DAVID SOLWAY: THE ASSAULT ON GREATNESS *******
https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2021/01/24/the-assault-on-greatness-n1407826
EXCERPT
“It is not only that we cannot see the forest for the trees; our vision is so low to the ground that we cannot see the trees for the underbrush. The contemporary intent is to attach minds of ivory to feet of clay, strong wills to weak inclinations, and sterling qualities to commonplace attributes. Greatness grates. Or in Johnathan Swift’s terms from Gulliver’s Travels, we need to shrink the Brobdingnagian down to the size of the Lilliputian.
Today, we see this species of libelous truncation carried out by the media, the political echelon and a significant portion of the electorate against Donald Trump, one of the truly great presidents in the national pantheon. Obviously, Trump did not possess the gravity of Lincoln or the folksy humor of Reagan. But presidents should be judged by their deeds.
This was a president who did not accept a salary, whose love of America was undeniable, and who strove might and main to Make America Great Again. He created a prosperous economy, brought jobs and industries back to the homeland, slashed the unemployment rate to its lowest figure in the last fifty years, lifted between 6 and 7 million people off food stamps, oversaw record stock market gains, eliminated strangling business regulations and bureaucratic overreach, gave tax relief for the middle class, cut the capital gains tax, rebuilt the military, renegotiated trade deals in America’s interests, established energy independence, imposed tariffs to protect vital industries, brought high-speed broadband infrastructure to rural America, lowered the price of vehicles, passed the Navigable Waters Protection Rule providing relief to farmers, modernized the Department of Agriculture’s biotechnology sector, brought the Space force into being as the sixth branch of the U.S. Armed Services, and much much more.
The fact that Trump accomplished what he did in four short years despite the veritable barrage of political obstructions, slander, disinformation, fraudulent investigations, frivolous impeachments, media mendacity and mantic contempt—in effect, a campaign orchestrated by a rabid group of ideologues to discredit and literally belittle him—beggars belief.
Trump built towers; his enemies dug trenches. Trump’s “fall” is a sign of an era which cannot admit and admire that which eclipses it. Trump was and is a creator but, living in a picayune age, he paid for it in the coin of defamation and diminishment. “All creators agree,” writes Paul Johnson in Creators, “that it is a painful and often terrifying experience to be endured rather than relished, and preferable only to not being a creator at all.” Those who savor attacking the great, or finding ways to bring them down to their level, are precisely that: not creators at all. They are petty cavilers.
One day someone will make a biopic of Donald Trump and we can be sure that his faults and foibles, his more embarrassing moments, and his presumably divisive conduct will be foregrounded at the expense of his complexities, struggles and manifold accomplishments.
Trump was a great president and he will suffer for it.
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