Peggy Noonan and I have recently confirmed that our political disagreements absolutely will not stand in the way of our long friendship. This is timely, as in her latest pronouncement upon the ever-shifting and more desperate perspective of civilized Trump-hate (defined here as making some effort at analysis, no matter how nonsensical, and not just primal scream therapy like most Trump-haters) in the Wall Street Journal on June 16, she presented the most delusional version of the Trump-cancellation argument that has yet been made by any otherwise serious person still capable of rational comment on the subject.
The five thin and vibrating tent poles holding up the porous canvas of Trump-denial now, according to Noonan, are: 2020 was a pristine election incapable of serious doubt; Trump was trying to overturn the election result by intimidation on Jan. 6; there’s no merit in the Trumpism without Trump argument—his administration was a complete failure in every policy area; his scores of millions of supporters don’t really support him and they’re deserting him; and all those who turned themselves inside-out and in some cases violated election and vote-counting statutes to bring Trump down have no responsibility whatsoever for the almost indescribable catastrophe of the present administration. The proportions of this failure need not be considered. Both parties will just take lots of emetics, allowing nature to take its course, and move on as if the Trump-Biden years never happened.
No matter how their political vision is marred by the phobia that has turned much of America’s professional political community into jabbering lunatics from whose foreheads cuckoo birds lurch out shrieking anti-Trump epithets at the mention of his name, a diluvian watershed mid-term election disaster for the Democrats is now only four-and-a-half months away. As many as a hundred victorious Republican candidates will have benefited from Trump’s endorsement.
By Conrad Black
