In this spring season, America’s future is fraught with uncertainties as a result of the pandemic unleashed by communist China’s malicious deceptions about a virus that first appeared in the city of Wuhan.
Will the nation be able to “re-open” as the president desires, or will it descend into a long-lasting depression with millions unemployed? At the same time, a much greater uncertainty haunts the horizon. This uncertainty is a product of the ferocious hate for the president and his supporters ginned up by the political left ever since the 2016 election.
The anti-Trump fervor is so intense that it has divided the nation into two alien camps until there is hardly any longer a national conversation or a united front in the face of the deadly contagion.
For anyone not in thrall to anti-Trump obsessions, the spectacle of Trump hatred is unfathomable. It’s not that the criticisms of President Trump are harsh, but that they veer on the lunatic, making communication with those who voice them impossible. It is why the national conversation and a semblance of national unity in the face of threats seem almost hopeless.
A recent New York Times interview with Bernie Sanders impersonator Larry David highlights the problem. “You know, it’s an amazing thing,” David told the Times, “[Trump] has not one redeeming quality. You could take some of the worst dictators in history, and I’m sure that all of them, you could find one decent quality. Stalin could have had one decent quality, we don’t know!”
Where to begin? Stalin was a totalitarian dictator who killed 40 million of his own countrymen – in peacetime. How does such a preposterous comparison even occur to a man as intelligent as Larry David? Here are a few of Trump’s obvious redeeming qualities: Trump went out of his way to give a presidential pardon to free Alice Johnson a 63-year-old African American grandmother sentenced to life without parole for a non-violent drug charge. Johnson had served 21 years of her sentence when Trump freed her. Barack Obama by contrast turned a deaf ear to her appeals.
Trump also shepherded the passage of the First Step Act, something no other Republican would have done, giving thousands of mainly African American prisoners a second chance. Here’s the way far left CNN commentator Van Jones described what Trump had done: “[S]omething beautiful is happening … It is happening right now, people coming together to help the people who have nothing. And it is amazing.”
How does one engage a mentality that claims Trump has no redeeming qualities but that historical monsters like Stalin probably do? The New York Times interviewer didn’t even notice, let alone challenge this absurdity.
What is most troubling for the future of our democracy is that the otherwise intelligent people, including those who inhabit its elite opinion institutions, think — or rather don’t think — about Trump and his supporters in the same ludicrous way as Larry David.
In an article in the New York Review of Books titled “Vector in Chief,” Finian O’Toole describes Trump thus: “Trump’s narcissism, mendacity, bullying, and malignant incompetence were obvious before the coronavirus crisis and they have been magnified rather than moderated in his surreal response to a catastrophe whose full gravity he failed to accept until March 31, when it had become horribly undeniable.”
False. Trump banned travel from China and declared the virus “a national health emergency” on January 31, two months earlier – actions which caused Democrats like Biden and Pelosi and their lackey press to call him a xenophobe and a racist. O’Toole references to Trump’s March 31 remarks but ignores his earlier declaration on January 31.
O’Toole then concocts a bizarre argument that Trump’s alleged later decision to take the epidemic seriously is merely a self-interested necessity because his supporters are in the category of the most vulnerable to the disease. He writes, “For we must bear in mind that Trump’s ‘real people,’ the ones who make up his electoral base, are disproportionately prone to the chronic illnesses (the ‘underlying conditions’) that make Covid-19 more likely to prove fatal.”
So even Trump’s good deeds are bad deeds, dictated by his voracious self-interest: People who are sick vote for Trump, while Trump for selfish reasons is forced to protect them.
It gets worse. Since it’s that time of year, let’s throw in some religion: “Trump has acted in relation to Covid-19 like the God who tells the Jews to mark their homes with a sign so that the plagues he is inflicting on Egypt will pass by their doors—with the malign twist that he has instead marked out his own chosen people for special harm.” Get the point? What an evil president we have to lead us.
Fifty-two percent of voters over the age of 45 voted for Trump. In addition to being more prone to illness, these older people have active memories of the disasters of socialism, went to schools that still taught American principles and the American Constitution rather than Rules for Radicals, and also have a healthy understanding of why America needs a strong military rather than the degraded one Obama left as his legacy.