A New Offensive: Trump, the GOP, and the Battle for America’s Future Like the German army as the end loomed, the Democrats have been driven to desperate expedients. By Roger Kimball
https://amgreatness.com/2024/07/14/a-new-offensive-trump-the-gop-and-the-battle-for-americas-future/
Having just spent a week padding about battle sites around Verdun and the Somme, I could not help but register the historical vibration of certain dates. Was it entirely coincidental that on July 18, 1918, Ferdinand Foch, the Allied Supreme Commander, launched a major counteroffensive against the Germans in the Second Battle of the Marne? That operation was the beginning of the end for the Boche. They sued for peace in November after American General John Pershing crushed the German forces near Montfaucon, northwest of Verdun.
This Thursday, July 18, 2024, Donald Trump will deliver his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. I like to think that Trump’s address will mark the beginning of a potent counteroffensive against the soul-blighting, woke forces of the Democratic juggernaut.
Like the German army in the summer of 1918, the Democrats are in rabid disarray. On paper, they still command impressive force. They continue to jail their political opponents and shower Donald Trump with potentially lethal legal shrapnel. [UPDATE: I wrote this column before the assassination attempt on Donald Trump at his rally in Pennsylvania yesterday. I will have more to say about that in due course.]
But though their guns may continue their periodic eructations, morale among the troops teeters on despair. Their leaders are panicking.
Of the Kaiser, Winston Churchill once remarked that “in every crisis he crumbled. In defeat, he fled; in revolution, he abdicated; in exile, he remarried.” What would Churchill say about Joe Biden and Kamala Harris? Addressing NATO a few days ago, the leader of the free world introduced the President of Ukraine as “President Putin.” Asked whether he really thought Kamala Harris was up to the top job, Biden said, “I would not have picked Vice President Trump to be vice president if I did not think she is qualified to be president. Let’s start there.”
Shall we start there? Harris, the half-Indian, half-Jamaican scion of slave owners, may be a certified “person of color.” But she is also living proof that senility is not the only form of cognitive-rhetorical incapacity.
Like the Germans in the summer of 1918, the Democrats and their media poodles are full of sound and fury. The New York Times, for example, is regularly on the battlements, delivering anguished rhetorical air-raid sirens. They understand that “Biden’s Path to Re-election Has All But Vanished.” Hence, the Times, along with other besieged media battalions, are engaged in a desperate pantomime to diffuse the biggest threat to their franchise. Donald Trump is “unfit to lead,” they skirl; Republicans will rue the day Trump is reelected, they insist. He’s a dictator in waiting, a bully, and a man of bad character who tramples upon the rule of law.
This signal-jamming wall of static is impervious to fact—including the fact that almost every item of the Democrats’ bill of indictment is a morsel in the giant feast of projection that Trump’s opponents have laid on. We’ve already seen what Trump as president looks like. He had an amazingly successful, if tumultuous, first term. He did not jail his political opponents. He did not weaponize the Department of Justice or instruct his Attorney General to tie up leaders of the opposition with groundless (but very expensive) lawfare. Everyone can see that a second Trump term, more mature and much better organized, is almost certain to be even better than the first. Trump is, as Batya Ungar-Sargon recently observed, “a moderate.”
That, of course, is precisely what the junta in charge is worried about. Trump’s success will be the success of the American people. But it will be the defeat of our version of the Central Powers. One sign of what is to come was released a few days ago when the Republican National Committee published its party platform.
In recent history, these documents have been bloated, bloviating repositories of political verbiage, scraps of hustings rhetoric and special-interest slogans. In the last few decades, they have typically weighed in with tens of thousands of words. The 2024 platform is a svelte 5200 words. Moreover, it is a robust, plain-speaking 5200 words.
Dedicated “To the Forgotten Men and Women of America,” the leitmotif of the document is “common sense.” In eloquent but plain-spoken language, the platform underscores what we all know but what the Democrats have mesmerized us to disbelieve:
- That a country without a border is not a country.
- That “if we don’t have domestic manufacturing with low Inflation, not only will our economy—and even our military equipment and supplies—be at the mercy of foreign nations, but our towns, communities, and people cannot thrive.”
- That a key to prosperity (and hence to national security) is an abundant supply of cheap energy, which means in turn that we must exploit our untapped fossil fuel resources.
- That a strong military is the best safeguard for our national security—what Ronald Reagan called peace through strength. (The Roman military historian Vegetius summed up the point neatly: si vis pacem, para bellum: if you want peace, prepare for war.)
- That “equality” means “equal treatment for all,” not the Animal Farm subterfuge, according to which “some animals are more equal than others.”
All these pillars of the 2024 GOP platform are matters of common sense. But we live at a moment when common sense, having been censured by the engines of political correctness, is among the least common and least permitted of virtues.
The preliminary observations of the 2024 GOP party platform provide the groundwork for 20 crisply articulated imperatives: “Seal the Border and Stop the Migrant Invasion,” “End the Weaponization of Government Against the American People,” “Cut Federal Funding for any School Pushing Critical Race Theory, Radical Gender Ideology, and Other Inappropriate Racial, Sexual, or Political Content on Our Children,” “Strengthen and Modernize Our Military, Making it, Without Question, the Strongest and Most Powerful in the World,” “Make America the Dominant Energy Producer in the World, By Far!”
Like the German army as the end loomed, the Democrats have been driven to desperate expedients. Anyone who was paying attention has known since before Biden was elected that he was a cognitive basket case, but in order to keep themselves in power and promulgate their woke agenda, the Democrats pretended, and the media supplied the props for the pretense, that Biden was fine, “sharp as a tack,” and fully in command of his administration. They knew otherwise. But they deliberately misled the American people in order to preserve their perquisites.
Now that the truth is out, whole divisions are in mutiny, scurrying to replace their failing standard bearer, never mind that their machinations are utterly undemocratic. To save “Our Democracy™”—that’s “their oligarchy” in English—democracy may just have to be sacrificed.
The farce unfolding in Washington and in the pages of our woke media is more disreputable than funny. But it highlights the manly, clean, and robust alternative gaining force in Milwaukee and throughout the country. Finally, at last, common sense will have its day in the sun.
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