Just how badly the Democratic Party and American liberals generally need Donald Trump around is demonstrated by the current push in the liberal media to ensure that the Ogre does not retire into the mists the wreathe Trump Tower or onto the golf links at Mira Lago should he fail to win reelection on November the third. To prevent the disaster from happening, the Washington Post and the New York Times (among others) have launched a campaign to have former President arrested the instant his term in office ends at 11:59 January 20, 2021, arraigned on an encompassing charge of Ogreism, and (presumably) jailed to await his appearance before a National Truth Commission.
In the Times’ view,
“Donald Trump’s reelection campaign poses the greatest threat to American democracy since World War II.” Win or lose, its members must be prosecuted for high crimes and misdemeanors. Sam Tanenhaus, a former editor of the New York Times Book Review who has been at work on the official biography of William F. Buckley, Jr. for the past quarter of a century, says
“it is imperative to confront the fact of the Trump era. We elected as president a homegrown insurrectionist. He rose to the highest position in our democracy and damaged it….It’s unimaginable, ludicrous even, to contemplate doing nothing about Donald Trump.”
As President, Joe Biden –he suggests– rather than order an inquiry (which might destroy those few bits of our former democratic polity that Trump has left intact) should establish an election commission on the order of the Warren Commission or the one that investigated the Arabs’ attack on September the eleventh. (No doubt many thousands of writers, publishers, and publishing house editors have an equally warm opinion of the Tanenhaus era at the NYTBR. Fortunately for Sam Tanenhaus, they eventually got over it.) I wonder if my old boss Bill were aware of what a political and legal innocent —indeed, ignoramous— Mr. Tanenhaus is when he handed him the Great Commission all those many years ago. Perhaps he is hoping the ms. is never finished at all.
While I know many Americans who manage to keep their sanity in these insane times, it does seem to me that American society as a whole has become unhinged, largely on account of the emotional infantilism that is spreading faster than Covid-19 across every level of society, starting with the Ivy League and extending downwards to Capitol Hill to Wall Street to the Times Building to the suburban soccer clubs to the towns of Milford and Brookline, New Hampshire, where householders displaying Trump signs in their front yards have received anonymous letters from people threatening to burn their houses down if President Trump does not concede the election.
“You have received fair warning,” the letters —which amount to felonies and are being investigated as such by the local boys in blue— respectfully conclude. There are moments when I wonder how innocent infants really are when they are brought into this world and given the sacrament of baptism.
This post first appeared on my blog Chilton Williamson:
chiltonwilliamson.com/
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