Trump is right not to concede

I am happy to see that President Trump is acting on the maxim of the month: Don’t concede if you didn’t lose. Any other GOP president would be on the defensive now. ‘Yes, there was voter fraud, but, but, but…’ That dangerous conjunction is a fledging concession just waiting to spread its wings and fly.

Donald Trump does not trade in concessions. It’s one of the things about him that infuriates people. It’s also one of the reasons he is so effective. He abhors clutter. He seizes upon the main issue – there’s too much illegal immigration, our trade practices are unfair to American workers, the deep state has created a suffocating regulatory nightmare that benefits a tiny class of bureaucrats.

When Napoleon abdicated and the Bourbons were restored, Talleyrand cast a jaundiced eye on the royal family’s heavy-handed efforts to reassert their ancient prerogatives and acidly observed ‘They had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.’

Already we see the Deep State and Never-Trump activists panting to reinhabit the corridors of power. The lavishly funded left-wing front group known as ‘The Lincoln Project’ has smartened up its house GOP impersonators like Michael Steele to natter on about a restored Republican party that ‘could become a governing majority in the future.’ Right. As a friend observed, what the Kristol Klub Kids represent is a Potemkin party, a party with no voters, only apparatchiks.

Meanwhile, the president and his supporters are challenging what they see as rampant voter fraud in Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. The invaluable Project Veritas is in many hot spots. In Traverse City, Michigan, for example, it has video testimony from US postal workers showing that late ballots were sorted into special bins and then hand stamped with bogus November 3 postmarks.

Across the country today, you will see energetic (but peaceful) gatherings of Trump supporters demanding that voter fraud be exposed and neutralised. The president and his lawyers have brought multiple law suits, in Pennsylvania, in Wisconsin, and elsewhere, to address the brazen efforts to disenfranchise Trump voters by discarding their ballots and by manufacturing fake ballots for Biden. It turns out that in Pennsylvania, Kathy Bookvar, the Secretary of State overseeing the election, is on record declaring President Trump ‘dangerously unfit’ for office and ‘demeaning’ to the presidency. At some polling stations, people were asked their party affiliation before being handed a ballot, while at others GOP election observers are prevented from entering the stations.

The fake ‘Russia Collusion’ investigation that blighted the first two years of Trump’s first term was the biggest political scandal in this country’s history. It failed utterly in its aim of removing the president. The widespread and, it seems clear, coordinated effort to subvert the 2020 election may actually dwarf that earlier scandal. I predict that it, too, will fail and that, come January 20, we will be celebrating Donald Trump’s second inauguration.