90 Miles From Tyranny

Saturday, February 8, 2020

The Political Genius Behind Trump’s SOTU Theatrics

The ranks of President Trump’s supporters are swelling with former Democrats, with independents, with blacks and Hispanics, and with former nonvoters. He has earned their trust and their enthusiasm through bona fide real-life achievements.

President Trump’s political genius was on display in his 2020 State of the Union address on Tuesday, as much as were his many achievements from his first three years.

As the president began to roll out his introductions of guests in the gallery, with each one, he was doing a three-for-one. No person with a heart remained dry-eyed. The stories and the dramas were electrifying moments for normal people watching and sharing the guests’ sorrow, joy, pride, hope, and desire for justice.

These guests also conveyed a political meaning—an in your face challenge to the Democrats on key policy conflicts such as homelessness, abortion, school choice, honoring those who sacrifice for our safety and freedom, borders, and sanctuary cities. Trump was going for the hot-button issues, not by debating, but by showing their human face.

Each real-time drama demonstrated how the president delivers for real people, individual people.

Lastly, the pathos associated with each guest was paired on camera with the stony-faced Democrats unwilling to applaud. They didn’t applaud for all the great statistics showing the lowest black unemployment and lowest black poverty in history. They didn’t applaud Charles McGee, the 100-year-old World War II veteran and Tuskegee airman who President Trump announced he had honored earlier in the day with a promotion to brigadier general.

Trump used the opportunity to display both his respect and his understanding that blacks have been treated as second class citizens in living memory, relating how after 130 combat missions, McGee returned home to “a country still struggling for civil rights.” Trump upped the emotional power by also introducing General McGee’s 13-year-old great-grandson, who aspires to be a Space Force officer, a new branch of the military President Trump established last year.

Democrats found nothing here to applaud. They want the race narrative to be 1619, America to be eternally damned as a foundationally racist country. Trump’s position, in contrast, raises everyone up: “From the pilgrims to our Founders, from the soldiers at Valley Forge to the marchers at Selma, and from President Lincoln to the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Americans have always rejected limits on our children’s future.” Trump wants to remind black Americans that this inheritance of striving and overcoming belongs to them, too.

In Trump’s America, we are a land of heroes. We all unite in honoring and loving our common heroes. Whose team would you rather be on?

It was clear from the choice of guests that President Trump is going all out for the black vote, with personal stories of courage, success, and hopes answered. The first five featured guests were African American. The Democrats scowled through it all. It was shocking.

The very first was a previously homeless and drug-addled black veteran, now sober and working thanks to a President Trump supported enterprise zone, for which Senator Tim Scott (R-S.C.) got a special shout out and a close-up on camera. This was an unspoken challenge to the Democrats’ failed policies on the homeless.

The next was awesome because President Trump upped the ante and used a reality TV approach to create a dramatic moment in real-time. He introduced Janiyah Davis, an adorable fourth grader and her pretty single mom, desperate for a better school and better future for her daughter. Her hopes to get her daughter a good education in a charter school were blasted by Pennsylvania’s governor, a Democrat, who vetoed the expansion of school choice for 50,000 children.

President Trump came to the rescue. “Janiyah, I am pleased to inform you that your long wait is over. I can proudly announce tonight that an Opportunity Scholarship has become available, it is going to you, and you will soon be heading to the school of your choice!”

For me, the most moving real-time experience was seeing a young mother and her miracle 2-year-old child, born after only 21 weeks. Trump didn’t need to make a pro-life argument. He showed it to us in an unforgettable, living moment. In doing so, he changed that debate forever.

When the president announced he was asking Congress to ban late-term abortion, we weren’t listening to a debate. We were watching a human face, the face of the child’s mother—seeing intense emotions surge through her—surprise, gratitude, elation, love, vindication, triumph.

President Trump co-opted and promoted initiatives Democrats once claimed, making them his own: incarceration reform, family leave for men and women, infrastructure, high-speed internet for all communities, stamping out human trafficking. Democrats were unwilling to applaud for anything but...

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If you decide to open it, you could be disappointed,

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How History Will Judge the Trump Impeachment

The Senate has voted against impeaching President Donald Trump, defeating two articles of impeachment by votes of 52-48 and 53-47. Trump joins two former presidents, Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, in being impeached by the House of Representatives before being acquitted by the Senate.

The House failed to produce credible evidence that the president committed any “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” or engaged in any action that justified his impeachment by the House, let alone his conviction and removal from office by the Senate.

Despite Democrats’ loss in the Senate, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Reps. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., are no doubt basking in the admiration of their liberal allies for their actions, and they are hoping that their attempt to damage the president in the eyes of the public will be successful in the 2020 election.

However, history is often an unforgiving critic.

Historians in the future may judge them far more harshly for abusing the impeachment power in the Constitution. That provision was not intended to allow 285 members of Congress—a simple House majority and two-thirds of senators—to remove a duly elected president for partisan reasons or over matters of style, no matter what his margin of victory in the last election.

Impeachment was to be used only in the direst of circumstances to remove a president clearly guilty of such serious, substantial misconduct that he posed a danger to the nation, and who was clearly unfit to continue in office until the next election when the public could make its own choice.

House Democrats did not come even close to meeting that standard.

It seems highly likely that Pelosi and company will be viewed in the same manner as historians now view the “radical Republicans” who impeached Johnson, and who came within one vote of convicting and removing him from office.

Republicans personally hated Johnson, who became president after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and they virulently disagreed with Johnson’s decision to implement Lincoln’s conciliatory policies toward the Southern states.

As Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen outline in “A Patriot’s History of the United States,” in inflammatory rhetoric reminiscent of that heard from some Democrats today, radical Republicans claimed that Johnson was a “wild-eyed dictator bent on overthrowing the government.”

Schiff was just as inflammatory when he called Trump a “despot” and the type of tyrant the Founders feared, while Nadler called Trump a “dictator.”

Last time I checked the news, I didn’t see any stories about despotic activities by this president, such as a refusal to follow court orders or the abuse of federal law enforcement power to spy on and investigate political opponents. The latter is something only the prior administration did.

Liberals can certainly criticize the president for some of his policies that they may disagree with, but claiming he is a despot and a dictator is so over the top, so far from reality, that it helped destroy whatever credibility the House managers may have had at the start of...