Thursday, several media and other entities that had held off calling Arizona for Joe Biden did so, as it began to look as though the president’s vote totals weren’t going to catch up to the former vice president’s there.
That doesn’t end the controversy over the failed 2020 election in the least. If anything, word that Arizona’s Democrat Secretary of State had referred to Trump supporters as “neo-Nazis” calls into question whether that state’s voting was tabulated correctly and also whether irregularities in election management as found in other states aren’t part of the tapestry out in the desert.
No one should have confidence in the results of the 2020 election as currently reported, and most don’t. A Rasmussen survey found that only 49 percent of Americans believe Biden really won the election despite Big Media and Big Tech doing everything they can to scold people into accepting that narrative. And with the tumbling forth of allegations and statistical implausibilities of the six still-contested states — Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia — the American people will not and should not be persuaded. Not until those appearances of irregularity if not outright criminal fraud conducted in large Democrat-controlled cities are vetted and adjudicated.
If you believe this election was stolen from Donald Trump, no one has proven you wrong. They aren’t even trying. They’re just attempting to shout you down with demands for “unity” while at the same time vowing to make lists of dissidents for the purposes of … something.
But we’d be kidding ourselves not to admit conservatives and Trump supporters are in a bit of a fix. At the most generous we have to admit that despite turning out more votes than any incumbent candidate in presidential history the Trump campaign still didn’t manage to win the election outside the margin of fraud. That’s still true despite the caveat that this appears to be a bigger margin of fraud to overcome than ever before.
Which means that what’s below are some things it might have been nice to see addressed before the election.
Now, if your reaction is that this is hindsight, or blaming the victim, or piling on, fine. It isn’t intended that way. In fact, while it’s true the situation looks gloomy right now, the election is certainly not over, and there is no reason for anyone to give up on the outcome. And in that spirit each one of these suggestions is still very much operable for a second Trump term or even as an easter egg in the lame duck period. It isn’t too late for the president to implement them; he should.
1. Those tweets
Over and over you’ve heard that Trump’s Twitter outbursts have been a negative that has driven away suburban women, old people, and lots of others whose pinky-fingers take flight when beverages are imbibed.
Maybe that’s true. Frankly, I’m withholding judgement about it until I see the real, final, adjudicated election results. As of now that’s generally a mainstream media narrative, and those don’t have much of a record for veracity of late.
I would argue Trump’s problem was those tweets for a different reason.
The problem was they were tweets.
Why on Earth was Donald Trump still on Twitter by September of this year? Twitter was censoring the statements of the president of the United States … and he put up with it!
They’re still doing it, and he’s still putting up with it.
The first time Twitter started fact-checking Trump or suppressing anything he said, the president should have loudly announced that he was closing his Twitter account and inviting his 80-something-million followers to join him at …
Parler. Or MeWe. Or Gab.
It really doesn’t matter which one. He’s the president of the United States, and he communicates via social media. He is the single most important market mover in that entire economic sector. Wherever he goes becomes a significant player on the social media scene.
Sure, a mass Twexit to some smaller platform likely overwhelms the new kid. Maybe that should have been staged over the course of months in order to allow the lucky recipient to scale up to handle Trump’s traffic. That isn’t a fatal problem.
A Trump Twexit would have done one of two things. Either he single-handedly creates a Big Tech entity beholden to, and likely friendly to, his cause which will never censor him and which now has every member of the American news and political media building a presence because they have to in order to cover him, or the media no longer is reporting on the things he says on social media and it’s his supporters and only his supporters hearing about them. The soccer moms and grandmas and bridge-club set become none the wiser.
As said above, this is still something Trump ought to do. Today. This minute. After the negative role Twitter played in this election, why you would reward them by continuing to post there is beyond any rational understanding.
2. COVID
Let’s be honest here. It’s extremely unfair that Trump was saddled with the Chinese coronavirus, and he was put in a near-impossible situation in dealing with something that was an impossible dream for the Democrat Party. Not only did it force Trump into a political minefield, but upon shallow examination it would appear that authoritarian government policies such as those Democrats want to impose anyway are prudent.
But Trump had all the right instincts from the beginning. He needed to follow those instincts and surround himself with people willing and capable to convert them into successful policy.
He did well with his first notion: banning travel from China. That was the smartest thing he did. Enlisting the private sector to ramp up production of PPE and other items America was short on thanks to the Obama administration’s gross mismanagement of national stockpiles was also a good move. Operation Warp Speed, aimed at producing a vaccine in record time, was also a good move and but for chicanery on the part of Big Pharma it would have benefited Trump’s reelection. Thanks for holding that announcement a week, Pfizer!
But the most fundamental instinct Trump had was also the most correct. Trump saw the virus for what it is. It’s a coronavirus. Everybody will get it eventually, and unless you’re in a number of specific at-risk categories it’s exceptionally unlikely it’ll kill you. For something like that, attempting to stop the spread is fruitless, a waste of time, and only prolongs the societal and economic damage the virus can cause.
What you need for a coronavirus is treatment. You need a program of medical care that works to get people past it.
Trump wanted that to be his focus, but he was unable to get there. He found himself accused of wanting people to inject themselves with bleach. It was reported that a woman who it later appeared might have murdered her husband with fish-tank cleaner killed him because of Trump’s positive statements about hydroxychloroquine. And on and on.
What Trump needed was cover. And he never found any. Why?
The Democrats on his coronavirus task force, that’s why.
He was beset by the public health bureaucrats from the CDC and National Institutes of Health, most of whom had performed poorly in previous epidemics. Every one of them sabotaged Trump, and every one did what they could to spread the narrative that there were no effective treatments for COVID. Of course, the tune is changing now. Magically.
By May Anthony Fauci and most of the rest of that task force should have been cashiered. And Trump should have been explicit that he was running them off because their groupthink and defeatist talk was insufficient to beat the virus. He should have replaced them with people whose strategies were in line with his ideas — that the virus can only be beaten with treatments and vaccines, not poverty and social isolation.
This isn’t a fair criticism given the challenge he was faced with, but there is no doubt COVID has been handled poorly by government top to bottom, and that includes Trump despite the fact he saw the virus clearly. It’s a damned shame.
3. China Joe
Trump spent a lot of time castigating Biden for his clear mental and physical decline, and nothing he said about Biden was wrong.
The problem is by doing so it made Trump look like a bully. And there was no shortage of conservative voices willing to carry that standard so Trump didn’t have to.
Instead, what Trump needed to be castigating Biden about was China. Because while beating Biden up for his inability to make complete sentences did show that Trump was considerably sharper, more energetic, and stronger, it’s clear half the country isn’t interested in an alpha male as president of the United States anymore. Or at least not as such.
But almost nobody is comfortable with the idea that our beta president would be China’s beta. And that’s exactly what Joe Biden’s history presents him as.
This was true long before Hunter Biden’s laptop surfaced on the scene, by the way. It’s been known, or at least suspected, that Hunter Biden was raking in Chinese money on his father’s behalf long before Trump was even elected. And Biden’s record on China was abysmal two or three decades ago, going back to his support for giving Most Favored Nation trade status and WTO membership to the regime that was red in tooth and claw from Tiananmen Square.
That China represents the single largest threat to America’s national interest and that Joe Biden has been over-friendly and suspiciously dismissive to concerns about China are hardly contestable statements. They’re obvious, and most Americans see them.
Trump has hit on this, and he especially hit on it late in the campaign after that laptop came out into the public eye. But a stronger and much earlier Trump narrative skewering Biden as a bought and paid-for lackey kowtowing to the ChiComs, and painting a Biden presidency as a surrender to China on trade, currency, economics, culture (the LeBron James–NBA debacle needed to be wrapped around Biden and his “come on, man!” protestations about Chinese aggressions) and even individual liberty, would have scared Americans into rejecting him a lot more effectively than pointing out that he’s feeble and senile.
Because every aspect of the China thing is true, and it’s the most important threat facing the country if Biden is inaugurated on Jan. 20.
4. Declassification
This is, again, something Trump wanted to do and for some reason wasn’t able to. There should have been a bloodletting all over Washington until it was done.
Trump hadn’t even taken office before the Deep State assassins and saboteurs left over by the Obama administration, not unlike the Harkonnen villains laying in wait for House Atreides on Arrakis, began striking at his administration. Before he knew it his attorney general had been rendered impotent and he was at the mercy of Democrat career bureaucrats out to get him, and for two years he was under siege by a politically motivated cabal disguised as the Mueller investigation.
The way to combat that witch-hunt and attempted coup would have been to declassify everything. Not just everything to do with FISAgate and the Russian business. Everything. Wipe out the entire Obama administration who are out to get you by shining a bright light on eight years of filth and corruption.
Surely Trump wanted to do that and was talked out of it. He shouldn’t have been. He should have fired bureaucrats until he found enough of them who would unload every document the public needed in order to see that cabal for who they really are. Instead he left it to Congress to do most of that work, and Congress isn’t capable of vetting Washington scandals anymore.
This is absolutely something that still can and should be done, by the way.
5. Bringing the troops home
On Wednesday Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper, for a very specific reason: Esper is dragging his heels on bringing home those American troops who are wasting blood and treasure in Afghanistan 19 years after they accomplished the mission we sent them there for.
Perhaps the fundamental feature of Trump’s appeal in 2016 was that he offered a break from the continual, pointless, endless wars of the Clinton–Bush–Obama continuum in the White House: Somalia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and so forth.
To Trump’s credit he has made good on his promise not to pack troops off to some foreign war with little relationship to our national security, and the staggering success of our domestic energy industry has made it so we’ll never need to care about the Middle East again (at least until Biden’s abysmal Green New Deal reverses those successes).
But we’re still in Afghanistan, because the Pentagon and the defense contractors think it’s too sweet a honey-hole to give it up.
Talk to people who have served there recently and they’ll tell you there are a whole lot more civilians posted in Afghanistan than troops. What are the civilians doing there? Making money. You’re paying them to build and run things in a country where it’s societally acceptable to rape little boys. After 19 years of American occupation.
James Mattis wouldn’t get the troops out of there, and neither would Esper. Trump needed to keep on firing people until those troops, and those defense contractors, were home. Period. And let’s not kid ourselves about peace talks with the Taliban. Those are a waste of time; nothing we negotiate with those people will be adhered to.
Had he been able to accomplish that objective Trump would have been the single most consequential “America First” leader since World War II. He might still be, but it’s an incomplete legacy and he couldn’t take adequate credit for it.
Hopefully Chris Miller, who’ll serve as Defense Secretary now that Esper has been fired, can get the troops home by Christmas. It’s overdue. Afghanistan stopped being significant to American national interest when Osama bin Laden was liquidated.
