Tim Blair: Historians to get the Trump presidency all wrong
According to headlines about Donald Trump’s time in office, he’s some kind of human wrecking ball – but this is more to do with his enemies than the President, writes Tim Blair.
Opinion
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Donald Trump’s presidency could end on November 3, or it may continue all the way until 2024.
Either way, future historians will doubtless describe Trump’s time in office as massively controversial, divisive and destructive.
All of which will be entirely wrong.
The destruction, divisiveness and controversy we’ve seen since the 2016 election have been caused almost completely by Trump’s political and media enemies. They’ve created chaos and fury out of nothing.
Subtract all of that and you’re left with one of the most sedate and productive presidential terms of the past 40 years.
No new wars. No new deployments. Pre-coronavirus economic gains plus increased employment, particularly for the black and Hispanic communities. Peace deals in the Middle East.
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And then there is all the non-news, beginning with leftist distress following Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton four years ago.
Mamamia’s Mia Freedman actually included the Lifeline suicide number in her first column about Trump’s election, as though Australians might be tempted to kill themselves over an election in the United States.
The emotional indulgences of hysterical leftists are not Trump’s fault. He isn’t responsible for the behaviour of the psychologically immature.
Nor was Trump responsible for all of the celebrities who vowed they’d move to Canada, New Zealand, Africa or who knows where else if Trump won.
(None of those celebrities subsequently relocated, by the way. Even the ones who wept with anguish during their announcements. Rich leftists are frauds.)
So we can subtract all of that from the “controversy” column. And we can subtract, too, the Russian collusion hoax.
That hoax ran for a good three years or so, and is still kicking around in some of the dimmer corners of the online left.
The notion that Russians fixed the election was boosted locally by ABC’s Media Watch presenter Paul Barry, who in 2017 insisted that a few online ads caused all the trouble.
“What exactly were the Russians doing that Americans failed to see?” Barry asked.
“Tonight, in a special program, we’re going to look at how Facebook and Twitter allowed their platforms to be used by Russia to swing the US presidential election and divide America.”
Didn’t happen, old bean. A retraction may be in order one of these years.
And we are now learning much more about the genesis of the collusion hoax.
US Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe last week declassified notes by former CIA Director John Brennan that were written after he’d briefed then-President Barack Obama on Hillary Clinton’s little plan.
“We’re getting additional insight into Russian activities from [REDACTED],” Brennan’s notes read.
“CITE [summarising] alleged approved by Hillary Clinton a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.”
Brennan’s line about “stirring up a scandal” quite catches the eye, doesn’t it? It should, especially if you’re involved in US law enforcement.
That declassification follows the release to the Senate Judiciary Committee of a US intelligence memo describing FBI and CIA discussions over the Russian collusion plot.
“Per FBI verbal request, CIA provides the below examples of information the CROSSFIRE HURRICANE fusion cell has gleaned to date,“ the memo reads.
“An exchange [REDACTED] discussing US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s approval of a plan concerning US presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering US elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.“
Leftists who didn’t clam up even after the Mueller Report found no evidence of a conspiracy between Russians and the Trump campaign might be more inclined to silence now that Clinton is in the frame.
Another non-controversy: Trump’s alleged fondness for white supremacists and associated racial hate groups. “Time and time again,” Democrat presidential contender Joe Biden claimed last week, “President Trump has refused to condemn white supremacy and stoked the flames of hate for political gain.”
Biden’s words inspired a rare burst of profanity from Dilbert cartoonist and political observer Scott Adams.
“This claim is the most debunked claim in American history – including all over the media this week and even today – and this f---ing idiot Biden still thinks the claim is true,” Adams wrote online.
“He‘s either that stupid or that despicable. Which is it?”
A little from column A, a little from column B.
Biden has lately been telling the American people that he won’t tell them anything about his plans for Supreme Court expansion (and Democrat domination) until after the election, which seems a novel way to campaign.
“Don’t the voters deserve to know?” a reporter asked Biden during the weekend.
“No, they don’t,” Biden replied.
Well, I suppose it’s only the most powerful legal body in all the land.
No big deal. Voters can wait until after they’ve voted to discover exactly what they voted for.
Interestingly, most local leftists have no difficulty understanding that Victoria’s enormous coronavirus toll is nothing to do with Prime Minister Scott Morrison, but they lose that appreciation of federal and state divides when it comes to the US.
So they buy the line from their stateside comrades that Trump, rather than Democrat leaders in Democrat states, is to blame for all of the nation’s 200,000 deaths.
That’s another Trump controversy we should be put aside. Yet history will judge the 45th US President more for the actions of his foes than of his own.