RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/portal-donald-trump-elon-musk-david-samuels

EXCERPTS

The photograph of a bloodied former President Trump defiantly pumping his fist in the air beneath the American flag as his Secret Service minders struggle to protect him was immediately among the most indelible political images of the past half-century. As memorable as a hunched Richard Nixon signaling V for victory, or JFK standing tall in West Berlin, these are the kinds of images that are impossible for political operatives to gainsay or counterfeit, because they capture character in action. Once seen, these images are impossible to unsee. This was one of them.

In Trump’s case, the photograph was of a man who took a bullet in front of his supporters and lived, just like he said he would. He got up with blood on his face, in front of 10,000 or more people, and showed both the presence of mind and the unkillable ego strength to stage the political photograph of the century with himself as the star. Worship him or hate his guts, it was the most Trumpian act imaginable.

For the record, I don’t vote. I think it’s wrong for reporters to pick sides. But I found Trump to be a vulgarian whose first term in office was mostly a disaster, culminating in the social catastrophe of mass lockdowns and mandatory vaccinations whose health effects remain to be reckoned with. In his time in office, he was: easily distracted; surrounded himself with a sordid assortment of flunkies and scum; confused words with actions; and displayed the managerial ability to run a shoeshine stand in one of his few remaining Manhattan buildings, which are decorated in taste so gaudy it seems likely to repel even midlevel Azerbaijani millionaires, or whoever the audience for these places was originally supposed to be.

However, as it turns out, I am even less of a fan of the people who have spent the last seven years weaving wild conspiracy theories about a duly elected president in an attempt to drive him from office by zeroing out the store of public trust in every institution in America, and in doing so have turned the American press, academia, and other places that once served entirely useful social functions into a Soviet-style moral, intellectual, and aesthetic wasteland.

https://victorhanson.com/the-biden-titanic/

Joe Biden’s escalating dementia and the long media-political conspiracy to hide his senility from the public are the least of the Democrats’ current problems.

Biden’s track record as president may be more concerning than his cognitive decline. He has literally destroyed the U.S. border, deliberately allowing the entry of more than 10 million illegal aliens. His callous handlers’ agenda was to import abjectly poor constituencies in need of vast government services without regard for the current struggles of a battered American middle class and poor.

The widespread poverty of a vast new cohort of illegal immigrants could serve as indictments of a “racist,” “unequal,” and “unfair” America—as if the residents of East Palestine, Ohio or inner-city Chicago had anything to do with the centuries-long corruption and oppression of Mexico and Latin America that daily drives thousands of their own poorest citizens northwards to a society founded on very different ideas than those of their homelands.

Note that the left, neither in Mexico nor in America, never asks why millions of these impoverished people prefer to break into a supposedly racist America. Much less do they even distinguish those principles and values that once made America prosperous, free, and secure from their antitheses that have sadly made much of Latin America mostly poor, without freedom, and insecure.

Biden inherited near-zero real interest rates and inflation at 1.4 percent. Almost immediately, in nihilistic fashion, Biden did to a sound economy what he had done to a secure border. So, he recklessly printed money at a time of spiraling, quarantine-ending demand and supply chain disruption. Middle-class wages never caught up with Biden’s inflation, as prices for key staples are nearly 30 percent higher than when he took office.

The cost of servicing the ballooning national debt at high interest is now nearly $1 trillion per year. The world abroad is aflame, lit by Biden’s inexplicable withdrawal from Kabul, his mixed signals to Vladimir Putin on the eve of his invasion of Ukraine, his deliberate alienation of Israel, his appeasement of Iran and China, and his cuts in the defense budget, coupled with his woke war on mythical “racists” in the military.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/07/16/isnt-this-what-the-left-wanted/

Like Robert Redford’s character in “The Candidate” — who unexpectedly won a U.S. Senate race and then bewilderedly asked “What do we do now?” — the Democrats, the media, the Hollywood-celebrity industrial complex, and the leftist-dominated professoriate are in a similar position. They have to wonder what to do next after their wish that someone would take out Donald Trump was attempted and failed.

In the hours after Trump was shot in a botched, but only by millimeters, assassination bid, the media scolds began to insist that we must “take down the temperature.” President Joe Biden followed that with a national address Sunday in which he said “we must stand together” as Americans. Trump is reportedly revising his convention speech to focus on unity, believing that he has now been given “a chance to bring the country together,” rather than Biden’s failings.

While Biden struck the right tone in his Oval Office speech, let’s not pretend that the political left hadn’t been looking for any way possible to “stop Trump,” even if that meant in the minds of some on that side that he had to die. And they almost got what they wanted.

Trump is still alive, though, leaving the Democrats in a thorny “now what?” situation.

We don’t doubt that many of the left who fantasized about Trump taking a fatal bullet, such as John McWhorter, are now feeling some remorse. But for every one of those there are too many who were frustrated that the would-be assassin missed his shot by the smallest of margins.