January 31, 2023

Donald Trump was a great, if imperfect, president. By the third year of his presidency, the country was flourishing. The economy was roaring, jobs were up, incomes were up, gas prices were down, and America and Americans were doing fairly well.

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But then a funny thing happened on the way to the election. The swamp struck back via Covid and the George Floyd protests. Neither of those was of Trump’s making, but Democrats used both to steal the election. The Democrats didn’t create Covid or put Floyd in the morgue, but they used the lockdowns and the riots to sufficiently upend American life so that they could steal the election under the cover of chaos.

Those were tests, and Donald Trump failed. With Covid, he allowed the country to be misled by a snake oil salesman and, with the Floyd protests, he didn’t send in the troops. It’s easy to understand, of course, why he failed.

Anthony Fauci had played a role in America’s various health crises for decades and was an internationally respected doctor. As the media was hyping the idea that the virus could wipe out mankind, Fauci was a voice of calm, reassuring the country that, with distance, masks, and lockdowns, we would persevere.

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At the same time, when Trump raised questions about anything that diverged from the Big Pharma/media narrative or suggested we should remember the economic costs of lockdowns, the media, medical people, and scientists attacked, lampooned, and vilified him unmercifully. Given the fusillade facing him, it’s not a surprise that Trump couldn’t recognize the lies the American people were being served.

Image: Donald Trump by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0.

On the George Floyd-inspired Antifa/BLM riots, Trump failed, and that’s on him, although again, one can see why he acted the way he did. As one article explains, Section 252 of the Insurrection Act

permits deployment (of military troops) in order to “enforce the laws” of the United States or to “suppress rebellion” whenever “unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion” make it “impracticable” to enforce federal law in that state by the “ordinary course of judicial proceedings.”

Thus, Trump could have used the military to stop the violence that cities were unwilling or unable to stop. Trump knew this, saying in early June 2020, “If a city or a state refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residents then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them.” The Democrats pilloried him, with Pelosi stating: “But there is no reason for the U.S. military to be called out for this.”

Trump chose not to act, likely because he knew Democrats would brand him a tyrant or dictator if he did, despite the fact that FDR, Kennedy, LBJ, and Bush 41 all used troops for far smaller riots. His forbearance was irrelevant because Democrats attacked him anyway for thinking about troops.

That Donald Trump failed at leading the country through those two disasters is, sadly, understandable. Given the savagery and breadth of the relentless attacks on him, it would have taken someone just short of Zeus to have succeeded. The result of that failure was that Democrats stole the election, and Trump lost the White House.