The Trump/Churchill Disparity
No, I’m not comparing the accomplishments of former U.K. Prime Minister Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill – the man who rallied his country and the rest of the Western world against the depredations of Hitler’s Nazi regime – to the many positive things former U.S. President Donald John Trump made happen.
Not exactly anyway.
However, there are some curious and clear-cut similarities that occurred near the end of both men’s political careers that should at least alert those who believe Mr. Trump “could never be re-elected” to the possibility that he in fact could be re-elected.
After all, how many of us believed he could ever be elected in the first place?
Don’t lie.
You know you knew the day he announced that he had no chance of becoming President of the United States of America.
Yet, against all odds, he won.
A trip down memory lane will lead us to Britain’s World War II Commander in Chief: Winston Churchill, who became Prime Minister after Hitler’s troops marched into Belgium and Holland and Neville Chamberlain resigned in disgrace and humiliation. Churchill proved to be a courageous, inspirational, and determined wartime leader.
Though there were simmering ongoing conflicts when Trump came into office, the U.S. was not at war. The people who lived in America did, however, seem to be at war with one another. The country was plugging along and slowly but surely embedding the progressive agenda into its schools, its military, its colleges, its businesses, and even into the mundane daily tasks of ordinary citizens. Nothing – it seemed – could stop the relentless march of the globalists, whose policies had gutted the smaller cities of the Midwest and the South, had turned most of our major metropolitan areas into a sanctuary of homes for the well-off surrounded by vast pools of welfare recipients serviced by an arrogant and well-paid army of civil servants.
Then, there were the issues of energy production logjams, pipelines denied, a border no one seemed able or willing to defend, closed and abandoned production facilities littering the landscapes of those smaller American cities, and a dozen other festering problems that were unlikely to be addressed with the ascendancy of Hillary Clinton, whose place in the world of international elites was both well-known and secure. Virtually every political pundit fully expected Hillary Rodham Clinton to become the first female president of the U.S.
Yet, against all odds, she lost.
Trump had zeroed in on those Midwestern cities during his campaign, promising that he could reinvigorate their moribund economies. His message reverberated in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Ohio, and elsewhere.
He won and did indeed begin to fulfill the promise of renewal in what had been desultorily labeled the “Rust Belt.”
Like Churchill, Trump was both determined and courageous, taking on the progressive elites as no one ever had. Trump, unfortunately, also declared war on the intelligence community, which, he was forewarned, could cause him trouble.
Big trouble.
As recounted in the January 11, 2017 issue of the New York Post: “A week before unverified documents emerged undermining President-elect Donald Trump, Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer predicted that intelligence officials would ‘get back at’ Trump for challenging their credibility. ‘Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday to get back at you,’ Schumer said in a Jan. 3, 2017, MSNBC interview. Asked what intel officials could do to Trump, Schumer said, ‘I don’t know, but from what I am told, they are very upset with how he has treated them and talked about them.’”
We know how, now, the intelligence community got back at Trump and basically negated all the positive results of his presidency.
But here’s the Churchill/Trump parallel:
After steering the United Kingdom and the entire British Empire successfully through the great battle for survival against Nazi domination during the war years from May 1940 to July 1945, Churchill was unceremoniously booted from office barely two months after Nazi Germany offered its unconditional surrender to the Western Allies in May 1945. His Party lost the July 5, 1945 General Election to Clement Atlee and the Labour Party.
Huh?
The new government immediately began the task of completely transforming British life. As Prime Minister, Clement Atlee put in place policies leading to the dissolution of the Empire that Churchill had spent his entire life defending. His Party pursued rapid decolonization of various British outposts and nationalized the steel, coal, and railway industries. They also introduced the idea of free national health service and government-supported full employment.
Socialism had come to Britain.
It took the next thirty years, until Margaret Thatcher was named Prime Minister in 1979, to begin reversing the damage, but the U.K. has yet to fully recover – and probably never will – from the socialist turn.
In 1945, Churchill was just shy of turning 71 and the loss of his party and his position devastated him. He departed for the south of France soon after the election and spent the better part of a year painting and nursing his bruised ego.
“Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday to get back at you.” – New York Senator Chuck Schumer
Six years later, in October 1951, the Tories won the election; Churchill was vindicated and was once again named Prime Minister. He served until 1955 and retired at age 80.
Trump was no doubt crushed by the thought that the electorate had turned its back on him after all he had accomplished in the face of such determined resistance from the Left.
Democrats had outwitted him and the Republican Party, successfully installing a basement-bound do-nothing nearly senile life-long Senator to replace him. He has spent nearly two years playing golf and contemplating his vindication. Painting is not his style and he preferred Palm Beach to the South of France.
If another like-minded Democratic candidate along the lines of Biden is successful in the upcoming 2024 presidential election and brings along with him or her a Democratic-controlled Congress, the damage will also be nearly impossible to undo.
Socialism will have come to America (though, truthfully, most of it is already here).
Donald Trump will be 78 on election day 2024. If he manages to rein in his worst tendencies, shows kindness towards his opponents and forgiveness to his detractors, he could possibly rehabilitate himself with enough Republican and Independent voters to win again.
The example of Churchill’s return – and Richard Nixon’s – is clear.
Though I’m now a DeSantis voter, if Trump is the nominee, I’ll pull the lever for him.
And if he were re-elected, he’d be 82 at the end of his term. Old enough to retire with dignity.
And maybe he’d retire when he turned 80 and allow Vice-President DeSantis to take over.
Hey, a guy can dream, can’t he?