Table of Contents:
A Very Real Silent Majority Will Reelect Trump: David Catron, The American Spectator, June 5, 2020
Trump Writes Campaign Script With Three Big Themes: Gerald F. Seib, WSJ. June 15, 2020
Conrad Black: Why Donald J. Trump is Truly a President like No Other: Conrad Black, National Post, May 11, 2020
Class, Not Race, Divides America: Victor David Hanson, American Greatness, June 14, 2020
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A Very Real Silent Majority Will Reelect Trump
David Catron
The American Spectator, June 5, 2020
Tuesday morning, President Trump tweeted two words that succinctly describe the winning coalition that will assure his November reelection: “SILENT MAJORITY.” This prompted a considerable amount of fustian mirth from the Twitter mob, a number of ostensibly serious opinion pieces in the corporate media, and contemptuous dismissal by the Democrats. The consensus was that Trump was indulging a Nixonian fantasy whereby white suburbanites frightened by an increasingly diverse electorate would save his presidency. This interpretation betrays profound ignorance about the term “silent majority,” which never had any racial connotation, and disregards what suburban voters really fear — Democratic incompetence in a time of economic uncertainty and social unrest.
The ongoing riots in cities “governed” by supine Democrats, combined with the genuine threat that the violence will metastasize outward to the suburbs, is their most conspicuous fear. And they want action. A Morning Consult poll released Tuesday reveals that 71 percent of registered voters support calling in the National Guard to assist the police in quelling the riots, including 67 percent of suburban women. Likewise, 58 percent of voters support calling in the U.S. military if necessary, including 54 percent of suburban women. In other words, clear majorities support President Trump’s intention to deploy U.S. troops if state officials are unable or unwilling to contain the violence. Moreover, he possesses the power to do so. As Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) wrote in the New York Times Wednesday morning:
This week, rioters have plunged many American cities into anarchy, recalling the widespread violence of the 1960s.… Some governors have mobilized the National Guard, yet others refuse, and in some cases the rioters still outnumber the police and Guard combined. In these circumstances, the Insurrection Act authorizes the president to employ the military.… This venerable law, nearly as old as our republic itself, doesn’t amount to “martial law” or the end of democracy, as some excitable critics, ignorant of both the law and our history, have comically suggested. In fact, the federal government has a constitutional duty to the states to “protect them from domestic violence.”
Sen. Cotton’s straightforward and irrefutable essay has caused something of an insurrection at the Times. The New York Post reports, “Dozens of New York Times staffers erupted in outrage at the newspaper publishing an op-ed from Republican Sen. Tom Cotton urging President Trump to call out the U.S. military to crack down on protests that have turned violent.” In addition, the Times has been inundated by angry letters from its readers, a denunciation from the News Guild of New York, and outraged tweets from its own “journalists.” In the end, it may be necessary for the president to send in troops to protect James Bennet, the hapless editorial page editor who decided to print Sen. Cotton’s heretical op-ed. Bennett certainly can’t count on the protection of New York City’s Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Trump Writes Campaign Script with Three Big Themes
Gerald F. Seib
WSJ. June 15, 2020
It’s pretty easy to summarize President Trump’s political position: His re-election bid is in serious trouble. He trails Democrat Joe Biden by 8.1 percentage points in the RealClearPolitics average of the latest national polls. He is behind in almost all public polling in the half-dozen most important swing states.
Unemployment, the most politically sensitive of economic indicators, has rocketed upward because of the coronavirus and is certain to still be at historic highs by Election Day. Over the last 15 times a sitting president has sought re-election, only three of those presidents have run with unemployment rates that rose over the year before the voting, according to research by the Mehlman Castagnetti Rosen & Thomas lobbying firm. All three—Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush—lost.
The latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll shows that a stunning 80% of Americans think the country is out of control. There is no formidable third-party candidate emerging to siphon away anti-Trump votes from the Democrats the way the Libertarian and Green candidates did in 2016. Mr. Trump has a solid base, but he is a divisive figure who hasn’t really expanded it.
Ordinarily, such metrics would spell doom. But….
This is no ordinary time, Mr. Trump is no ordinary politician, and ordinary metrics may not apply over the 4½ months remaining before the election. The president has a cash and a social-media advantage over Mr. Biden, and an advantage in the Electoral College that would allow him to again lose the popular vote, and even a couple of those important swing states, and still win the election.
Perhaps most important, a clear campaign script is emerging for Mr. Trump. It has three parts: celebrate a recovering economy, bash China and proclaim himself the candidate of law and order. In each case, Mr. Trump is seeking to turn what could be a drag into an advantage.
On the economy, the Trump calculation will be that, in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, the economy’s direction, not its objective condition, will matter most by Election Day. If the economy has hit bottom in the current second quarter, starts climbing back in the third quarter and is on an upswing as the fourth quarter starts, the economic narrative is simple: Mr. Trump had a strong economy, wasn’t responsible for its collapse and already has led the recovery. Critically, the Journal/NBC News poll found that voters prefer Mr. Trump over Mr. Biden to handle the economy—the only clear issue advantage he has right now, but perhaps the most important one.
On China, Mr. Trump hasn’t achieved the wholesale revision of the trade relationship he promised. But he has a preliminary trade deal that has Beijing buying more American goods, pushing China back to the top of the list of American trading partners. Mr. Trump’s critics will claim that all this has done is move the trading relationship back to where it was before he shook it up. His claim will be that without his toughness China would have continued gaining a long-term commercial advantage.
More broadly, the tough-on-China theme has growing resonance as Americans increasingly place blame on Beijing for failing to do more to stop the coronavirus before it leapt to the broader world. Mr. Trump doesn’t get good marks for how he handled the pandemic, but to many voters China is the bigger villain of all in this tale. And Mr. Trump isn’t going to be outflanked when it comes to confronting China. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Conrad Black: Why Donald J. Trump is Truly a President like No Other
Conrad Black
National Post, May 11, 2020
In an excerpt from his latest book, available May 14, Conrad Black says now that U.S. President Donald Trump has reduced most peoples’ tax burden, relieved the fear that recession and unemployment are just around the corner, and adopted a foreign policy of prudent and effective realism, Americans will likely and rightly judge him a success:
Those who oppose Trump generally do not understand how desperate and disgusted almost half of Americans are at the most inept twenty-year streak of presidential misgovernment in American history that preceded the 2016 election. These decades of fruitless war, bone-cracking recession, humanitarian disasters, collapsing alliances, oceanic deficits, and the erosion of economic growth and private sector industrial investment to a third or a quarter of levels under Ronald Reagan, could rattle any American’s patriotic self-confidence. Trump is a throwback to Reagan in that he rejects the chic defeatism of the establishment; and despite all the media and Democratic Party and Never-Trump calumny of him, his political program is essentially conventional, moderate, conservative wisdom lifted in large part from the policy recommendations of thoroughly respectable conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation. Trump speaks to Americans fearful of decline. He wants, as his slogan says, to make America great again.
To those unaffected by the decline of America, that decline was invisible; to those who were affected by it, it is a challenge and a constant fear for their own welfare and national pride. The Democrats have had no policy for some years except to denigrate their opponents, and try to bribe and anesthetize a comatose lumpenproletariat addicted to state benefit. Their nomination of Hillary Clinton showed that they did not realize how many Americans rejected this vision of America.
The great majority of anti-Trump activity in the first year of his administration was devoted to the propagation of falsehoods, which were then justified by the selective and intentional misinterpretation of Trump’s careless and ambiguous statements. Distaste for Trump’s straight-shooting and sometimes vulgar style caused otherwise intelligent people to withhold any benefit of the doubt, and pathologically to interpret anything he said or did in the worst possible light. He is not, in fact, a racist, sexist, warmonger, hothead, promoter of violence, or a foreign or domestic economic warrior. No opposition can continue on this name-calling basis alone for much longer than this one has.
Every two weeks in the first year of his term a new alarm was raised, and all quickly fell silent. In a calmer atmosphere, the faddish frenzies will become rarer and shorter. For two weeks in August, Confederate statues were being taken down all over the South, but now such iconoclasm happens only intermittently; the abrupt termination of famous careers for alleged sexual liberties that once happened on a daily basis has become much less frequent. Trump’s opponents are tenacious but unimaginative and they have yet to seem to prepare for the possibility, now more of a likelihood, that he might be a durable and effective president. . … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Class, Not Race, Divides America
Victor David Hanson
American Greatness, June 14, 2020
Nothing is stranger in these tense days than the monotony of the inexact and non-descriptive mantra of “white privilege” and “white solidarity”—as if there is some monolithic white bloc, or as if class matters not at all.
In truth, the clingers, the deplorables, the irredeemables, and Joe Biden’s “dregs” have very little in common with those who so libel them, but superficially share supposedly omnipotent and similar skin color.
In the past, we saw such tensions among so-called whites in CNN’s reporting of the allegedly toothless rubes at Trump rallies, in the Strzok-Page text trove about Walmart’s smelly patrons, in the callous coastal disregard for the five-decade wasting away of the American industrial heartland, in the permissible elite collective disparagement of Christian evangelicals, and in the anthropological curiosity about and condescension toward such exotic, but presumably backward, Duck Dynasty and NASCAR peoples.
As a result, we have reached the surreal point at which the nation’s privileged whites on campuses such as Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, in the top echelon of politics, and the corporate and entertainment worlds, all deplore in the abstract something they call “white privilege” in others who have never really experienced it.
Of course, whatever such a thing is, they possess it in abundance but give no hint they have any intention of giving it up other than rhetorically or through the medieval concept of hair-shirt penance and Twitter confessionals. On the other hand, they are furious that middle-class whites do not join their theatrics of bending the knee and offering abject apologies for original sins.
Progressive, affluent whites run most of the blue states that oversee the big blue cities who hire the liberal police chiefs and their unionized officers. So how strange it is for liberal elite white people to damn supposed white privilege for the logical sins of their own ideology and governance.
Little in Common Culturally and Socially
Across the hollowed-out rust belt, in Appalachia, throughout California’s foothills and Central Valley, or in the rural South there are millions of white Americans who fail in terms of income, longevity, suicide rates, dependence on government assistance, and drug dependence statistically compared to nonwhite ethnic groups such as Punjabi immigrants, or Asian-Americans in general, and elite black and Latino minorities.
But more importantly, I can attest after living my entire life near the rural nexus of Fresno, Kings, and Tulare Counties, ground zero of the 1930s and 1940s Grapes of Wrath Oklahoma diaspora, that many whites by no stretch of the imagination could be defined as “privileged.” They are also not deplorable, irredeemable, or clingers to their guns and religion, much less dregs. Whatever they may be, they are not the beneficiaries at birth of any intrinsic advantage. They certainly did not enjoy the affirmative action of the white elite, defined by familial networks of like professionals, alumni influence, money, quid pro quo interning, incestuous leveraging, and good ol’ boy favoring. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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For Further Reference:
Conrad Black: Trump Deliberately Tries to be Underestimated: BNN Bloomberg, June 15, 2020 — Conrad Black, author and former newspaper publisher, joins BNN Bloomberg’s Amanda Lang to discuss his upcoming book on U.S. President Donald Trump.
Amna Akbar | Law and Social Movements: The Turn to Law Reform and Policy Platforms in Today’s Left: Duke Law, Feb. 20, 2020 — From the Green New Deal to the Vision for Black Lives, today’s left social movements are turning to law reform as a way to reimagine our relationships to each other, the state, and the commons. [Important video: Amna Akbar clearly and unabashedly explains how she and others are working to undercut President Trump and transform America in their hard-left image.]
UC Berkeley History Professor’s Open Letter against BLM, Police Brutality and Cultural Orthodoxy: Katy Grimes, California Globe, June 14, 2020 — An anonymous professor of history at U.C. Berkeley wrote open letter to colleagues lambasting the current narratives of “racial injustice” and “institutional racism” claimed by the BLM movement, and ongoing protests over the death of George Floyd. [The author of this letter is a woman of colour, as she identifies within the letter.]
The Monument-Destroying Mobs Don’t Hate the Confederacy, They Hate America: John Daniel Davidson, The Federalist, June 15, 2020 — Angry mobs are tearing down and defacing monuments across America. They make no distinction between Confederate and Union, abolitionist and pro-slavery, 15th-century figures and 20th.
