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How do I know the 2020 election was on the up and up? The only way anybody knows. I have enough faith in the freedom and diversity of our information market to believe the evidence would be reported if it existed. Even mainstream outlets would be dragged to acknowledge the truth. Also because many of the things Trumpists legitimately complain about aren’t illegal and don’t amount to vote fraud. CIA veterans and the media lying about the authenticity of the Hunter Biden laptop isn’t vote fraud. State voting rules being changed through dubious procedures isn’t vote fraud and doesn’t invalidate votes cast in good faith.
The appeal of “rigged” to Donald Trump is obvious—it lets him continue to command the airwaves rather than concede and disappear as losing candidates usually do. Oh wait I wrote these words in 2016 when he was losing to
Hillary Clinton.
Mr. Trump hints at riots if he is denied the nomination—oh wait, I wrote these words in 2016 too.
The big surprise wasn’t that the 2016 game plan was still the game plan in 2020, but how much his opponents’ behavior had come to resemble Mr. Trump’s in the meantime. If called before the bar of justice for his 2020 claims, he’ll have one semi-plausible answer: Why should anyone believe the media and government when they say fraud didn’t occur?
And he’ll have half a point.
Say this for Mr. Trump: How little disturbance in the social fabric he had to cause to expose the fraudulence of his enemies.
Joe Biden
and his speechwriters decried a Trump “threat to democracy” even as his donors spent millions promoting the most outré Republicans during the GOP primaries. Any GOP aspirant who stood against the election big lie faced not only Mr. Trump but his secret deep-pocketed Democratic partners.
Russia expert and Trump impeachment witness Fiona Hill sees a “straight line” between Mr. Trump’s 2019 Zelensky phone call and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Maybe so, but recall exactly what happened. The U.S. establishment tried to impeach a president for being, it said, flippant and cynical about Ukraine’s security interests. Then this same establishment that sought to expel Mr. Trump for being insufficiently devoted to Ukraine took power—and that’s when Mr. Putin invaded.
Clearly the Russian leader wasn’t making a judgment about Mr. Trump, who was out of power. He was making a judgment about Mr. Trump’s impeachers—about the cynicism and opportunism of their sudden and passing devotion to Ukraine.
A great failure has yet to be acknowledged—the failure of our elites to respond in a mature and patriotic way to the outcome of the 2016 election. You don’t have to be a Trump fan to see that Democrats, the FBI and the media deliberately promoted the collusion lie. You don’t have to be a Hillary Clinton supporter to see that the FBI’s unsanctioned meddling in the race likely cost her the presidency. You don’t have to be a Biden admirer to agree Mr. Trump’s own lies undermine our institutions.
But we reach an understanding with ourselves about such matters mainly through the media, which, in its cowardice and innate lickspittlism, sees only the last of these stories.
Voters are doing their part. Several readers complained after 2020: Who believes 81 million Americans actually voted for Joe Biden? They didn’t: 60 million (or some large number) voted against Mr. Trump. The biggest, most diverse coalition in America, comprising Democrats, Republicans and independents, has nothing in common except their desire not to see the Trump experiment renewed.
Regression to the mean is happening every day despite the
New York Times
bleating that “Jan. 6 is not in the past. It is every day.” The Trump era is passing even if Bernie Sanders wrestles with his conscience because what would be a “horror show” for America, aka Trump winning the ’24 GOP nod, would be good for Democrats.
Mike Pence’s memoirs are helping. The irresistible recognition that Mr. Trump sabotages the causes he claims to support is helping. A straight line, after all, also connects his muffing of the 2021 Georgia Senate runoffs and Joe Biden’s ability to enact his inflationary spending agenda.
The deus ex machina of everyone’s daydreams, the bus that drives off a cliff with Mr. Trump and his enemies aboard, isn’t really a bus and moves in slow motion.
Look for “whataboutism” to disappear from the national lexicon as surreptitiously as it came. Mistaken for a clever riposte, the term manifests the psychological symptom known as “splitting,” in this case denying the reality that some pathologies are not the property of just one party.
Let’s hope so because the biggest hostage to this stalemate is the subject we’re not talking about, namely how to renew America’s economy in the face of our giant debt and urgent need to rearm the country to meet the leadership duties world events are forcing on us.
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