And then came Trump!

In the American Spectator, Dov Fischer writes in part,

...Part of Trump’s greatness is that he is not intimidated by anything. In this, he differs from virtually every previous potentially great conservative American leader. Sooner or later, each has buckled under unremitting pressure from the Democrats and their left-wing media. When Nixon’s first Supreme Court choices were beaten back by the Left, he capitulated and named terrible justices in their stead. Reagan, too, was so desperate to mollify the left media that he began by naming Sandra Day O’Connor so that he could prove to be the first to name a woman. After elevating William Rehnquist to Chief Justice and thereafter naming Justice Antonin Scalia, Reagan next tried to appoint Robert Bork. The Left defamed and destroyed Bork, and Reagan buckled and went with Anthony Kennedy. Those two justices, O’Connor and Kennedy, disastrously impacted aspects of American society’s subsequent evolution in areas ranging from admissions and employment quotas (affirmative action) to abortion to the classic American family unit. The Bushes likewise mixed good and bad. From the first we got Clarence Thomas but also David Souter, and the second gave us Samuel Alito but also John Roberts and almost Harriet Miers.

Reagan gave in to leftist pressure and conferred a mass amnesty on millions of illegal immigrants, planting the seeds for the mess that has turned conservative states, including his own California, into leftist People’s Democrat Republics. One Bush gave in on taxes despite an ironclad promise. Another Bush likewise failed to lead strongly on the economy or immigration. The turning-point moments in American history were lost and cannot be retrieved. Now we are stuck with the fruits of nearly a century of government by liberal Democrats alternating with Republicans who promised to govern from the right and soon moved to the center-left. And then came Trump.

If Gen. Thomas Jackson of Clarksburg, Virginia, had not already become identified with the “Stonewall” sobriquet, it could have fit Trump. He has been standing there like a stone wall. Yes, he has compromised, especially in his early months in office, as he sought to govern effectively across the board. He was persuaded that Paul Ryan could deliver, that Reince Priebus could handle his role, that Rex Tillerson could lead at State, that Jeff Sessions could navigate the attorney general job. Trump was new to Washington but now knows, three years later, where he was wrong to take others’ advice and recommendations. And through it all, he increasingly has governed like a stone wall.

...Trump did not back down. Maybe that cost a few borderline Republican House seats in 2018. By contrast, LeBron James was such a coward that he could not say in China that the people of Hong Kong deserve freedom. And how fitting that the China Virus 19 and that dictatorship’s refusal to acknowledge the truth has resulted both in the NBA having to close down its basketball season while Nike has lost over $17 billion! How fitting! Go ahead and sign Colin Kaepernick to a new endorsement with that.

But Trump does not get intimidated. As weak-kneed Republicans behind the scenes have begged him to change course — on immigration, on trade, on almost everything — he has remained a stone wall, and it is they who ultimately have been the ones to change course as his instincts repeatedly have proven correct.

At this moment in time, Trump is precisely the person we need to lead America through the present mess and to recharge the economy as a societal “new normal” unfolds.

He is strong. He also has a fabulous Vice President in Mike Pence. Pence is cut out of different cloth, to be sure, but also is a tremendous conservative leader. The man is a deeply religious Christian and does not apologize or back down. He is principled, and he is exceptionally competent. This is exactly the leadership we need now and for the next 13 years, at least.

We saw what happened when the second Bush ran the economy into the ground, as had his father, and he was succeeded by Obama. Through the Wasted Obama Decade we watched the economy sputter and barely move. Yes, some numbers got better under Obama, but anyone who understands anything about economics knows that, after a recession, there always is a recovery. It is basic. A country is in a recession, so everyone chooses not to buy a new car, a new laptop or smartphone, or new clothes at the moment. Then, after a few years, everyone’s car starts breaking down beyond repair, everyone’s technology is out of date, and everyone’s clothes wear out, so everyone has to start buying again. And that, in two sentences, is why there always is a recovery after a recession. But somehow Obama managed to put a damper on the recovery. With all his welfare and food stamps and other “entitlements” inducing people not to return to work, all his anti-business regulations crippling entrepreneurs, all his anti-energy actions forcing us to rely on foreign oil from Arab Muslim dictatorships, and all his trade deals driving American manufacturing out of business — while shoveling our tax dollars into sweetheart deals with losers like Solyndra and into “shovel-ready” jobs that were never going to materialize but only would enrich and line the pockets of Obama friends and supporters — the Wasted Obama Decade managed to emerge with a dead economy. And then came Trump.

...For three years all the political experts on both sides have been jockeying and leveraging and investigating and impeaching, but the November 2020 election ultimately may turn not on whether you are better off today than you were four years ago — but on whether you want to return rapidly to the greatness you only recently experienced under a dynamic leader or to sputter backwards under a blowhard who talks a quasi-coherent talk and who has a documented record of voting the wrong way on major issues for decades. Biden has spent much of the past year apologizing for many of the most critical votes he ever cast. G-d forbid that we have a bumbler like him in power at a time like this.

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