Immigration, Hispanics, and the Political Triumph of Donald Trump

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The Amazing Political Comeback of Donald Trump

Given that I strongly disliked the policies of both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, I didn’t pay much attention to the twists and turns of our recent presidential election, and although I voted, I wrote in someone else’s name. I can’t quite remember whom I honored with that protest vote, though it may have been former British MP George Galloway, a pugnacious pundit and host on RT.

One silver lining in not having supported either major candidate in the race is that unlike many others I won’t be disappointed in my choice.

For example, some commentators had reluctantly backed Trump, hoping that he had learned his lessons from the many mistakes he had made in his first term. But just a couple of days before the vote, their candidate said that his likely choices for Secretary of Defense would include former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo or Sen. Tom Cotton, both of whom were hardcore Neocons, and the subsequent names floated for Secretary of State and National Security Advisor have been Sen. Marco Rubio and Richard Grenell, who also fall into much the same category. These early indications suggested that the Trump Administration would likely continue the same very aggressive foreign policies of the Biden Administration, and some of Trump’s erstwhile supporters probably began grinding their teeth in frustration.

They surely recalled that during his original 2016 campaign Trump had regularly denounced his own Republican Party’s ruling Neocon establishment, famously declaring in one of the primary debates that the Iraq War of President George W. Bush had been a huge disaster for America, a statement that shocked and horrified all his Republican rivals but may have helped win him the nomination. However, once he actually reached the Oval Office, he soon placed our national security policies in the hands of Pompeo and John Bolton, both arch-Neocons of the worst sort, and they did whatever they wanted. Indeed, I’ve read that in the book he published after leaving the administration, Bolton bragged how easily he had tricked and manipulated his ignorant and detached superior, heaping insults and ridicule upon the president whom he once had served.

However, talk of such potential Neocon appointments may have provoked a political backlash, and by the weekend Trump had declared that neither Pompeo nor Nikki Haley would have any role in his new administration, thereby soothing some of those concerns.

It is widely accepted that in a presidential administration, personnel is policy, so as we learn the names of Trump’s senior appointments over the next few weeks, we will also discover the likely trajectory of the next four years.

Although it is unclear what use Trump will make of his new term in office, the mere fact that he regained the White House certainly ranks as the most spectacular political comeback in our nation’s nearly 250 year history, easily outdistancing the split second term of Grover Cleveland in 1893 or Richard Nixon’s political resurrection in 1968. Indeed, the challenges Trump overcame along the way to Election Day sound like something out of a satirical Hollywood film.

While in office, he had been impeached not once but twice, and after his outraged supporters stormed the Capitol in early 2020, he was widely declared an “insurrectionist” by the Trump-hating media. I doubt that any other major political figure in American history has ever been so massively and uniformly vilified by that media, which for generations had been recognized as having the power to make or break presidential candidates.

Then, as Trump geared up for his 2024 run, Democratic prosecutors across the country brought him up on a host of criminal charges, eventually convicting him of 34 felonies and fining him hundreds of millions of dollars, so for a time it looked like he might have to campaign for the White House from a prison-cell.

After successfully capturing the Republican nomination, Trump soon became the victim of two separate assassination attempts, one of which nearly succeeded. Rather than being shocked, I was puzzled that there hadn’t already been many more such incidents:

When I first heard that Trump had survived an attempted assassination, my surprise was not that it had occurred but that there hadn’t already been a dozen or more previous attacks. I doubt that any political figure in modern American history has ever been so massively demonized by our mainstream media as Donald J. Trump during the last eight or nine years. He’s been vilified as a fascist, a Hitler, a traitor, a Russian stooge, a rapist, a racist, a swindler. Trump was endlessly portrayed as a fiend absolutely determined to destroy American freedom and democracy, someone who represented our country’s deadliest human enemy.

Our media creates our reality and for most of the last decade, hundreds of millions of Americans have been completely blanketed by these unrelenting waves of ferocious anti-Trump propaganda, so surely many thousands of them would have been unbalanced enough to consider saving our country by taking the law into their own hands and patriotically risking their lives to eliminate that deadly human menace. The media had spent all these years painting a very bright target on Trump’s back, and I’ve been astonished that until a couple of days ago no American had yet taken aim at it.

Yet despite all those seemingly insurmountable challenges, Trump ultimately triumphed, winning the presidential race far more convincingly than most observers had expected, and even capturing a majority of the popular vote, becoming the first Republican to do so in twenty years.

With Trump now returning to the White House and likely to be dominating the headlines for the next several years, I’ve added a new section that groups together my articles regarding his policies and activities.

How the Democrats Resurrected Trump in 2023

Although Trump’s political triumph was quite remarkable, he certainly had a great deal of help in achieving that result, and I think that most of the credit goes to his political enemies in the Democratic Party, whose seething hatred had inspired efforts that completely backfired. In August 2023, I’d described how this had played out.

Media is the oxygen of political campaigns, and Trump’s totally unexpected primary and general election victories in 2016 were driven by the massive attention he received for his sometimes outrageous public statements, coverage greatly amplified by the unprecedented number of Twitter followers he had quickly amassed on social media. His bitter political enemies recognized the enormous, unfiltered power of that latter communication tool, and after he reached the White House, they exerted huge pressure upon Twitter to begin censoring him. The notion of an American tech company restricting the political speech of a sitting American President seemed like something out of a Monty Python sketch, but it actually happened. Meanwhile, many of his leading activist supporters and pundit allies were completely purged from that platform, blows that greatly hindered his reelection campaign. Then after his November defeat and Joseph Biden’s inauguration, Trump himself suffered the same fate, with his Twitter account permanently suspended.

With Trump banned from Twitter in early 2021, his political standing soon ebbed away as more and more of his low-information political base gradually forgot about him. This led many observers to conclude that his time had passed and some rival would likely capture the Republican nomination in the 2024 primaries.

However, that decline was quickly reversed when Trump’s bitterly self-destructive Democratic Party enemies launched a series of prosecutions against him on a variety of different charges, ranging from mishandling secret documents to paying hush money to a former girlfriend to election fraud, all rather dubious charges. With such exciting new topics, the endless Trump Political Reality show had suddenly returned as popular entertainment, regaining the very high ratings it had previously enjoyed. Trump once again became the great hero of his populist Republican supporters, with recent polls showing he was drawing far more support in the 2024 primaries than all his Republican rivals combined.

Indeed, some cynical observers even suggested that this outcome might have been intentional. Perhaps the Democrats regarded Trump as the weakest Republican candidate they might face in 2024, and sought to ensure his renomination. Such a deeply Machiavellian strategy might be possible, but all of these various prosecutions and trials will surely keep Trump at the top of the news cycle from now until November 2024, whether Election Day finds him still on trial or already serving time behind bars. It’s easy to imagine that the same tidal wave of backlash sentiment now propelling Trump to a landslide victory in the forthcoming primaries might also carry over into November, returning him to the Presidency, whether from the courtroom or the jail house.

We should consider that even a couple of months ago when Trump’s legal problems were only just beginning, he already began attracting strongly sympathetic remarks from unexpected ideological quarters.

Columnist Kevin Barrett is a Muslim convert friendly towards Iran, and in May he published a short item that opened by characterizing Trump as “an odious figure…A narcissistic semi-literate scoundrel.” But his piece was entitled “Why I’m ALMOST Ready to Vote for Trump,” and he explained that the totally unhinged campaign of vilification by our entire political and media establishment against the obnoxious former President had largely shifted him in that direction. He also cited the analysis of a popular progressive podcaster:

Jimmy Dore makes a good case that Trump’s civil trial for sexual assault and defamation was “A Pure Democratic Hit Job.” Dore points out that New York’s bizarre one-year repeal of the statute of limitations was specifically designed to grease the skids for Carroll-v-Trump. Since when did governments start temporarily repealing statutes of limitations so they can go after political figures they don’t like? The move seems especially egregious because it involved an almost three-decade-old case in which the alleged victim can’t even remember which year the alleged assault happened, and has no evidence whatsoever other than her word against his. If you’re going to do something as extreme as suspending the statute of limitations so you can prosecute a specific case, shouldn’t you at least have some evidence?

Around the same time, other influential progressive journalists such as Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate similarly ridiculed Trump’s indictment on hush-money charges by an NYC prosecutor.

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