A Punch-Drunk President

If there's anything remaining that Americans can agree on, it's that Donald Trump and his three years as President have been like no other similar time in our lifetimes or in any other Presidency ever.

For most Scragged authors and readers, this has predominantly done far more good than any other presidency we recall, maybe as far back as Andrew Jackson.  No matter what is said about him, President Trump has at least tried to resist the siren song of the power elites who currently ride roughshod over American liberties, traditions, and good sense.

Unlike when Jackson was President, though, the elites have a lot more power and the Trump administration seems to have had a far harder time finding trustworthy and competent allies.  It's also true that the Trumpian style can be, shall we say, a bit disorienting at times, which tends to put off the mentally-orderly sort of folks that are effective in bureaucracies.

Still, when you stand pretty much alone as Mr. Trump does, keeping your enemies in a constant state of utter confusion and disarray is not only an effective tactic, it may be the only one with a prayer of working.  Sun Tzu emphasized the importance of always doing the unexpected and hitting your enemy when he thinks you aren't anywhere nearby.

Watching Mr. Trump constantly do this, repeatedly kneecapping and blindsiding his enemies in the media and in office, has been a thing of beauty.  We've seen so much of this, in fact, that at times we fall into musing about the legendary four-dimensional chess he might be playing - is he really that smart, or just insanely lucky?

Well, all that may be coming to an end.  Whether Mr. Trump may have been outmaneuvering and out thinking his opponents all this time, or Lady Luck was just on his side, clearly neither is the case anymore.  He stumbles from smashing impact to smashing impact, roaring and flailing to apparently little impact.

How Much is Too Much?

Before we judge him too harshly, though, we must establish a little perspective.

There's no doubt that presidents have been hit by disasters before.  We think of Abraham Lincoln and the shots fired at Ft. Sumter by Democrat insurrectionists; we remember the disastrous attack on Pearl Harbor that Franklin Roosevelt had to deal with.  Both of them rose to the occasion and are considered among our greatest leaders.

Is it really that unjustified to compare the Democrat-supported BLM destruction of our cities with the open armed rebellion of the Southern Democrats?  Like the Southern states, Democrat cities have openly defied federal laws and constitutional rights for years, from immigration controls to the Second Amendment.

Now they are using violence to drive out federal authority, represented by President Trump, that they don't agree with, while encouraging widespread invasion by ill-educated mobs crossing our southern border.  Future historians may come to consider the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse in Portland, OR much as we think of Fort Sumter, SC.

There are also striking similarities to the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor by our duplicitous undeclared Japanese enemy of the day, and the lies and political machinations of the Chinese Communist Party that led to the Chinese coronavirus infecting the entire world.  Certainly, the consequences are if anything more dire and far more costly - a mere 2,000 people died in the Pearl Harbor attack, whereas if you choose to believe our mainstream media, hundreds of times that number are victims of the bat-soup flu.

What's never happened before, is a president having to deal with two such severe onslaughts at the same time.

This would be challenging enough under any circumstances - but FDR, at least, had pretty much the entire country united behind him, and as a Democrat, certainly all of the media.  Lincoln had neither, which is one reason we consider him to be greater than FDR, but at least there was general agreement that he was fighting a war, which allowed him to do things like throw seditious journalists in jail.  Mr. Trump can't.

In reality, how is our mainstream media, which encourages insurrectionists to assault federal officers and defy federal laws, any different than Southern sympathizers in Northern presses who encouraged rioters to attack Federal troops on their way south through Baltimore?

Mr. Lincoln arrested journalists who published sedition, as nearly all of our major news outlets do today.  More than that: Mr. Lincoln's subordinates were even more aggressive about locking up seditionists than he was.  Mr. Trump has, maybe, possibly, one single subordinate - Attorney General Barr - who maybe, possibly, after extensive and thorough investigations, just might file charges for blatantly seditious behavior, years after it took place.  If only.

Now, the South was engaging in a violent, armed civil war of insurrection.  In what way is what BLM, the Democrats, and the mainstream media are doing any different?   Only one: Mr. Trump has chosen not to call it for what it is, and formally declare an insurrection.

One can understand this hesitation - what President wants to be the one who history records as landing us in a second Civil War?  Mr. Lincoln didn't want to wind up leading the first Civil War either, but history, and the solid Democrat South, had other plans.  Mr. Lincoln was wise enough to recognize reality and act accordingly.

When Donald Trump whines about having been treated worse than any previous President in our history, it's unseemly and it makes him look weak, but he's not wrong.  He is dealing with the equivalent of the challenges of FDR and Lincoln at one and the same time, without the unified-nation advantage FDR had, and without the laws-of-war and fireable-bureaucracy advantages that Mr. Lincoln had.

And yet he's still standing. He may be stumbling around like Rocky after taking one too many hits from Apollo Creed.  He may even be on the ropes, but he's not yet on the mat.

What he needs is for the ref to do a count, giving him a chance to catch his breath and get back on his feet.  Pray that the Almighty Ref in the Sky does so - for with open Marxists rampaging in the streets and measuring the curtains for the White House, if Mr. Trump falls and stays down, America falls with him.