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Salvo 08.29.2024 2 minutes

A One-Paragraph Defense of Trump

Donald_Trump,_June_2024

With an irked chaser.

Frustrated by Trump’s performance since the Harris Ascendancy? Me too, but we should continue to have great sympathy and admiration for him. He’s been unfairly maligned and schemed against since 2015; he was betrayed by many in his administration; nearly all media and organs and members of the establishment are against him; his domestic and international records are vastly better than those of his opponents, who were senile and are now socialists largely unburdened by intelligence (lots of redundancies there); he is as patriotic and pro-Western as they are un- and anti-; and he had already defeated the candidate he was entitled to think he was running against. Oh, and he faced near-assassination with great courage. In a sane country served by honest media with reasonable attention to truth and balance, he could have announced, “I’m running; please vote for me,” and then gone golfing until reinauguration. It must irk him that he has to work hard and cunningly for a victory here, and others in his position would give up or go crazy, whereas he goes on, however imperfectly. Bravo—and yet: To be human is to be irked and worse, and he took on the irksome burden and worse of supplanting any other candidate to defeat the Left. If he wants to win, he must act more consistently like a sober adult and less often like an irked adolescent. We owe him much, but he owes us that.

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