Miranda Devine: Donald Trump about to fall victim to cancel culture
Now that Biden has all but assumed the presidency, you’d think the left would be happy. Instead, they are determined to destroy anyone associated with Trump, writes Miranda Devine.
Opinion
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Cancelling Donald Trump and all his works is the next project of a ruling class which believes it has regained the upper hand in America after the presidential election.
Even as the Trump campaign’s attempts to overturn the election result fizzle out, he remains a powerful figure, the leader of a populist nationalist movement involving half of the country and with admirers as far away as Australia.
He remains such a threat that Joe Biden and the corrupt Democrat establishment he represents will not be content until they have stomped Trump into the dirt, sued him, prosecuted him, jailed him, trashed his legacy and, most importantly, have brought to heel the 75 million freethinking Americans who voted for him.
You thought Trump Derangement Syndrome was hateful? Wait for the sequel.
It begins with legal harassment from Democratic operatives in the President’s former home state of New York.
Once Trump is no longer protected by the convention that protects sitting presidents from prosecution, Big Apple Democrats intend to go after him over taxation and federal prosecutors may chase up old “obstruction of justice” claims from the Russia collusion probe.
Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance Jr has subpoenaed the President’s tax returns and New York Attorney-General Letitia James is investigating the Trump Organisation in a move the President’s daughter Ivanka describes as “ harassment pure and simple”.
“These politicians are simply ruthless,” she said.
That they are.
Trump and Trumpism must be vaporised, until they no longer are a threat to the ruling order.
To that end, the Thought Police have set about creating blacklists to punish anyone associated with Trump, ensure they never work again, and effectively become “unpersons”.
A letter is circulating at Harvard University demanding that Trump administration officials be banned from campus.
Democratic congressman Bill Pascrell this week called for Trump and his “enablers” to “be tried for their crimes against our nation”.
Former Clinton labour secretary Robert Reich wants to “name every official, politician, executive and media mogul whose greed and cowardice enabled this catastrophe …
“When this nightmare is over, we need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission [to] erase Trump’s lies”.
Democratic socialist congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez also wants an enemies’ list of Trump alumni to hold them accountable for “complicity”.
“Is anyone archiving these Trump sycophants?” she tweeted.
Her allies created a “Trump Accountability Project” website to punish Trump officials, but later shelved it.
The Washington Post’s “conservative” columnist Jennifer Rubin, called for her own blacklist of Trump collaborators who “should never serve in office, join a corporate board, find a faculty position or be accepted into ‘polite’ society. We have a list.”
To rob Trump of his biggest megaphone there are calls for Twitter to erase his prolific account, along with his 90 million followers,
Jerry Saltz, New York magazine’s art critic wants Trump voters “snuffed out”. “Republicanism is a social problem,” he tweeted.
“It must be treated in the same way coronavirus is treated: it has to be isolated and snuffed-out by repressing it in about 70 per cent of the general population.”
Then there is the intimidation and “doxxing” of Trump campaign lawyers who have been trying to uncover instances of election fraud or vote anomalies to chip away at Biden’s wafer thin 80,000 vote lead in swing states.
Democratic leaders such as Michigan Attorney-General Dana Nessel have threatened to criminally prosecute Republican state officials who might challenge vote results.
Never-Trumper Republican reject group, The Lincoln Project, launched a somewhat successful campaign to intimidate law firms and target their clients to force them to abandon Trump.
In the end, Trump was represented by a remnant band of loyalists, including his old pal, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, and colourful former federal prosecutor Sidney Powell.
While Giuliani concentrated on lawsuits to try to disqualify a few thousand suspect of votes in swing states, he deputised Powell to make the extraordinary allegation that millions of votes had been switched from Trump to Biden by voting machines which had been rigged in a Communist plot involving Venezuela, George Soros and the Clinton Foundation.
She upped the ante on the weekend when she accused Georgia’s Republican Governor Brian Kemp, a Trump ally, of accepting bribes as part of this outlandish plot.
Considering Republican control of the Senate depends on two run-off races in Georgia, the Powell bombshell threatened to shatter Republican unity in the state and jeopardise the January 5 special election.
Having failed to produce the evidence to back her lurid claims, Powell was abruptly cut loose by the campaign on Sunday night.
The next day the Trump administration authorised Biden to begin a formal transition process after Michigan certified his win.
With the December 14 deadline looming for electors to officially confirm Biden’s victory, the President has still not conceded and allies are floating the idea of a comeback in 2024.
This is driving Democrats insane, having spent the past four years trying to delegitimise Trump’s 2016 win, they have a hide to complain.
It is no accident they are starting to act like Maoist fanatics.
When Democratic National Committee member David Atkins tweets, “Seriously, how do you deprogram 75 million people?” it’s not a throwaway line, it’s an agenda to remove the only obstacle to the establishment’s total control.
Cancelling Trumpism is a very deliberate, targeted campaign, familiar to anyone who has read 1984, George Orwell’s dystopian novel.
Orwell’s protagonist Winston Smith is a clerk in the Ministry of Truth, where his job is to delete any trace of people who threaten the absolute rule of The Party with their forbidden free thinking. They are rendered “unpersons”.
“Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporised was the usual word.”
Victors who go to such lengths to vaporise a vanquished opponent clearly are not confident in their victory.
Miranda Devine is in New York for 18 months to cover current affairs for The Daily Telegraph
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