Donald Trump’s remarkable victory

Despite the suspension of vote-counting in Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan and Wisconsin, President Trump leads in all of those states by substantial margins compared to the number of ballots to be counted and has almost certainly been reelected, bringing the Senate and some House gains behind him.

That he has done this in the teeth of the pathological hatred of 95 percent of the American national political media and Hollywood, Silicon Valley and most of Wall Street is an astonishing achievement.

One would ransack the British media unsuccessfully trying to find a trace of the fact that he has had the most successful first term of any American president except Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Nixon. Trump’s elimination of illegal immigration; creation of a full employment, low tax, low inflation economy, where the bottom 20 percent of income-earners were in percentage terms gaining more quickly than the top 10 percent; his resistance to the Paris green terror, revival of nuclear nonproliferation, identification of the Chinese challenge, renegotiation of trade agreements, comprehensive deregulation and destruction of Isis, assure him of that status.

The animosity of the American media is understandable up to a point. As Trump ran against the entire political system, all factions of both parties (rightly) heaped scorn on the media as unenterprising, biased and dishonest. He was portrayed as a boob four years ago, even though prior to becoming president he had achieved more than every previous occupant of that office except the presidents instrumental in founding the country (Washington, Jefferson, Madison) and the victorious commanders of great armies in just wars (Grant and Eisenhower). His public personality is often jarring and garish, but renovators of great nations are not sent over by casting studios and he followed 20 years of the most incompetent presidential government in American history, worse than the decade that preceded the Civil War or the three terms between Wilson and FDR.

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The obstruction and harassment of him by his enemies, threatened as they were and had never been before — even by amiable critics like Ronald Reagan, who achieved what he wanted without much ruffling the system and its personnel — has had no precedent. The Trump-Russia collusion canard, the most fatuous impeachment trial in history (unimpeachable offenses which there was no evidence he committed); and then the manipulation of the coronavirus in order to blame Trump for the economic consequences of brief shutdown and to exploit some of his public relations infelicities to accuse him of incompetent administration (an unfounded charge). He was a joke until he was nominated, unelectable until he was elected, easily removable but inexplicably tenacious and a pushover in the election this year, until Election Day. He brushed off the coronavirus, conducted the most strenuous presidential election campaign in American history and exposed the Democratic nominees as a matched pair of bombed out electoral losers retrieved from the ditch by Democratic party elders to spare them a Sanders candidacy.

Joe Biden is a waxwork dummy and Kamala Harris is a chucklehead; their party is tainted by corruption, far left socialism and fraternization with extreme racists. The rabidly partisan made the campaign for the comatose Biden.

It will require the current cant, emotionalism and snobbery to subside for it to be appreciated that Trump’s achievements as a politician and a president have been extraordinary. His enemies’ bag of tricks is empty, the American media have been thoroughly humiliated and the next four years will be less perturbed than the last.