Saturday, September 21, 2019

Back Off from the ‘Resist’ Nonsense

Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
Perhaps we should back off from the Third Reich analogies and begin to take our duties as citizens seriously.
When Donald Trump was elected president of these United States — or, more properly, president of the federal government of the United States of America, a distinction worth keeping in mind — some of those who were disappointed by his election declared their intention to, in the now-inescapable word, “Resist.”
Few of them thought very much about what that word implies. (American political partisans are the world champions in not thinking very much about things.) Not only had 2016 seen the election of Donald Trump as president but it also saw another unlikely occurrence — the making of a new Star Wars movie that was pretty good. The word “resistance” sounded cool, and it was further attractive for rhetorically linking angry and alienated progressives to the French heroes who fought against and sabotaged the illegitimate Nazi occupation government during the Vichy era.
The creed of “resistance” was — and is — founded on a lie, that President Trump came to power through illegitimate means, that the election was somehow “stolen” by Republicans in cahoots with Moscow. But there is no evidence that the Kremlin’s screwball, Boris Badenov–worthy campaign of dank memery had any meaningful effect on the 2016 election. The endless investigations into Trump and his campaign have turned up a great deal of unseemly behavior and bad judgment — these being traditional Trump trademarks — but there’s a reason the effort to impeach him is going nowhere. And it is really something to see Stormy Daniels thrown in the president’s face by many of the same people who defended Bill Clinton’s shenanigans on grounds of sophistication (American rubes could learn something from more worldly Europeans, you’ll remember them telling us at the time, and take a more indulgent view of the ways of powerful men).
The Democrats strive mightily to invent a crisis surrounding Trump — Russia, his travel habits, the emoluments clause, etc. — but the only real crisis for them is that they lost the 2016 election. They may lose the next one, too: Senator Warren should keep in mind that her party already has proven itself entirely capable of losing to Trump by nominating an elderly white woman with an undistinguished Senate career, bad ideas, and the soul of a hall monitor.
Trump is an unusual president in that he comes from the world of celebrity and entertainment rather than from the world of politics or the military, but he is not Adolf Hitler, a white nationalist, or the second coming of Theodore Bilbo, and political rivalry with him is nothing like resistance to the Third Reich — it is only ordinary partisan opposition dressed up with excessive self-regard.
Read the rest from Kevin D. Williamson HERE.

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