Donald Trump Demonstrates Our Impatience With Failure

By CONRAD BLACK, Special to the Sun, September 15, 2015

Republicans find themselves at the confluence of two powerful political streams, a fortuitous occurrence complicated by the fact that the streams are colliding, as if rolling inexorably toward each other from two mighty sources diametrically opposite. The Republicans have a lock on that vast mass of sensible Americans disgusted with the incompetence, trumpery, cowardice, corruption, and chicanery of the last 20 years: the Clinton scandals; the George W. Bush malapropisms and fixation on democracy even where (Gaza, Lebanon, Egypt) the democratic preference was the suppression of democracy; the huge current-account deficits (about $10 trillion in that time); trillions of dollars and scores of thousands of casualties and almost the whole conventional military capability of the United States mired in Middle Eastern wars for no gain except the removal of Iraq from Kuwait; the housing bubble; the worst economic crisis in three whole generations; official evasion on every major issue from abortion to immigration to chronic wealth inequality; sleazy, rapacious politicians; crumbling public education; insane and rabidly partisan health-care reform; and a justice system that fattens the lawyers, terrorizes the nation, and fails to prosecute big-business crooks.

The press is filled with tired mythmakers, screaming extremists, and pretty-faced disseminators of feel-good pap. Racial prejudice has almost evaporated in the electorate, but the cry of the racial victim has grown louder, and crime rates are increasing as courts and politicians are finally looking into the coast-to-coast shooting gallery many local police forces have been operating, especially in the rubble heaps of America’s decayed urban core. These have been bitter and horrid decades, politically, for Americans, who like to believe what they are singing when they incant the splendid anthems about “the land of the free” and “sweet land of liberty.”

For many months Senator Rubio could not utter two paragraphs in a public place without declaiming that the United States is “the greatest country in human history.” Of course, in some ways it is, but in many ways, Donald Trump is also correct that “We can’t do anything right. . . . We’re being swindled by everybody. . . . We’re a laughingstock. . . . Our foreign policy is a disaster run by dummies.” The greatest nation in history has become, to borrow a phrase from the great Peggy Noonan, in another context, also a “bumsquat Egypt” type of country, and Americans are right to be mad as hell about it. Mr. Rubio cannot really dispute the accuracy of most of what Mr. Trump says, and the old chestnut that “America’s greatest days are ahead of it” is little heard in this campaign and would not resonate well even with what is left of Norman Rockwell-style Americans, wherever, in the bowels of the country, they may now reside.

The Economist, in its uncomprehending British sobriety, knowledgeable but laboriously serious, objects to Mr. Trump’s sexual references — not just his (outrageous) imputation of menstrual discomfort to the irresistible Megyn Kelly, but also his references to Democrats as “impotent” — as well as such an unceremonious debunking of the foreign-policy establishment as the description of them as “dummies.” But the Obama administration is impotent, and Secretary of State Kerry is a “dummy”; that is exactly what he is — that is le mot juste. Donald Trump has the charm of an Archie Bunker, straight-talk style and wit, with the credibility of an educated and successful businessman and promoter and showman.

Read the full article here, at the New York Sun.