As Florida’s Senator Marco Rubio observed as he left the race, having been bombed by almost a million votes in his home state by Trump (who, remember, had no “ground game”), “There was a tsunami coming that no one except Mr. Trump saw.” These earthshaking lamentations for those identified in both parties with the failures of the past 20 years are completely implausible. Trump didn’t give us the immense housing bubble and terrible financial crisis, over a decade of war in the Middle East well conducted by the military but leading to colossal strategic and humanitarian disasters, the doubling in seven years of the $9 trillion of national debt accumulated in the previous 233 years of American independence, and an endless sequence of foreign policy humiliations: disappearing red lines, a nuclear sell-out to Iran, and unprecedented cheek from the penurious Russian mountebank Putin, allowed to pretend he has the force of Stalin.
These wailing commentators should be asking why the powers that be of both parties didn’t lift a finger while 12 million illegals flooded into the country, and why the authors of these fiascos, after 60 years of triumph over the Great Depression, Nazism, Japanese imperialism and international communism, suddenly became an elite of idiots who could not run a two-car funeral, apart from the expertise and courage of the armed forces, mis-deployed though they were. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton can’t utter the phrase “Islamist extremism,” the president called the Fort Hood shooting by a jihadist “workplace violence,” and told the joint chiefs of staff that the greatest danger facing America is climate change. What sclerosis has taken hold that the great achievements and generally high level of competence of 10 administrations, five of each party, (FDR to Bush senior), suddenly was warped into this nightmare of serial self-inflicted blunderbuss wounds, causing great collateral damage in the world?
Donald Trump saw it and none of those who governed and legislated for a living did (apart from, to a degree and through such rose-tinted glasses his vision is blurred, Bernie Sanders). The country has tried changing parties in the White House and the Congress (Tom Foley to Newt Gingrich, who is not “odious” as the Tuesday NP editorial claimed, merely flakey, to Nancy Pelosi, John Boehner, and now the more promising Paul Ryan). By any normal criteria, the whole governing elite should be sent packing, bag and baggage, foot, horse and guns.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member