Steadily and almost imperceptibly, normalcy is returning to American political life. For the last eight years the conventional wisdom endorsed by practically all of the national political press, and nodded at complacently by almost all the elites as an unquestionable truism, has been that the Trump phenomenon was a lawless and extreme byproduct of the megalomania of a mad and extremist billionaire. 

In translating notoriety into ballots for the presidency, Trump was assaulting the Constitution and the continuity of the political institutions of American democracy. Most of Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the academy down to the over-unionized daycare centers that call themselves the public school system, thought Trump a threat to democracy and to racial peace. 

This was not based on any analysis or legitimized by anything he had ever said or done. It was the reflex of overindulged, self-pleased children addicted to their celebrity. Anyone who dissented from their poses and attitudes was a threat to democracy in America and throughout the world.

President Trump, In his first term, was largely sandbagged by a relentless campaign of governmental harassment. It is hard to imagine that anyone could have taken seriously the argument that he had colluded with the Russian government to rig the 2016 election. The former Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, publicly declared that President Trump was a Russian intelligence asset and that his collusion with the Kremlin had determined the result of the 2016 Presidential Election. 

The comparatively sensible solon, Senator Coons of Delaware, said that he was confident Trump’s tax returns would disclose a treasonable relationship with the Russians. Bruce Springsteen announced to mystified Australians that he was launching the “Resistance.” The renowned political scientist Madonna told the huge crowd of “pink pussy” protesters against Trump’s (falsely) alleged incipient misogyny, that she regularly dreamed of blowing up the White House.

As soon as the Trump collusion nonsense was dispensed with, a spurious impeachment was launched on the basis of the president’s telephone call with President Zelensky of Ukraine in which he asked if the commercial conduct of the vice president at the time, Joe Biden, and his son Hunter in Ukraine had been legal and ethical or not. He did not attempt to direct this verdict, merely to ascertain the facts. 

The impeachment attempt failed but this fatuous nonsense handicapped the president until the Covid pandemic descended and he was accused of being an “anti-science” know-nothing if he did not shut down the country and induce an economic recession which the Democrats would then with excruciating predictability blame entirely on him. 

Despite all of this, President Trump delivered broad non-inflationary economic growth and by using the tax system to incentivize job creation in lower income areas, he effectively eliminated unemployment. There were 750,000 more positions available than there were unemployed people, and he did this while maintaining inflation beneath 2 percent and reducing taxes for 83 percent of American taxpayers. 

The partisan claim of tax cuts for billionaires is absurd: the percentage of reduction of tax steadily increases the lower the tax bracket, and the Trump tax cuts excused millions of Americans of modest incomes from paying any income tax at all. He practically ended illegal immigration by building a wall across most of the southern border.                                               

President Trump left the Democrats with really no possible allegation against him except this imperishable and fraudulent allegation that he was anti-democratic and a threat to constitutional liberties. There was never a scintilla of evidence to support this but they managed to fix it on to their hyper-partisan representation of the January 6 trespass and vandalism at the Capitol as an attempted insurrection by Trump. 

Their inability to find any corroborating evidence for this unfounded view despite years of isolating arrested parties and subjecting them to the notorious American prosecutorial tool of promising light sentences and a guarantee against prosecution for perjury if the detained defendants could produce any evidence, implicitly including invented evidence, to incriminate Trump on the January 6 charges. No one took that corrupt bait.

The entire Democratic campaign for president this year, such as that was, was just the propagation of mindless Trump-hate. Not many bought that one either. Oprah Winfrey’s production firm was paid $2.5 million for the talk show host to lob softball questions at the Democratic nominee and proclaim the Trump victory would be the last free election in America. 

The Republican embrace of early voting, the modification or elimination of changes to voting and vote counting laws supposedly to facilitate pandemic voting four years ago, and a high-energy campaign of Republican vote monitoring effectively denied the Democrats their ultimate weapon, which, as the shrunken vote from 2020 to 2024 indicates, was the ultimate reason for their razor thin victory four years before.

Contrary to widespread fears, there were no significant voting irregularities nor any violence in the 2024 election and its aftermath. It went off smoothly and despite being outspent by more than two to one, and the customary 95 percent support of the country’s morally bankrupt national political press, Trump won the election by several million votes and carried all seven of the swing states and over 300 electoral votes. It certainly was not a landslide, but it was a clear-cut victory and a mandate and was accompanied by control of the Senate and a narrow retention of the House. 

Now, finally, Trump is having the honeymoon incoming presidents normally receive: Trump-hate has effectively collapsed and he is enjoying approval ratings of nearly 60 percent, as he has effectively assumed direction of the country in certain policy areas, even before his predecessor’s somnambulance into history. 

The American political system has survived and grown stronger from another crisis, and the danger that existed from breaking through the constitutional guardrails, particularly by transforming the Justice Department into an arm of the dirty tricks division of the Democratic National Committee, has passed. Wokeism, DEI, and the Green Terror are dying at last. The office does seek the man, and it has found him.