This has been the Spring of Donald Trump’s discontent. First the COVID-19 derailed the sustained economic recovery that would have been the centerpiece of his re-election campaign.
Then the protests following the sadistic killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis policeman galvanized voices of protest into a torrent of anger, which left Trump looking marginalized, if not somehow responsible.
Initially, the thought was: this is it. Trump has been discredited and with only six, then five months to the election, he would be replaced by an unobjectionable Joe Biden.
This assessment was based on the seemingly inexorable groundswell of righteous indignation concerning the plight of blacks in America. Notwithstanding a lack of hard corroborative data, the indictment of “systemic racism” became a widely accepted depiction of the state of racial affairs in America.
In such a scenario, Trump was of course complicit. All the dog whistling about alleged winks and nods to white supremacists became the accepted state of affairs. This despite Trump’s economic advances producing the all time low for black unemployment, and liberalized sentencing guidelines that would be far less punitive to black defendants.
None of those advances mattered, because Trump was labelled an irredeemable racist.
But Spring has turned to Summer and we are now witnessing the kicking in of the Iron Law of Left Wing Protest Movements. So, what started as racial grievancing has morphed into racial separation and despicable judgments about “whiteness.”
Racial grievance became a witchhunt for anyone who might have fallen short of the current standards of woke-ness.
What started as a cry from the heart about police brutality has morphed into a police defunding campaign that for certain will most negatively impact poor minority areas.
Through it all there has been an undercurrent of radical opposition to American society. This found common cause with the Retrospective Racial Rejectionists, who saw even the likes of abolitionists and Abraham Lincoln as somehow being racists.
The Iron Law of Left Wing Protest Movements says that such protests will inevitably morph and devolve to a point where the majority of society rejects their message, and gets frightened by what they are seeing.
It was bracing to see the protest marches, but cringing to see the looting. Then it became downright surreal to see statues of great American heroes – Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt – destroyed, defaced or threatened.
One need not have a PhD to understand that defacing historical figures represents an attempt to erase history. It is the not too terribly well disguised way to de-legitimize America as somehow irretrievably flawed, racist, and oppressive.
What an incredible leap though, from frustrations about police brutality to overthrowing the entire society/economy/political system!
Whether he stood aside deliberately or not, Trump was wise to let the Protest Movement run its own course. The CHOP phenomenon in downtown Seattle quickly morphed from the Summer of Love into a Third World Thugocracy in which six were shot, and two killed.
The spinelessness of University officials, local political figures, cowed corporate leaders and kneeling Democrat bigwigs has presented Trump with the platform that he will now embrace and run on in November.
Simply put, Trump will be the man who rescues America from the clutches of the ungrateful, nihilistic Left.
He will be the man who remembers and preserves American History, refusing to let it be erased and discarded by a group of America-haters whose DNA seems to lean towards the totalitarian.
You can love or hate Trump, but if you love or at least appreciate, or at least don’t want to overthrow America, you will support him. That is the clear message of Trump 2020.
Trump will tell us that a vote for Biden is a vote for Bernie Sanders, because Biden is not strong enough to be the Leader, and he will kowtow to radical Leftist influences, as personified by Bernie.
Notice that none of this has anything much to do with Joe Biden. Trump doesn’t have to run against Biden, except to point out that Biden will not stop the flood.
If anything, Trump will tell us that a vote for Biden is a vote for Bernie Sanders, because Biden is not strong enough to be the Leader, and he will kowtow to radical Leftist influences, as personified by Bernie.
The speech that Trump gave the night preceding July 4th at Mount Rushmore marked the beginning of his campaign and his new platform. He was atypically analytical in dissecting the motivations and describing the threat of the Leftist activists threatening the pillars of American society.
It was not a demagogic speech, intended to work the crowd into a frenzy. Instead it sounded like an article from a Conservative think tank. Trump was not involving the bogeyman or “Commie goons;” instead, he very coolly and accurately laid out the agenda and threat that the run amok Leftists who now dominate the protests represent.
The reactions to the speech indicate the state of where the country is now, and why Trump has found the platform that could bring him victory in November.
The usual Left wing media suspects predictably excoriated the speech for being dark and divisive, while The Wall Street Journal called it one of the best speeches of his presidency.
The denunciations of Trump are disingenuous, especially since when he sought to be unifying and a healer, he was in turn criticized for being insincere or insufficient.
There is, of course, absolutely nothing that Trump can do to find favor with the The NY Times or The Washington Post. Ironically, this is a very liberating gift, for it frees Trump of any need to do anything other than what he thinks should be done.
Anecdotally, I have now learned of a dozen people who previously didn’t like/loathed Trump who now plan to vote for him. Of course, they are not voting for him so much as they are voting against anarchy, and voting for America.
The more Trump can instill the message and the perception that only he can save the country, the more likely he is to be re-elected.
To paraphrase Churchill on democracy, America is the worst country there is. Except for all the others. At the end of the day, most Americans intuitively understand that, with all its flaws, America is not worth canceling, and indeed is worth preserving.
If that becomes the referendum the public will be asked to vote on, we will likely be in for another November surprise.
Douglas Altabef is Chairman of the Board of Im Tirtzu and a Director of the Israel Independence Fund. He can be reached at [email protected].