The Currency Lad

IT was the most embarrassing bungled hoax relating to Donald Trump since the last bungled hoax relating to Donald Trump. On Tuesday, Democrats arranged for fake ‘witness’ Cassidy Hutchinson to ‘testify’ that the 73 year-old overpowered a team of Secret Service he-men a third his age before punching through the reinforced divider of his presidential limousine (aka “The Beast”) and taking the wheel. His objective? To get to the Capitol and personally lead an unarmed crowd of middle-aged men in cargo shorts, slips of lasses and a few Conans in hides and horns to a world-historical victory over the US Army. Hutchinson’s account of Trump’s gallantry and generalship calls to mind Theodore Roosevelt at San Juan Hill and Leutze’s masterpiece of George Washington Crossing the Delaware. Also The Dukes of Hazzard. The contrast with Joe Biden hiding in his Delaware napping nook at the height of the Real Insurrection is shameful.

And what a coup the latter was between 2017 and 2021. A violent riot at the Trump Inauguration, the shooting of Congressman Steve Scalise (during the largest political assassination attempt in the nation’s history) and the 2018 siege of the Supreme Court. Democrats coached a disturbed perjurer to accuse Brett Kavanaugh of rape, encouraged the worst murder rampage in 100 years, called for the assassination of two Supreme Court judges in March 2020 and wilfully enabled the attempted murder of the same Justice Kavanaugh three weeks ago. Overlaying this gargantuan meta-reef of living, spawning insurgency was the Russia Hoax – the most egregious constitution-class crime in America’s annals, not excluding the Democrats’ big day out at Fort Sumter in 1861. Hillary Clinton paid Johnny English, Russian psy-oppers and digital con artists for forgeries that were shopped to the media and the FISA Court to create a pretext for spying. Already a washed-up wino of waddling umbrage by 2016, Clinton was an easy mark for rōnin on the make, as were hoax bodyguards like former FBI boss James Comey. The title of Comey’s 2018 ‘leadership’ memoir, A Higher Loyalty, was no less an in-joke than O.J. Simpson’s ^IF I Did It. No, January 6 wasn’t an insurrection against a deep state run by malevolent delinquents but it should have been.

In the Comey class for badge engineering irksome reality as a marque more saleable to the berserk left was Labor historian Troy Bramston’s irrational and pseudo irate anti-Trump fulmination of 22 June in The Australian: Scandal is, today Nixon would survive Watergate. Richard Nixon would survive? No. ‘Big Guy’ Biden has survived. That’s the scandal. In a gaslight switcheroo that would have given Charles Boyer the willies, Bramston condemns a “treasonous attempt to overturn an election and initiate a coup” (what the Democrats did for four years). Nixon, he argues, wouldn’t be forced out today because Trumper-like proxies would be “willing to propagate his lies.” Or maybe they would just point out that Daniel Ellsberg was a scoundrel who colluded with Democrats (as Nixon suspected) to criticise a war he kept quiet about until a Republican was sworn in as President in 1969.

One corollary of what I call the Real Insurrection is that Trump was understandably sceptical when Joe Biden won the 2020 contest after election night shenanigans and pre-poll ballot rigging. Given that his foes spent four years talking about abolishing the police, secret Kremlin hotlines, golden showers and gang raper judges – and that these lunacies had been promoted by reporters every bit as sycophantic as those who once covered up Chappaquiddick and the vast criminality of Lyndon Johnson – insisting the Democrat campaign was self-evidently unsullied has always been risible. Given also that Trump was right on the Russia Hoax, right on the Afghanistan evacuation, right on the China lab theory, right on Europe’s energy disaster, right on inflation, right on the return of warmongering and right on Hunter Biden, to dismiss his misgivings outright is crazy brave. There is far more evidence of irregularity in 2020 than there is for Vladimir Putin causing price hikes at American petrol statons or for masks stopping coronavirus or for babies needing covid vaccines or for men being women or for Hunter being an artist.

Trump isn’t perfect. He continues to overestimate the importance of crowds and his lifelong policy of refusing to admit any mistake leaves him prone to media-indulged commotion that even tactical contrition would neutralise. A man who never apologises – like the man who apologises casually – loses authority. As for 2024, his prospects for becoming the GOP’s nominee for a second time are not merely undiminished but more solid than ever. That the termination of Roe v. Wade is – as the New York Times pointed out – a signal Trump victory highlights a remarkable dimension of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. While Washington’s War Party – under the banner of “Western values” – congratulated itself for spending tens of billions of dollars pretending to save a corrupt, semi-Nazi state in Europe, justices appointed by Trump were crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s on the greatest rescue of civilisation, law and human life since the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. For the record, when brought to a final vote in the US Senate in April 1864, only two Democrats voted to abolish slavery. M.O.s come and go but DNA stays.