No one will ever know what passed through the President’s mind when he addressed the demonstrators who proceeded afterward to the Capitol. There is no reason to suppose he intended them to attack the “sacred” place. (Only one realm in all the universe is sacred, and that is the Kingdom of God.) Nor is there good reason to believe that he knew—how could he have?—that the crowd included agents provocateurs from Black Lives Matter and Antifa, though that seems indeed to have been the case. It is far more likely that he imagined he was facing another adoring crowd, such as he was accustomed to greeting on the campaign trail; and addressed them as such.
I imagine that Donald Trump had a brief mental lapse induced by the accumulated stress of the past five years. His is a monumentally tough character, but even tough characters have their breaking point—from which Trump recovered almost at once. Naturally, his enemies on the left and in his own party—self-deluded partisan hacks like Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who absurdly hopes to reestablish the Bush-Cheney machine that owned the Republican Party before Trump humiliated them and beat them out—have piled on with the Democrats to ensure Trump’s banishment from political life forever.
Their campaign will go nowhere. The best it can accomplish would be to remove the man himself from public life. The Trumpists Republicans will never go away unless and until they leave the GOP to establish a third party; which is almost certainly their best strategy at this point. As everyone—right and left–is now agreed, the GOP delendum est. This placid, smug, and maleficent association of rich, self-interested and unprincipled corporatists, economic imperialists, military bureaucrats, statists, globalists, and their boughten agents in public life and in Washington is no less undemocratic, ruthless, predatory, criminal, and wicked than the Democratic Party, which—despite Trump’s remarkably effective four years—it comes ever closer to resembling. Trump’s election in 2016 gave the Republican establishment a choice: change, or become extinct. Now it is up to the party establishment to make their final choice. If they decide wrongly, they will be confronted eventually—very soon, in fact—by something far worse (in their eyes, and for their purposes) than Donald Trump. Unfortunately (or not), it is almost a certainty that the establishment is incapable of changing either its spots or its minds. Pressed between the left and the progressive left on the one hand, and the 50 percent of the country that is still “populist” (more accurately, Old American) on the other, it will be squeezed into political oblivion.
The major news sources and national commentators have yet, so far as I know, to acknowledge the role that Antifa and BLM played in the Capitol assault. They and the Democratic Party, which has similarly ignored the role of these groups in their zeal to assign full responsibility to Trump’s supporters, had better recognize the truth of the matter and its implications for themselves, before it hits them rudely in the hinderparts. For now—the next ten days, that is—Antifa’s and BLM’s major target will continue to be Donald Trump and the Republican Party. Immediately after the inauguration, it will become the Biden administration, to which these groups will transfer the full force of their terroristic mania on behalf of the progressive members of Congress and against a relatively moderate (in the beginning, anyway) Democratic government, which inevitably will not progress fast enough to suit the radicals, for whom patience is no virtue but rather a mortal sin. In more normal circumstances, the riots of last summer would have cost the Democrats the election in twenty-twenty. In the coming year or two, the nihilistic spirit that inspired them is sure to assert itself against themselves. In which case, the Donkeys, in 2022, will be fighting themselves on the left, even as they have to contend with an angry and justly reactionary party on the right.
I, for one, am not done with Donald Trump. Should he succeed in reestablishing a strong political foothold in Washington in the next four years, he will have my support for the presidency in 2024. In my estimation, he is the greatest president in the history of the United States since Washington, John Quincy Adams, and Grover Cleveland (who served two non-consecutive terms in the White House).
This post first appeared on my Chilton Williamson blog:
chiltonwilliamson.com/
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