Trump’s foes are their own worst enemies

TRUMP’S opponents would be better off preparing a decent candidate to oppose him in 2020 than getting tied up in battles in the media, writes James Morrow.

Donald Trump is blessed with his enemies. (Pic: Evan Vucci/AP)

AMERICAN Democrats are reportedly preparing formal articles of impeachment against Donald Trump.

Elsewhere, others are trying to figure out how to use the 25th Amendment to the US Constitution — the “unfit for office” clause — to turf the man from office.

And collectively, the American media is having a meltdown not seen since, well, last November, when Trump beat Hillary Clinton for the office many regarded as rightly hers.

All of which points to one thing: Trump brazening it out, surviving his first term, and quite possibly even winning a second.

Of course at this point it’s necessary to repeat all the usual caveats: there are plenty of reasons not to like Trump. And, yes, Nazis and Ku Klux Klanners and other assorted nutbags need to be condemned in the strongest terms, particularly in the wake of last week’s deadly confrontations in Charlottesville, Virginia.

But the fact is Trump’s foes are their own worst enemies.

Need proof? Check out how CNN’s Wolf Blitzer covered Thursday night’s Islamist terror attack in Barcelona.

Apparently forgetting the long and deadly history of jihad-by-vehicle ­attacks in Europe (Nice, Berlin, London, London again, and so on), Blitzer wondered if he could pin it, somehow, on the American “alt-right”.

“Yeah, there will be questions about copycats,” Blitzer said.

“There will be questions if what happened in Barcelona was at all — at all — a copycat version of what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia, even though there may be different characters, different political ambitions. They used the same killing ­device: a vehicle going at high speed into a group.”

CNN's Wolf Blitzer suggested the Barcelona terror attack may have been a “copycat” after the Charlotteville terror incident. (Pic: Spencer Platt/Getty)

At this point Trump must be thinking he is blessed by his enemies.

It is also when Americans who are not part of the hard one-third of the population for whom Trump is an epithet start to wonder if, for all his faults, Trump’s opponents themselves might be somewhat detached from reality. james

Indeed, that seemed to be the case during the past week of wannabe cultural revolutionaries seeking to pull down statues in the public square in an attempt to rewrite history.

Yet according to a poll conducted by National Public Radio — an American institution that makes our ABC look like a suburban Liberal branch’s annual barbecue — 62 per cent of Americans think statues of Confederate generals should be left where they are, the better to learn about history.

A protester kicks the toppled statue of a Confederate soldier after it was pulled down in North Carolina this week. (Pic: Casey Toth/AP)

Rhetorical ham-handedness aside, Trump can also point to success on the foreign policy front. His blustering threats to North Korea — employing a New York property developer’s tactics where for the last 25 years professional diplomats have failed — seem to have caused Kim Jong-un to think twice about his threats to lob something unpleasant towards Guam.

And since taking office, while not having yet eliminated Islamic State exactly as per his campaign promise, it is a shell of its former self in its previous strongholds in Iraq and Syria.

Trump’s opponents would be better off getting ready for next year’s Congressional elections, and looking at somebody credible to run against him in 2020, rather than getting tied up in battles in the media and their own minds.

James Morrow is the Daily Telegraph opinion editor.