A man named Steven Malanga — Senior Editor at the City Journal — yesterday (31 July 2020) published an article in that journal called “More Panicked Than Presidential”.[1] This weepy piece about the evil of Trump’s suggestion that the November election might be delayed is built only on his own tears, partisanship, and dearth of perceptiveness.
Malanga creates an indelible portrait of the non-existent, politically perfect, and even saintly Abraham Lincoln. In truth, Lincoln may well have been the best, smartest, most patient, shrewdest, and toughest politician ever to win the republic’s presidency. Such a piece as Malanga’s could have been written only by a mindlessly partisan, half-baked historian. Malanga entirely misses Lincoln’s non-altruistic character, as well as the fact that Trump’s statement neatly annihilated a fallback position the Democrats had coveted if they fail to get universal mail-in-voting.
Let’s put the author’s pure-hero portrait of Lincoln to rest. I’ll first say that I consider Lincoln one of the greatest Americans, and that I have no gripe about the way he handled the 1864 election. General George McClellan, Lincoln’s opponent in 1864, was a genuine traitor — just like Obama, Biden, Hillary Clinton, Holder, Carey, etc. He refused to press the war on the Confederacy; indeed, he nearly lost at Antietam even though he had a copy of Lee’s battle plan for the Army of Northern Virginia. He did his best to poison the army and the population against Lincoln, and created a senior-command clique in the army that supported him in these subversive actions. For those reasons alone he had to be defeated in 1864, and he was.
But Lincoln had to pull out the stops to make sure this occurred. In particular, Lincoln and his senior commanders furloughed numerous Union regiments that came from states where the presidential-election race was thought to be close. The soldiers marched home, most voted for their commander in chief, helped to defeat McClellan, reelected Lincoln, and, in the end, saved the Union. Preserving the Union — not ending slavery — was the North’s aim in the war and it was achieved. All praise to Abraham Lincoln, who knew that he could not have fielded a strong army in 1861 — or any other time during the war — if he had claimed the war was being fought to end slavery, not to save the Union. Slavery ended, thank God, because the North won the war and maintained the Union. Slavery’s end was a splendid by-product of the war.
Next, it is clear that Trump’s statement on the election this week was meant to stir the pot, and it clearly succeeded. Loyal Americans will re-elect Trump in November, 2020, unless the Democrats use Chief Justice Roberts and their other slave-judges in the federal judiciary to install universal mail-in voting. Indeed, Trump used his statement to cut off a route of retreat for the Democrats. Without his statement, you can bet that the Democrats — if they failed to secure universal mail-in voting — would have made a Malanga-like, weepy, late-October plea to delay the presidential election to protect the health of the American people. That fallback position was killed by the Democrats’ fierce, even maniacal reaction to Trump’s comment about a delayed election.
Finally, in regard to Malanga’s claim that “the president does not have the power to delay the election,” it can only be said that he is dead wrong. Clearly, the president, in normal times, cannot, by whim, delay a presidential election. But the United States currently is facing an “armed insurrection” that has been building in violence, terror, and economic damage since Inauguration Day in 2017.
Today, Trump has a much stronger case for declaring a state of insurrection than did Lincoln in April, 1861. The Confederates caused an infinitesimally smaller amount of death, maiming, and property destruction, between secession and Fort Sumter, than Democrats’ armed forces have in the past month alone. That is why there is no possible chance of any reconciliation between Loyal Americans and the Democrats and their completely racist, though multi-racial, paramilitary forces. The Democrats and their operatives are not honorable Confederates, they are simply amoral, authoritarian, and snarling. In short, all Democrats are death-loving animals.
Overall, those who self-identify as Democrats — from teachers to terrorists, from politicians to freed-criminals, from judges to abortionists — are well-advised to hope they lose to Trump in November. If they win a rigged election, it will be their too-long-delayed turn to find a glorious river of their blood flowing through streets across the country, which, as Jefferson said, is periodically needed to refresh the tree of liberty.[2]
–Endnotes:
–1.) Steven Malanga, “More Panicked Than Presidential,” 31 July 2020, at https://www.city-journal.org/trump-delay-presidential-election
–2.) Thomas Jefferson to William Stephens Smith, 13 November 1787 at https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-12-02-0348
