https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/david-solway-2/2021/11/22/where-trump-went-wrong-n1535547
Back in August 2020, Trump declared correctly that Kyle Rittenhouse appeared to have acted in self-defense. Media reports suggested it was yet another of his irresponsible statements. In fact, Trump was right about Rittenhouse, as he was right about most things — but, alas, wrong about a number of significant issues.
Donald Trump may have been a controversial personality during his tenure in the White House, but he was on balance a great president in the mold of Henry Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, a man who prior to his election had never held political office — an advantage in every respect. He was beholden to no one, had extensive and successful business practice, and understood the productive base and beneficial trade agreements that underwrite a vibrant economy. But he made two fundamental errors of judgment.
First, it appears in retrospect that he did not recognize how deep the Deep State was and how fetid and vast the political swamp. To his credit, he made a heroic effort to “drain the swamp” but managed only to filter out the surface scum. His adversaries were legion and merciless. One thinks of the Lizard people from the hit miniseries V who were able to take on human form, shape-shifters par excellence who now proliferate at every turn in the corridors of power. The legacy political class is densely populated by these subversive, corrupt and avaricious changelings. Even Mr. Smith who went to Washington in his principled quest for probity and honor would have failed had not his benefactor providentially suffered a crisis of conscience. The odds were always against Trump and one cannot entirely fault him for the disaster. The unequal terms of the battle were largely to blame for the fiasco. One David pitting his courage against an army of Goliaths would eventually run out of pebbles.
But one wonders if Trump had acted more decisively, had used the instrument of Executive Action more effectively, had been more suspicious of his putative allies and less concerned with legislative decorum, had fully realized that the Left was not a political consortium or Party but a dedicated enemy more dangerous to the integrity of the nation than North Korea, Iran and Communist China put together, and had acted as Lincoln did in a time no less fraught than the present — one wonders if the outcome might have been different.