Trump Haters claim he is to blame for why our nation is divided and many voters who even thought his accomplishments were positive still voted against him because they did not view him presidential..
I maintain the (m)ass media are the ones who have caused the national discord the Trump Haters lay at Trump's feet. From the day he and Melania came down the elevator their reporting has been negative controversial and biased. Trump has made his own contribution but their negativity has been overwhelming.
The(m)ass media's ratings, believability and public respect is at historic lows. Their blatant failure to investigate, to do their job, to ask penetrating questions is obvious.
If claims of a fraudulent election are appropriately investigated, honestly adjudicated and held not to be factual I have no doubt Trump will leave in accord with historical precedence. As long as he is president he has every right to pursue his constitutional rights to assure the election was not fraudulent and he is due support infighting to insure voters have confidence in the election process.
That the (m)ass media chooses not to support Trump's efforts is another black mark against them not Trump.
Why are Biden supporters pressing for the (m)ass media to certify his victory and so quickly? When have the (m)ass media been allowed to call an election legally? I suggest because skullduggery is afoot and the elite who dwell in the Potomac Swamp are getting fearful
Trump Campaign Files Suit in PA, Urges Judge to Block State From Certifying Result for Biden
Trump Lawyer Sidney Powell: “We’re Getting Ready To Overturn Election Results In Multiple States”
More op eds worth reading because stealing an election takes planning. Some lies are so big no one will believe them.
Harvesting the 2020 Election
Pelosi’s top priority was remaking the electoral system. The virus gave her a boost. By Kimberley A. Strassel
The Trump campaign is pressing its case that last week’s ballot counting was off, and it will get its day in court. But if Republicans want a fuller accounting of the shenanigans, they’ll need to look much further back than Election Day. They’ll need to internalize Nancy Pelosi’s H.R. 1, and then do battle.
House Resolution 1 is the designation for the first bill unveiled in any new Congress. It’s designed to highlight the majority party’s top priority. In early 2017, the Republican-led House gave the title to Donald Trump’s tax reform. When Mrs. Pelosi retook the speaker’s gavel in 2019, her party had just campaigned on a slew of urgent Democratic priorities: health care, climate change, immigration, student debt. None of these rose to the honor of H.R. 1.
Instead, Mrs. Pelosi unveiled a 600-plus page bill devoted to “election reform.” Some of the legislation was aimed at weaponizing campaign-finance law, giving Democrats more power to control political speech and to intimidate opponents. But the bill was equally focused on empowering the federal government to dictate how states conduct elections—with new rules designed to water down ballot integrity and to corral huge new tranches of Democratic voters.
The bill would require states to offer early voting. They also would have to allow Election Day and online voter registration, diluting the accuracy of voting rolls. H.R. 1 would make states register voters automatically from government databases, including federal welfare recipients. Colleges and universities were designated as voter-registration hubs, and 16-year-olds would be registered to vote two years in advance. The bill would require “no fault” absentee ballots, allowing anyone to vote by mail, for any reason. It envisioned prepaid postage for federal absentee ballots. It would cripple most state voter-ID laws. It left in place the “ballot harvesting” rules that let paid activists canvass neighborhoods to hoover up absentee votes
Democrats grandly named their bill the For The People Act, but conservatives had better titles. This page called it the “Majority Preservation Act,” while the editors at National Review described it as an “Unconstitutional, Authoritarian Power Grab.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell decried the bill as a “naked attempt to change the rules of American politics to benefit one party,” and dubbed it the “Democrat Politician Protection Act.”
Mrs. Pelosi’s bill didn’t become law, despite her attempts this year to jam some of its provisions into coronavirus bills. But it turns out she didn’t really need it. Using the virus as an excuse, Democratic and liberal groups brought scores of lawsuits to force states to adopt its provisions. Many Democratic politicians and courts happily agreed. States mailed out ballots to everyone. Judges disregarded statutory deadlines for receipt of votes. They scrapped absentee-ballot witness requirements. States set up curbside voting and drop-off boxes. They signed off on ballot harvesting.
Meaning, “the fix” (as it were) was in well before anyone started counting votes. Pollsters aside, political operatives understood this election would be close—potentially closer in key states than it was in 2016. The Democratic strategy from the start, as evidenced by that legal onslaught, was to get rules in place that would allow them to flood the zone with additional mail-in ballots.
And of course there was harvesting—as these pages warned. This isn’t a new practice; candidates and campaigns have been honing it for years. Three years ago, the Palm Beach Post ran an expose on the practice in Florida. A North Carolina congressional race in 2018 was roiled by a ballot-harvesting operation, and a new election was ordered. This year simply offered the perfect environment to roll it out at new levels, and throughout the fall conservative groups were documenting examples.
Yet the beauty of ballot harvesting is that it is nearly impossible to prove fraud. How many harvesters offered to deliver votes, only to throw away inconvenient ones? How many voters were pushed or cajoled, or even paid—or had a ballot filled and returned for them without their knowledge? And this is before questions of what other mischief went on amid millions of mailed ballots (which went to wrong addresses or deceased people) and reduced voter verification rules. As the Heritage Foundation’s election expert Hans von Spakovsky has explained, mail-in voting is the “single worst form of election possible” because “it moves the entire election beyond the oversight of election officials.”
Republicans fought the worst changes but were up against the virus excuse. The question is whether they now understand the stakes. This election was a mere glimpse of the system Mrs. Pelosi wants nationwide, and she has already suggested “election reform” might again be her first priority in 2021. The GOP’s job is to harness voters’ frustration about the murky mess that was this year’s vote into a movement that demands transparency and renewed integrity of the ballot. Or risk a lot of 2020 repeats.
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Donald Trump, the President His Detractors Loved to Hate
A friend reported that I disappointed his wife with the insufficient intensity of my dislike. By Joseph Epstein
Donald Trump is likely to go down in history as one of the most effective and most despised one-term presidents in American politics. So despised was he by those opposed to him that even now they won’t admit his effectiveness. But until the Covid-19 crisis, which had much more to do with bringing him down than did Joe Biden and the Democratic Party, Mr. Trump’s policies had vastly lowered unemployment rates, cut away entrepreneurially inhibiting financial regulations, and revved up the stock market. His enemies called him a racist, but his opportunity zones, prison reform and encouragement of black enterprise generally did much more for African-Americans than his African-American predecessor did. In foreign policy he cut America free from a badly conceived Iran deal, made substantial strides toward peace in the Middle East, and showed himself a greater friend to Israel than any American president in recent history.
That’s a lot, and it should have counted for a lot, had his rebarbative personality not served to negate these accomplishments. Almost daily he demonstrated he was devoid of graciousness. Without the suavity of the statesmen or the bonhomie of the practiced politician, in both his tweets and most of his public performances he revealed a taste for insult, an unrelenting boastfulness and arrogance, and a general coarseness.
That this same coarseness—some would call it directness—appealed to more than 70 million Americans is perhaps a more complicated question. Some of my friends have expressed dismay that so many of their countrymen loyally supported Mr. Trump over the past four years. But I wonder if it was him they admired so much as his high-spirited attacks on the progressive program that seemed to have taken over the country.
Imagine yourself a member of the lower middle class recently put out of work by the Covid pandemic and worried about how you will supply your family’s basic needs in the months ahead. You turn on your television set to watch the news, and you see major American cities taken over by rioters and looters claiming they are protesting “systemic racism.” In disgust you change channels to discover kids at Yale and elsewhere denying speakers who disagree with them the right to speak, and then claiming they feel unsafe even behind ivy-covered walls. You change the channel once more to discover your local anchors are delighted to run a piece about the first trans judge in your county, a former man, now claiming to be a woman but who even in a dress looks a good deal more masculine than most. Enough, enough! Bring on Donald Trump.
As for Mr. Trump’s claim that the press and other enemies came after him even before he inhabited the Oval Office, there is much to it. He represented everything they loathed: his wealthy upbringing, his raw capitalist spirit, his uncultivated manner, his mockery of political correctness, his unwillingness to accept and play through their early and unrelenting bias against him.
The great charge against Mr. Trump—apart from those who wish to stress his hyperbole, his lies, his want of generosity—is the divisiveness his time in office has caused. Opinions about Mr. Trump, true enough, could divide a room of friends, ruin a family dinner, break up an engagement. And what he could do on the personal level, he also did to the nation. Neutrality about Donald Trump was nearly impossible. A friend reported that his wife was disappointed that I didn’t dislike Mr. Trump more.
Raging opinion for and against a leader isn’t entirely without precedent. Robert Walpole, the Whig prime minister (1721-42) under Kings George I and II, set similar passions astir. The British philosopher David Hume, who prided himself on his impartiality in politics, noted “that there was never a man, whose actions and character have been more openly canvassed, than those of the present minister, who . . . might make a large library of what has been wrote for and against him.”
Walpole’s vices, Hume went on, “are not compensated by those virtues which are nearly allayed to them. The private character of the man is better than the public. . . . With many good qualities he has incurred the public hatred: With good capacity he has not escaped ridicule.”
Hume sums up Walpole as we might sum up Mr. Trump: “During his time trade has flourished, liberty declined, and learning gone to ruin. As I am a man, I love him; as I am a scholar, I hate him; as I am a BRITON, I calmly wish his fall. And were I a member of either house, I would give my vote for removing him from ST JAMES’S; but should be glad to see him retire to HOUGHTON-HALL, to pass the remainder of his days in ease and pleasure.”
So, today, many millions will be less than pleased to see Donald Trump, after all he has done for what they feel their interests, repair to Mar-a-Lago or another of his properties, while a few million more will be entirely pleased never to hear from him again.
Mr. Epstein is author, most recently, of “Gallimaufry: A Collection of Essays, Reviews, Bits.”
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U.S. Crop Prices Are Rising, and China Is Buying
Investors pile into bullish wagers on agricultural commodities after the coronavirus had cast doubt on demand
Dry weather, China’s push to fatten its pigs and the lockdown-induced baking bonanza are lifting prices for U.S. row crops.
Futures prices for soybeans, corn and hard red winter wheat—the kind used for baking bread—have risen by about a third since a rally began Aug. 10. Soft red winter wheat, found in animal feed and processed foods, is up about 20%.
The gains are a sharp reversal of fortune for farmers. The global coronavirus pandemic had cast doubt on demand, from the corn that finds its way into motor fuels to the wheat that winds up as restaurant dinner rolls.
In June, investors held a large short position in U.S. agricultural commodity futures, betting that prices would fall. Now they have piled into a historically large wager that prices will rise, said Tracey Allen, agricultural commodities strategist at JPMorgan.
“These markets could extend much higher,” Ms. Allen said. “We’ve drawn down considerable inventory at the same time that China’s demand appetite has stepped up.”
Dry weather in the U.S. Great Plains, Argentina, Russia, Ukraine and Brazil have reduced yields and expectations for what were forecast to be bumper crops.
Meanwhile, China has been restocking its grain bins and rebuilding its hog herds after culling millions of pigs last year to combat an outbreak of African swine fever.
The U.S. Agriculture Department predicts that China this season will import record volumes of coarse grains, which are mostly corn, and buy more foreign wheat than it has in a quarter-century.
China’s buying has been particularly bullish for soybeans. U.S. soybean sales to China have doubled since the countries signed a bilateral trade agreement earlier this year. Though China has bought more than $23 billion of U.S. agricultural goods, it has billions yet to spend to fulfill the terms of the countries’ so-called phase-one deal, according to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.
China’s big orders are opening up other markets for U.S. growers as well. China bought so many soybeans from Brazil that the world’s largest exporter is running low at home. Last month, Brazil lifted import tariffs on soybeans and corn. Earlier this month a ship loaded with 38,000 metric tons of soybeans left the U.S. bound for Brazil, taking a rare trade route, according to Randy Giveans, a Jefferies shipping analyst.
From July through September, 234 million bushels of wheat were ground for flour, up 7% from the second quarter and 1% higher than in the third quarter of 2019, according to the National Agricultural Statistics Service’s quarterly survey of millers. “That’s literally people sitting at home baking,” said Sal Gilbertie, president of Teucrium Trading, which operates exchange-traded funds that buy agricultural commodity futures.
The Agriculture Department last week said it expects U.S. inventories of wheat and corn to end their current marketing years 15% lower than in the prior ones. It slashed expectations for soybean production following poor yields in Ohio, Indiana and other states and expects season-end stockpiles to be about a third of what they were a year earlier.
Farmers and traders are watching the weather in Argentina and Brazil, where a lack of rain threatens harvests.
“If South America has weather issues and production issues, that’s how you get beans in the teens,” said Craig Turner, a podcasting commodities broker at Daniels Trading in Chicago.
Soybeans for January delivery ended Friday at $11.48 a bushel, after trading at a four-year high earlier in the week.
Andy Huston, who grows corn, soybeans and hemp in Warren County, Ill., is among those betting on even better prices.
Not long ago, Mr. Huston was counting on losing money on this year’s crop. He was trying to decide where to skimp on the next crop when prices shot up. The rally prompted him to hold back on his soybean harvest in hopes of higher prices.
“Definitely changed the attitude of a lot of farmers out here,” he said. “We’re doing the gambling thing. This could be the start of the rally.”
Write to Ryan Dezember at ryan.dezember@wsj.com and Kirk Maltais at Kirk.Maltais@wsj.com
Trump Remade His Party and the World
He transformed both the Republican coalition and the way other countries see America. His legacy will be with us for generations.
By William A Galston
Although the American people voted not to give Donald Trump a second term, history will regard him as a consequential president—if not always for the reasons he intended.
Working with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, he reoriented the federal judiciary, appointing three carefully vetted conservatives to the Supreme Court and 53 appellate-court judges, two shy of Barack Obama’s count during two terms. By making aggressive use of executive authority, Mr. Trump demonstrated that many limitations on presidential power are customary norms rather than legal restraints. Future presidents and Congresses will have to decide whether to ratify Mr. Trump’s expansive conception of his office or enact new limits.
On the domestic front, Mr. Trump’s most enduring legacy may be on the Republican Party. When he announced his candidacy in June 2015, the GOP was a coalition of social conservatives, national defense types and free-marketeers. Mr. Trump made his peace with social conservativism and supply-side economics—tax cuts and deregulation—while altering his party’s stance on foreign, trade and fiscal policy.
Mr. Trump endorsed robust military budgets while challenging party orthodoxy on alliances and the use of American power. “America first” represented a shift away from internationalism toward self-interest understood mainly in economic terms. He repudiated what he called “endless wars,” especially those initiated by George W. Bush, and turned away from democracy promotion, which Ronald Reagan and Mr. Bush emphasized.
Mr. Trump’s revisions to party orthodoxy in economic policy were equally far-reaching. From President Eisenhower to Speaker Paul Ryan, Republicans favored balancing the budget, even if some were more talk than action. Mr. Trump barely paid it lip service. In his announcement speech, he promised to “save Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security without cuts,” adding for emphasis: “Have to do it.” During his first campaign, he proudly called himself the “king of debt”; later he presided over a trillion-dollar annual deficit even before the Covid-19 pandemic.
Although white working-class voters began moving away from the Democratic Party half a century earlier, Mr. Trump was the first Republican nominee to make their concerns central to his policy. He shifted away from open trade governed by multilateral agreements toward managed bilateral deals, and he made eliminating trade deficits and restoring factory jobs key objectives for trade deals. On immigration, he ended the split between Republican elected officials and working-class voters, who regarded a large inflow of immigrants as a threat to their jobs and way of life. Republicans who had backed comprehensive immigration reform—as did both Reagan and Mr. Bush—found themselves sidelined.
The president’s policy shifts changed the Republican coalition. The Business Roundtable and Chamber of Commerce shifted away from the GOP, and the chamber endorsed 23 freshman House Democrats as well as 29 Republicans. Joe Biden made strong gains in the suburbs, including traditionally Republican exurbs. Mr. Trump’s more modest gains in small towns and rural counties weren’t enough to stop swing states—Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and apparently Georgia—from moving into the Democratic column. The president’s no-holds-barred appeals to the working class turned out to be effective among black and Latino voters (especially men) as well as white ones, but could still end up shrinking the Republican coalition in the long run.
In 2024, some candidates may advocate returning to the party’s pre-Trump stances on fiscal policy, trade and immigration. They are likely to face an uphill battle. So long as working-class economic and cultural concerns play a central role in shaping the party’s agenda, suburban professionals and corporate leaders will be forced to choose between taking a back seat in their party and realigning with the Democrats, whose views on some issues are closer to theirs.
Yet the election of 2020 was nothing like the root-and-branch repudiation of Trumpism that Democrats (and not a few Republicans) had hoped for. It was a personal defeat for Mr. Trump but a victory for his party, which outperformed expectations in the Senate and made gains in the House and state legislatures. If the 2024 Republican nominee isn’t Mr. Trump himself, it will likely be someone who embraces the president’s orientation without his loud rhetoric and character flaws.
In foreign policy, Mr. Trump has presided over—and in some cases hastened—the end of several eras:
• The China integration era. Both political parties have abandoned the hopeful thesis that economic growth will lead Beijing to embrace democracy and the Western economic order. Instead, Xi Jinping’s domination of Chinese politics has ended halting moves toward political and economic liberalization. Unless his model of a state-dominated economy, enforced political and cultural uniformity, fervent nationalism, and drive for regional hegemony hits a wall, China will remain a revisionist power with which opportunities for cooperation will be limited.
• The era of unchecked globalization. Political conflict and the Covid-19 pandemic have heightened doubts about relying on global supply chains. Because efficiency often comes at the expense of resilience, policy makers and business leaders are groping toward a new balance. The drive for self-reliance in strategically important sectors—defense, information technology and health, among others—will call for targeted public investment and the transfer of some production facilities to the U.S. or reliable partners such as Canada and Mexico.
• The 9/11 era. American patience with what leaders of both parties call “endless wars” has run out. Residual forces may remain in Afghanistan and Iraq, but the U.S. will no longer fight Islamist terrorism with large ground deployments in the Middle East. If Iran attacks American interests in the region, retaliation may be necessary, but American administrations will remain reluctant to enter a full-fledged military conflict with Tehran.
• The era of transnational threats and alliances. Although Democrats insist on the continuing significance of issues such as climate change, migration and nuclear proliferation, both parties now acknowledge the return of great-power rivalries, especially with Russia and China.
The U.S. and Europe might have gone their separate ways after the Cold War ended. Instead, America’s standing as the world’s only superpower made possible, even invited, involvement in conflicts from the Balkans to the Middle East and Libya. Although the U.S. and Europe didn’t always agree, both understood them as quarrels within a family united by shared values. Both accepted the continuing utility of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the broad commonality of economic interests between the U.S. and Europe.
America’s leadership rested not only on might, but also on predictability. Mr. Trump’s election, and his attacks on NATO and the European Union, shattered European confidence that American politics would oscillate within fixed limits. Europeans now believe that substantial numbers of Americans have no investment in NATO or the EU and see Washington’s 75-year leadership of the world’s democracies as a burden they would like to lay down. “Europeans are afraid that there is no longer a foreign-policy consensus in the United States,” Ivan Krastev of the Bulgaria-based Center for Liberal Strategies has observed. “Every new administration can mean a totally new policy, and for them this is a nightmare.”
Although Mr. Biden’s election will improve the tone of trans-Atlantic relations, America’s political polarization is leading some Europeans to reconsider their basic strategies for security and prosperity. Some are beginning to think seriously about “strategic autonomy,” and many are reluctant to take sides in the rising conflict between the U.S. and China.
Finally, the Trump presidency has crystallized a fundamental shift in Americans’ view of the future.
Two world wars, the rise of fascism, and the emergence of the Soviet Union as a global competitor shattered this confidence. A new generation hardened by bloody war and bitter peace came to see freedom as precious but endangered and human nature as harboring the capacity for unimaginable evil. The outcome of the struggle between liberal democracy and communism was far from assured.
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union ended 75 years of threats to freedom, and progress seemed inevitable. The end of history had seemingly arrived, and the world could look forward to the steady spread of freedom and open markets.
The number of democracies rose significantly, and previously closed economies entered the global economy. As models of governance and economics converged, optimists believed, the world would become more integrated across national boundaries. The World Trade Organization and the European Union symbolized this hope. So did Barack Obama, whose election seemed to mark a new era of racial reconciliation. Mr. Obama often characterized ideas or practices he regarded as misguided as being on the “wrong side of history.”
But the political impact of the slow recovery from the Great Recession, which had been underestimated, came into focus. The rise of authoritarian populism in some democracies, Britain’s decision to leave the EU, and the emergence of China as a political as well as an economic adversary ended a quarter-century of optimism. It became clear that the movement toward global democracy had peaked in the first decade of the 21st century. Heightened conflicts over immigration and ethnicity undermined confidence that existing arrangements were adequate to deal with cultural differences.
With the election of Mr. Trump, each of these trends played out in the U.S. Complacency about the survival of American democracy gave way to deep concern. Mr. Trump’s critics saw him as a threat not only to racial progress and social inclusion but to the Constitution. And they came to understand that this threat represented the culmination of longstanding trends.
Partisan polarization had not only blocked agreement on public policy but also eroded safeguards—normative as well as institutional—for our constitutional order, which the Founders designed to protect liberty by preventing undue concentrations of power. As partisan divisions paralyzed Congress, the executive and the judiciary expanded to fill the vacuum, threatening the constitutional balance among the branches.
Mr. Obama’s policies sparked a populist backlash on the right, and critics emerged on the left as well. Immigration advocates labeled him the “deporter in chief.” African-American leaders focused on widening economic gaps between white and black Americans and racial inequities in policing and criminal justice. The deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner at the hands of police in 2014 set the stage for the protests that broke out this year after the killing of George Floyd.
In the 12 years separating Mr. Obama’s first victory and Mr. Trump’s defeat, hope gave way to fear, confidence to doubt. More Americans came to understand that history doesn’t inexorably flow in a single direction and that broad cultural and political movements can spark counterreactions. Mr. Biden’s election won’t erase these sentiments. If his efforts to renew civility, bipartisanship, economic inclusion and racial reconciliation fall short, the U.S. will likely plunge into a new era of discontent, and ideas once confined to the margins of politics may become its focus.
Mr. Galston is senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution. He writes the Journal’s Politics & Ideas column.
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