Donald Trump was right

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 4/15/11

Trump told NY1 on 11/11/2008: "McCain, really, that was almost an impossible situation. Bush has been so bad, maybe the worst president in the history of this country. He has been so incompetent, so bad, so evil that I don't think any Republican could have won."

Trump was right. Go back and look to the first appraisals by General Wesley K. Clark and Senator Jim Webb of Virginia on the invasion of Iraq, both of whom Trump might look to as outside-the-box running mates.

The Republicans poison themselves today by trying to accommodate the life and times of George W. Bush; by trying to vindicate Bush. It is a psychological trap: It cannot be done by a free people if they are to remain free. Bush/Cheney will recede in infamy. They will bring their supporters down with them but they will not bring America down with them.

And he may in time be vindicated about President Obama:

"I think he has a chance to go down as a great president. Now, if he's not a great president, this country is in serious trouble," said Trump.

No consensus. But Obama’s failing is that he did not know what to do as President as he had never had a real job before. Had he hired William Daley and Elizabeth Warren (and California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was all but begging for a job) in prominent supporting roles at the beginning it might have gone better. But as President he does push to the sidelines all other liberal Presidents in the post-war period, including Jack Kennedy and family and especially the Clintons, who bear some of the contempt appointed to Bush/Cheney in foreign policy.

But most important is that Obama fulfills and ends a period of history that began in 1831 with three specific objectives: 1) prevent the Southern states from secession 2) free the slaves 3) equality of life and opportunity between blacks and whites. What is important about Obama is that he completes a vast historic America epic: He completes us, and he does so with some grace.

And that is why 2012 and 2014 are most important. A new era awakens, portal to the century, portal potentially to the millennium.

Is interesting this week that Ayn Rand’s Libertarian icon John Galt comes to the big screen. Is Donald Trump John Galt? Rand’s characters are forms and archetypes, but Trump still has that real life New York common man swagger in his walk; it is that which makes one a New Yorker. It can be 50 Cent’s New York, but it can also be Toby Keith’s. He hasn’t lost that quality – which the Clintons as New Yorkers never understood and certainly never had – to the big bucks and his big, gaudy buildings.

Oh and it says that Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich – the endless apprentice - and Mississippi’s Haley Barbour are coming up to see us here in New Hampshire. And they are interesting to us now why?