The Flight 93 presidency

Q: How did America wind up with a small, vindictive, self-absorbed, law-oblivious President? A: Because the alternative was worse and very likely still is.

In September 2016, Michael Anton, writing under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus, published the essay, “The Flight 93 Election.” It began like this:

2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees.

Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.

Trump defeated Hillary two months later. We had four years of him, four years of Joe Biden (for some part of which Joe was still there)(how much we may never know), and now more than four months of Trump’s second term. Over that time, Trump has done one thing after another seemingly to show himself to be as indigestible, or worse, than the MSM often portrays him. I don’t say that lightly, since the MSM has its own broad and florid streak of vindictiveness, partisanship, and routine dishonesty. I say it mainly because Trump’s petty and juvenile behavior, most recently with his former best buddy Elon Musk (as Paul chronicled), and more importantly his frequent and casual disregard for law, leave me no honest choice.

I’m not going through the list, because it’s too long and too disheartening. I’ll just mention a few things from my own area, federal criminal law. Just yesterday, Trump appointed a convicted drug felon as — ready now? — Deputy Director of the Bureau of Prisons. A few weeks ago, he appointed another former drug felon as “Pardon Czar.” He did this at a Black History Month event at the White House, apparently to imbue with some sort of legitimacy the false and toxic (and very Leftist) notion that blacks are disproportionately “victims” of federal drug prohibition, while the truth is that they are disproportionately victims of drugs and drug dealers. And why exactly he thought he needed a Pardon Czar to begin with is something of a mystery, since he had previously decided on his own to give pardons to virtually all the January 6 defendants, including, with no apparent qualms, those who used violence against the police — this despite his and his Vice President’s earlier explicit statement that the violent rioters shouldn’t and wouldn’t be pardoned. His record on granting scratch-my-back clemency to buddies and Republican politicians is too widely known to require further documentation here. If Biden had done something similar — which he and Obama and Clinton most certainly did — people on our side would be raising hell. And lastly, just thinking off the seat of my pants, he and his Justice Department dismissed a strong corruption case against the Mayor of New York City without ever looking at its merits and, instead of seeking accountability from the Mayor, effectively fired the first-rate, and quite conservative, Acting US Attorney, Danielle Sassoon, as chronicled by my friend Ed Whelan in his National Review piece.

Again, all this is in just one small corner of Trump’s administration. For now, I won’t get into his turning his back on Ukraine to wink at Putin’s brutal (and dangerous to the West) aggression; or his playing footsie with the mullahs to reach an unenforceable “deal” pretending to thwart their nuclear ambitions; or his frequently needless provocations of the judicial branch, many of which were easily avoidable if he took greater care in the implementation of his immigration and tariff policies.

It’s one thing to believe that we couldn’t avoid a Flight 93 election. It’s another to believe we can’t avoid Flight 93 governance.

So is it time to repudiate Trump?

Well……………………….here’s the problem: It’s easy, too easy, to deplore Trump’s deficiencies. But as long as we’re adults, we have to ask: What’s the alternative? Foot stomping and High Dudgeon are fine if you’re 13. I doubt that any of Ringside’s readers is 13.

Michael Anton told us in his article why we had to “spin the cylinder and take our chances.” It boils down to this: Largely although not exclusively hatched by racial guilt-tripping, the Democratic Party dislikes America and for decades has been determined to bring it down (all the while lying about it, just as it fervently spent at least a year lying about Biden’s mental fitness). The list of ills with primarily liberal/Democratic sponsorship is not cheerful reading.

Illegitimacy. Crime. Massive, expensive, intrusive, out-of-control government. Politically correct McCarthyism. Ever-higher taxes and ever-deteriorating services and infrastructure. Inability to win wars against tribal, sub-Third-World foes. A disastrously awful educational system that churns out kids who don’t know anything and, at the primary and secondary levels, can’t (or won’t) discipline disruptive punks, and at the higher levels saddles students with six figure debts for the privilege.

If one can, for the sake of argument, call four years of getting your head jammed with anti-American, anti-white and (increasingly) antisemitic propaganda a “privilege.”

Conservatives spend at least several hundred million dollars a year on think-tanks, magazines, conferences, fellowships, and such, complaining about this…And yet these same conservatives are, at root, keepers of the status quo. Oh, sure, they want some things to change. They want their…ideas adopted—tax deductions for having more babies and the like. Many of them are even good ideas. But are any of them truly fundamental? Do they get to the heart of our problems?

I think Anton is overstating his case, sometimes considerably, but it would be a mistake to dismiss the case simply for its overstatement.

If conservatives are right about the importance of…stability, character and so on in the individual;…if they are right about the importance of education to inculcate good character and to teach the fundamentals that have defined knowledge in the West for millennia;…if they are right about the soul-sapping effects of paternalistic Big Government and its cannibalization of civil society and religious institutions; if they are right about the necessity of a strong defense and prudent statesmanship in the international sphere—if they are right about the importance of all this to national health and even survival, then they must believe—mustn’t they?—that we are headed off a cliff.

To the admittedly small extent Kamala Harris had any ideas in her head, they were to keep merrily, and speedily, heading toward the cliff. So in last year’s election what, praytell, was the alternative to Trump? This is where the NeverTrumpers give away the game: Trying to get them to talk seriously about what the alternative would be, last year or ever, is like trying to get Bill Clinton to stop chasing skirts.

The obvious objection to the line of thinking I suggest here is that, while the Left and the Democrats are toxic to America’s future, Trump is hardly the right person to deliver a more wholesome message. Let’s be honest: One might better ask whether he’s so bad so often that he further discredits the message, to whatever extent he can be thought to be faithful to it at all. Do “stability” and “character” even belong in the same sentence with “Trump”? Can a plausible attack on Big Government be made by the man whose budget plan expands the government’s indebtedness by trillions, and who uses the government’s power to settle personal grudges? Does standing for a strong defense mean better funding for the armed services — only to be combined with an ideological unwillingness to use them or even plausibly threaten their use (with Iran, for example)? When the authentic meaning and obligations of “America First” are understood with all the historical learning, sobriety and thoughtfulness of a third grader?

While the Democrats’ sometimes sanctimonious and more often seething hate for the country means that we cannot give them power, it does not mean that we have to accept Trump’s failures as defining conservatism’s future. And, in my pieces on this site, we won’t.