CONRAD BLACK: The Midterm-Year Whirlwind:

Eighty-five percent of Americans are currently contemptuous of the Congress, but they are not so angry as to become revolutionary about it, so the legislators, almost all of whom were subjected to withering ridicule by candidate Trump, are radically divided. The House Democrats would impeach the president, for no cause, but for the fun of it and to immobilize him while the infantile nonsense of a Senate trial failed to remove him. This is the Maxine Waters/Jerrold Nadler/Red Queen Law School. The Republicans would spare the president, the country, and the world that indignity, but lack the energy or imagination to do anything about health care, immigration, infrastructure, welfare reform, the deficit, or anything else of any significance. The Congress claims to have just 75 work days left before the November elections, and the Senate, strangled by Democratic intransigence, will do brilliantly by its recent standards if it confirms the nominees to the present cabinet vacancies (State, Veterans Affairs, CIA). The many vacant embassies and judgeships will have to wait, for the voters. . . .

Before we get to the first week in November, I think approximately the following events will occur. There will be a four-power agreement between the two Koreas, China, and the United States that the Korean peninsula will, as verified by believably rigorous inspection, be denuclearized and it will be agreed that the Peninsula will be reunified only by spontaneous consent between the two Koreas without outside influence. Kim Jong Un can claim this is a victory of legitimization, but the removal of the North Korean nuclear threat will be a clear victory for President Trump also. If the talks with North Korea do not produce such an outcome, the administration will achieve the denuclearization by direct air attacks at minimum cost in lives and without a land war, yielding no concessions at all to the North, so the agreement described is likely.

Hysteria about trade wars will settle down and it will become clear that the administration is negotiating toward trade arrangements that do not yield such lopsided deficits for the United States as do the present arrangements with China, Japan, and Mexico. Everyone will see that the Russian-collusion argument, which was the Holy Grail of the Democratic party and the media for 18 months, is a gigantic canard. In fact, as any historically informed person would agree after two seconds’ reflection, no one ever nominated by a major party to the presidency of the United States would have entertained for an instant colluding with a foreign power to rig or influence an American presidential election. It is too outlandish a suggestion to be taken seriously, or even made the stuff of a novel. The attempts to present Donald Trump as a Manchurian Candidate, “groomed for the presidency by the Russians” (as the DNC-funded Steele dossier claimed), and promoted by $1 million a month on Facebook (most of which went to decry the condition of the country with nonpartisan impartiality, or to promote Bernie Sanders or the Greens), is a descent to the ahistorical, inconceivable nether region of outright madness.

Well, stay tuned.