The reason the United States reached its present astonishing condition is that a not wholly inadequate but complacent bipartisan consensus was moving the country slowly to the left and appeared to a large number of citizens to be favoring the educated middle-class and the scientifically and financially innovative higher income groups over the traditional working and middle classes and substantial numbers of the traditional minorities.

For some unexplained reason, few of the polls disclosed the vulnerability of the bipartisan governing majority. Donald Trump, long one of America’s most famous and controversial businessmen and celebrities, had been polling comprehensively for many years by 2015. He had developed the theory, after a near-death financial experience, that he could generate a large income by levering on and hyping his own name.

This process was commercially successful, and he suspected that it could be politically successful, also. To this end, he changed his official party designation seven times in 13 years waiting for an opportunity to take an open nomination in a year when the White House would not be defended by an incumbent president.

All will remember the howls of mockery and incredulity that greeted his descent on the escalator at Trump Tower in June 2015 to announce his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination. It became clear as soon as the primaries began that he had tapped into an unsuspected vein of electoral resentment.

The bipartisan arrangement that Mr. Trump called “the swamp” is best illustrated by the fact that in the eight terms, 32 years, ending in 2012, one member or another of the Bush and Clinton families had been president, vice president, or Secretary of State, and a member of each family was seeking the presidency in 2016. 

Mr. Trump won almost all of the Republican primaries in every region, but incredulity rose and defied unfolding events. The Republican Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, wrote of dropping “him like a hot rock.” The Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, was the overwhelming favorite to win even though the polls started fairly close and narrowed steadily toward election day.

As Mr. Trump alleged in his powerful and measured speech on the evening of April 4, after his indictment, Mr. Trump’s enemies had begun even before he was inaugurated, the unconstitutional process of using the intelligence agencies, the FBI, and other parts of the Justice Department to persecute and defame  him.

We now know that the heads of the national and central intelligence agencies and the FBI lied or dissembled under oath and that senior officials of the Justice Department knowingly signed false affidavits to justify illegal intercepts on the Trump campaign and transition team. We now know that the strenuous effort to pretend that concerns about the Biden family’s financial relations with Ukraine and China were unfounded was an outright fraud that was conducted even though a grand jury had been investigating the same matters for many months.

We now know that President Biden has lied repeatedly to the public about his knowledge of these activities. The failure of the United States attorney in Delaware to produce any findings at all on an investigation of more than three years into the Biden family’s questionable finances is as disquieting about the failure of justice to operate impartially as is its failure to be roused to any action at all about then candidate Hillary Clinton’s destruction of subpoenaed evidence.                                          

We now know that neither President Trump nor his organization had any involvement in encouraging illegalities at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. Mr. Trump tells me that the then-Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and Mayor Bowser of the District of Columbia declined his urgings that they accept 20,000 national guardsmen that he was prepared to provide as reinforcements.

We now know that both of the Trump impeachments were completely unwarranted. We also know that it is unlikely that he would have been defeated in the 2020 election if there were not millions of unverifiable, unsolicited, mailed ballots voted anonymously in drop boxes; or that he would have been defeated if the public’s awareness of the proportions of the Bidens’ overseas financial dealings had not been improperly suppressed by the FBI’s partisan collusion with major social media platforms.

We now know how feeble and frivolous is the New York district attorney’s spurious indictment of Mr. Trump and we know, because Mr. Trump told us, that the special counsel looking into the preposterous FBI raid at Trump’s home in August and the classified document incident that was invoked as the pretext for it, and into the January 6, 2021 events, is engaging in the United States prosecutors’ customary threat to indict those who do not, with full guarantees against prosecution for perjury, ransack their memories successfully to find inculpatory evidence against the former president.

It is all a disgraceful picture of systematic lawlessness by one of two national political factions of almost equal strength against the other: an act of usurpation and perversion of the institutions of justice accompanied by a total collapse of professionalism and integrity in the national political media, all with no precedent in American history.

His supporters, and the few uncommitted people in the middle, are deeply concerned that this abuse of the justice system and failure of the free press could destroy constitutional government in the United States.

The only positive elements in this crisis are that the vigorous reaction of the old establishment shows that it is not decadent and easily defeated: it has fought tooth and nail with an early and constant recourse to rank illegalities to defend its position. A vigorously abusive governing class is preferable to a defeatist one.

The other positive element is that the forces for change are equally determined; even the most inflamed Trump-hater will acknowledge that he has proved to be a foe of undreamed-of formidability. Nothing in his prior career with its frequent instances of outright hucksterism would have prepared those who did not know him well to expect that Donald Trump would be so indefatigable.

In a phrase of third-party candidate George Wallace, much more accurately applied here, Trump has “shaken the American political establishment by the eye-teeth,” and he has already received more votes for president than anyone in American history.

Now one of these two protagonists must win. For the sake of all the goals identified by Mr. Trump’s opponents, particularly the preservation of the Constitution and the integrity of the American political system, it is Donald Trump that must prevail.

The truth that dare not be uttered, is that he is now leading all the polls. His enemies, in their blind and mindless outlawry, are turning him into the last man standing, the only recourse and salvation for those who believe in the Constitution and in the continued greatness and moral distinction of the United States of America. 

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This article has been updated to clarify the attribution for Mr. Trump’s offer of members of the national guard to protect the Capitol before January 6, 2021.