The majority of Americans who hold serious political opinions, and a much larger percentage of American political commentators than the comparatively small number that could be reasonably described as observing professional standards of nonpartisan fairness, have concluded that whatever Donald Trump’s failings, they do not disqualify him from another term as president, either in policy or ethical terms. 

As all the world knows, he will be re-inducted into that office in two weeks. What is objectively splendid and overwhelmingly successful in the recent presidential election is that all of the major policy questions and all of the legal challenges to the former president, as well as the record of the incumbent administration, were evoked from a campaign of nasty and relentless back-biting and defamation to the collective judgment of a jury of 155 million voters.

There has been a terribly intensive controversy between the contending sides: those who felt Donald Trump had been unjustly and illegally deprived of reelection in 2020 and unconstitutionally assaulted in his attempt to regain the presidency in the ensuing years, and those who felt that he was a political pariah — an ogre unfit for public office because of his moral turpitude, assault upon the constitutional system, and behavioral infelicities incompatible with the great office of president of the United States. 

The consignment of the entire mass of accusations and counter-allegations to the collective judgment of the electors in the single question of their preference for elevation to the headship of the American state and people was a magic solution: a Deus ex Machina. There was no significant controversy over voting or vote counting; unlike the presidential elections of 1824, 1876, 1960, 2000, and 2020; there was no grounds for appeal or dispute. 

The American people’s judgment in all of the related questions of policy, personality, and conduct of the principal personalities involved was like Saint John Henry Cardinal Newman’s description of the human conscience: “powerful, peremptory, un-argumentative, irrational, minatory, and definitive.” Trump on balance was right; his opponents, on balance, were wrong: both mistaken and ethically deficient. Here endeth the lesson.

The terrible and cacophonous Tower of Babel that Washington had become was almost instantly and miraculously becalmed. It was no landslide, but it was a clear decision like a five to four victory on a court of nine justices. One side had won a mandate to dismantle and discontinue almost everything that the other side had done in the previous four years, and the other side had been comprehensively defeated and rejected. Yet it retained an undiminished right to regroup, reconsider its policy positions, bringing forward new personalities untainted by the rejected shortcomings of the Clinton and Obama eras, and contend on a level playing field to influence America’s future.                                             

The Clintons’ sleazy truckling to Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood, pitching to the yuppies while “feeling the pain” of the traditionally Democratic working class and minorities, which gave way to Mr. Obama’s saccharine-coated pill of “systemic racism,” oozing condescension for the economically stagnant working class dependent on ”guns and religion,” who were silenced for a time by the placebo of welfare and Prozac, has been decisively rejected by those whom they were intended to anesthetize. 

The working class and lower middle classes and racial minorities have responded affirmatively to Trump’s artistic fine-tuning of the Republican Party. First, he translated celebrity and the public persona of a wealthy and educated Archie Bunker praising traditional American patriotism but eschewing delusions of being a worldwide busybody and policeman, to election and reelection. And then he adapted and will continue to apply Eisenhower-Nixon-Reagan capitalism to using the tax system to promote job creation in the nation’s low-income areas.

Now that the frenzied tenacity of the bipartisan Washington establishment to maintain the inexorable slide to the left in the 95-percent Democratic government city of Washington while giving token Republicans like Senators McCain, Romney, McConnell, the Bushes, and Speaker Ryan cameo roles in the charade of a profound bipartisan consensus, has been shattered. The parties will realign as they always do, to new electoral arithmetic.

The role of money in American politics is scandalous: $16 billion spent in the late presidential election, more than $200 million poured into the coffers of the Trump Republican Party in the aftermath of his election victory. The degradation of the political system in partisan slurs and smears is appalling: Perversion of the criminal justice system to assault the leader of the opposition, Trump, who is reviled not just as a fascist but as the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler. 

The federal criminal justice system is a contemptible conveyor belt in 98 percent of cases, 95 percent without trial, to the country’s bloated and corrupt prison system. America, “a new order of the ages” in 1776, has five percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of its incarcerated people. Yet we have seen again that with all its imperfections, the American political system works. It is a sovereign democracy that can govern itself as it wishes.

On Sunday, the New York Times, chief mouthpiece of the corrupt pseudo-consensus of the Obidenton-McBushney coalition, devoted two whole pages to a fraudulent representation of the events of January 6, 2021, as an attempted insurrection at the Capitol, following an election any question of the legitimacy of which was a pre-proven falsehood. They do not go quietly into the good night, but they are going, and on these issues, will soon be gone. America moves on, strengthened and resolute.