We are an optimistic people. And in today’s world, there’s the rub.
By nature, we are sure that the extremes of any given time will be corrected as the political climate changes and elections bring in new players. The great ship of state will always get back on an even keel and the excesses, or omissions, of one administration will be corrected in the next.
Maybe not this time.
The norms uprooted by President Donald Trump are possibly too many not to have left lasting damage to this Republic.
Consider just some of his transgressions:
— We have abandoned our place as the beacon of decency and the values enshrined in that.
— America’s good name has gone up in smoke, as with the Paris climate agreement and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear forces treaty.
— The president has meddled in our judicial system by intimidating prosecutors and seeking to influence judges.
— The president has blown on the coals of prejudice and sanctioned racial antagonism.
But above all, Trump has tested the constitutional limits of presidential power and found that it can be expanded exponentially. He has expanded executive privilege to absolute power.
Trump has done this with the help of the pusillanimous members of the Senate and the oh-so-malleable Attorney General Bill Barr — his new Roy Cohn.
The most pernicious of Trump’s enablers, the eminence grise behind the curtain, gets little attention. He is Rupert Murdoch, a man who has done a lot of good and incalculable harm.
The liberal media rails — indeed enjoys — railing against Fox News but has little to say about the 88-year-old proprietor who, with a single stroke, could silence Sean Hannity and tame Tucker Carlson (whom I know and like).
But Murdoch remains aloof and silent. The power of Fox is not its editorial slant but that it forms a malignant circle of harm. It is Trump’s daily source of news, endorsement, prejudice and even names for revenge.
There are two conservative networks, OAN and Newsmax. But neither has the flare that Fox has as a broadcast outlet, nor acts as the eyes and ears and adviser to the president.
I am an admirer of Murdoch in many ways. But like a president, maybe he should get a lot of scrutiny.
Murdoch’s newspapers in Australia, where they dominate, have rejected climate change, and possibly played a role in the country not being prepared for the terrible wildfires.
In Britain, he has stirred feeling against the European Union for decades. His Sun, the largest circulation paper, is Fox News in print and was probably the template for Fox having campaigned ceaselessly and vulgarly against Europe.
After long years of watching Murdoch in Britain and here, I know the damage he can do and why he should be named. I must say, though, that Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal is a fine newspaper, better than before he bought it.
The Democrats, to my mind, present a sorry resistance. None of their presidential candidates has delivered a speech of vision, capturing the popular imagination.
Democrats search the news for the latest Trumpian transgressions and get a kind of comfort by seeing, by their lights, how terrible he is. But there is none of the old confidence that the president will be trounced in the next election and the ship of state will right itself because it always does.
Maybe it will list more.
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Like most of what we read, this is a list of one-sided proclamations with zero evidence. The Democrats in collusion with the liberal media and the deep state have labelled Trump corrupt. The actual corruption has been the insidious changing of our institutions through progressive liberal groupthink and the circumvention of the democratic process. This group finds such behavior morally justified because of their elitist attitudes and high moral standards which change as often as the wind changes direction. They can make up moral arguments about anything at any time.
What specific crime has Trump committed? There is none. If you want the ultimate example of an abuse of power take a look at FDR. His list is very long. He is the hero of the left and Bernie and the other candidates are hoping to be FDR 2.0. They want to to put the final nail in the coffin of individualism . Trump’s real crime from a liberal perspective is he has caused people to believe in themselves again. This undermines the liberal obsession with control, which they need to make people dependent upon them and the government. Their goal is one party and one nation intolerant of individual freedom and liberty.
I was told yesterday that President Trump suggested that it may be necessary to cancel the elections in view of the COVID19 epidemic.