FOR THE NATION, CERTAINLY. THE RULING CLASS HASN’T PAID MUCH OF A PRICE THOUGH. Conrad Black: Evicting Donald Trump was clearly a catastrophe. “Despite the frenzied, wall-to-wall, linked-armed international effort to present Trump as a brutal, crooked, moron, he almost eliminated unemployment and illegal immigration, did eliminate energy imports, and by identifying and incentivizing “enterprise zones,” he created conditions in which the lowest 20 per cent of American income earners were gaining income in percentage terms compared to the top 10 per cent on the income scale. President Trump, without demagogy or hyperbole, attracted American attention to the commercial and geopolitical threat from China. He incited NATO to stop sponging off America and raise the national defence commitments to figures much more closely approximating their long-standing promises to the United States.”

Plus: “There is open discussion of trying to reconstruct the Western alliance without American leadership. Biden’s own partisans are silent as his standing in the eyes of his countrymen crumbles. Is there any sane person who in the dark and quiet of their bedroom in the dead, vast, and middle of the night would not prefer Trump with his gaucheries to this horrifying immolation of American national credibility and of the unbroken right of the West over 2500 years to be the preeminent influence in the world? Possibly, but they are no longer numerous or outspoken.”