Jim Crow, the Klan, and slavery itself, demonstrate that the Democrats and not the Republicans are the source of it.
On the adduced evidence, it’s a good deal more likely that the Democrats saw much of what was coming and ignored the request of Trump and others to provide additional security around the Capitol in the prayerful hope for just what did occur and that it would enable them to destroy the Trump phenomenon once and for all.
The voters seem not to be distracted, and they will not be distracted by a spurious revival of the abortion issue. With just four and a half months to go before the midterm elections and skyrocketing inflation, gasoline prices, illegal immigration, violent crime, and foreign policy fiascos on all continents except Antarctica, the only imaginable method by which the Biden administration could palliate the chastisement it has justly earned from the voters is if it can play a decisive role in producing a satisfactory negotiated end to the Ukraine war. This would make some concessions to the Russians in the Russian-speaking areas of Ukraine, but anchor Ukraine solidly in the West with an ironclad NATO and Russian guarantee of Ukraine’s frontiers.
The only Americans visible to me in this administration who might have the stature and the ability to perform such a service are national security adviser Jake Sullivan, CIA director William Burns, and, conceivably, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. They’re not world beaters, but “In the valley of the blind,” etc. Trump-hate won’t fly anymore and “1/6” was a farce. Its most revealing moment was when the senators were hiding under their desks with their ludicrous anti-concussion hats on, a pose becoming to most of them.
