Trump Can Still Prevail in the Midterms

The current standing of the Democrats in the midterm election polls is a levitation. Their record when they had the administration was poor. Their official leader, former president Obama, bombed with his long-winded, self-serving monotone of historical revision at the University of Illinois two weeks ago and its dreary sequels in Orange County, Calif. He reminded America of why it put Donald Trump in the White House.

The Democrats and their helpers have emptied their magazines at the opening of the mid-term campaign. Bob Woodward’s novel is a wet kipper. Let him reveal his transcripts as he has threatened in response to those (including me) who have accused him of making up much of it, as has been his custom starting with Watergate, if not before. The takeaway on Woodward is his assertion that there is no evidence of Trump-Russian collusion.

Despite his long and baneful history of myth-making and defamation, Woodward has earned a commendation across the barricades for helping to dig the grave for the putrid corpse of that obscene fabrication. We are surely at the end of the “Let Mueller finish his work, we don’t know what we don’t know” school of maintaining a permanent cloud over whether Trump is legitimately the president.

The New York Times has amplified the chorus of chaos and madness in the White House to try to maintain the anti-Trump rage even though the imputations of criminality and illegitimacy have vanished. It is like a circus acrobat trying to leap from one trapeze to another at an impossible distance and with no safety net. No one cares how the White House functions as long as it does function, and the vagaries of the president’s personality leave many uneasy and some censorious or even outraged, but there is no possible question of his sanity, mental competence, and physical stamina. This is a desperate last-ditch defense of the illegitimacy argument before the president’s enemies have to fight it out with him in the old-fashioned way, as politicians and parties do in democracies, with competing personalities and programs. For ten years all the Democrats have had is the endless repetition of the mantra that they weren’t George W. Bush and then that they weren’t Donald Trump. Not being Trump was never a winning ticket, and now it is a passport to oblivion.

If his enemies and their media echo chamber can’t go on blowing up a hot-air balloon of a controversy every week between now and Election Day, they will pay the price of trying to beat something with nothing. When the noise subsides, the country will reflect on how much better a condition it is in than it was at the last Election Day: Not just every conceivable economic indicator, and some progress on illegal immigration, but the absence of any plausible nuclear menace from North Korea and Iran, the relative disengagement of the United States from endless, hopeless wars in places that have no relevance to American national security, the withdrawal from the Paris climate nonsense, in which Obama was going to impose the spending of trillions of dollars and dispense with millions of American jobs. He would have made the U.S. the only economically serious country in the world to meet such rigorous targets of carbon dioxide standards for no defined purpose except the feel-good self-righteousness of the scientifically gullible.