Rita Panahi: Donald Trump thrives as blundering Democrats flop
Between a failed impeachment bid and a petty, speech-ripping stunt, the blundering Democrats are doing all they can to help get Donald Trump re-elected, writes Rita Panahi.
Rita Panahi
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The impeachment farce is over. The latest attempt to delegitimise the 2016 election result and the presidency of Donald Trump has collapsed but not before providing some lessons. Democrats and their media cheerleaders must learn that conspiracy theories, partisan plots and wishful thinking are no substitute for evidence, no matter how much you want them to be.
Trump has been cleared in his impeachment trial, acquitted of abuse of power and obstruction of justice but the baseless charges will have a lasting impact on the 2020 presidential race — and not in the way the Democrats intended.
Even the most deluded Democrat would have known ousting Trump was a farfetched fantasy but they hoped to tarnish his presidency and damage his chances of re-election in November. Precisely the opposite has happened.
The Democrats have managed to not only strengthen the president’s re-election chances but also fatally wound their former frontrunner and best chance of beating Trump, Joe Biden.
The former vice president was flying in the polls ahead of other Democratic candidates and leading Trump in head-to-head match-ups by as much as 16 points in September.
That all changed when during the almost five-month impeachment process the American public became aware, for the first time, of the Biden family’s dodgy antics during the Obama years, when much of the media was on an eight year vacation from scrutinising their White House heroes.
Among the revelations were that Biden’s son Hunter was being paid about US$50,000 a month to sit on the board of Burisma Holdings, one of Ukraine’s biggest natural gas companies, despite having no qualification or experience in the industry.
Biden Jnr — who was kicked out of the Navy for cocaine abuse, cheated on his wife with his brother’s widow and then cheated on his brother’s widow with a stripper whom he denied impregnating before DNA tests proved him a liar — has admitted that his proximity to the vice president was probably why he secured the lucrative role.
When it comes to Trump and polls, one must proceed with caution, given that a plethora of polls showed Hillary Clinton was going to win in a landslide in 2016.
Experience indicates Trump’s support in polls is likely to be understated, but in some polls he is ahead of every Democratic candidate and in others he trails, but there’s no doubt that the numbers have swung his way as the impeachment circus progressed.
As for the bookmakers, Trump’s odds for re-election have never been better after a rousing State of the Union address.
Hours before the SOTU speech, the latest Gallup poll showed Trump has “the highest economic approval rating of any president in the last 20 years”; 63 per cent of Americans approve of the way Trump is handling the economy, the highest number since George W. Bush’s astonishing ratings in the few months after 9/11.
Trump was eager to trumpet his administration’s economic record at the SOTU, highlighting the fact that the unemployment rate is at a 50-year low and that his administration has averaged the lowest unemployment rate of any administration in US history.
The booming US economy has been particularly good for minorities with the lowest Black, Asian and Latino unemployment rates ever, plus solid wages growth. The stock markets have also soared with the S&P 500 and Dow Jones up about 60 per cent.
Remember, Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times in 2016 that the markets would “never” recover from a Trump presidency. How many times can the ‘experts’ beclown themselves before we can disregard their proclamations of doom and gloom?
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s petty stunt — ripping up a copy of the SOTU speech — has also backfired. At some point senior Democrats need to stop pandering to the far Left malcontents within the party, the DC media bubble and twittersphere and start appealing to the American mainstream. That’s if they’re interested in winning elections.
The greatest gift the Democrats have given Trump via their efforts to impeach him has been to re-energise his supporters like never before. Donations are pouring in and supporters are turning up to rallies and registering to vote.
Impeachment has been an even bigger rallying call than the Russian collusion hoax and the disgraceful treatment of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
For three years the Democrats have been in the midst of a reality-denying, anti-democratic tantrum instead of formulating sane policies that appeal to the swinging voters who supported Obama, twice, before switching to Trump.
It was a mistake for the Democrats to use their majority in the House of Representatives to approve the articles of impeachment but I fear they have learnt nothing from the partisan exercise.
If Trump is re-elected you can look forward to more manufactured crises, elaborate conspiracy theories and coup attempts in his second term.
Rita Panahi is a Herald Sun columnist.