The Godfather President

There was the time when the five families made their move — and he survived.

We are living out the first act of The Godfather. Remember the cliffhanger. Near Christmas, like today, five Mafia families execute a coordinated attack on Don Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando), riddling him with bullets. In the immediate aftermath, there is a profound sense of doom. Everyone expects the Godfather to die, and all seems lost. Only he does not die. He lives to initiate a counterattack against the five families with his successor son, Michael (Al Pacino).
Donald Trump is the American Godfather. Last Tuesday he got hit, perhaps lethally, by a combined five forces of the Swamp: the corrupt Democratic electoral machine, Big Tech, the Deep State, RINO turncoats, and the leftist news media, which unfortunately includes the current Fox News. Now conservatives have to be Michael Corleone to save the first principles movement that Trump almost single-handedly relaunched, whether he survives or not. And we artists are in the front ranks, right behind the courts.
I leave it to brilliant scholars such as Victor Davis Hanson to explain what a tragic disaster the radical left-controlled Biden administration will be to the nation, and I’ll stick to my forte, the arts and the culture. Conservative writers are anxious right now, with good reason. We had long been working outside the progressive hegemony to create good stories unshackled by intersectional and narrative demands. Consequently, we have been impeded from mainstream publication or film production, canceled when we broke through, then blocked from promoting our work. In President Trump we have a champion at the very top of government fighting for our endangered freedom of expression. Now that he’s wounded, social media is censoring him.
This too evokes The Godfather. What Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall) says to Sonny Corleone (James Caan) regarding Don Corleone’s precarious fate could perfectly apply to Trump’s. “If we lose the old man, we lose our political contacts and half our strength.” I was feeling the squeeze e...