Millions losing faith in our system over Trump-Biden divide

 

Watching the Tuesday circus in Miami and listening to media pooh-bah pronouncements about the gravity of the moment, I recalled a conversation with a friend about the indictment of Donald Trump.

He repeated a phrase he had heard recently: “We’re not voting our way out of this.”

“This” of course is a reference to the great divide tearing America apart, and Exhibit A is a Democratic president’s willingness to use the Department of Justice as a weapon against his leading Republican rival.

There are many good reasons why no former president has ever faced criminal charges, and it’s not because they behaved as angels for the rest of their lives starting the minute they left office.

It’s because previous generations understood there had to be limits to the use of government power, or the country would tear itself to pieces every time the presidency changed hands.

But the far-left wing that has taken over the Dem Party always knows best and believes it can cancel its opponents by shutting them up or, in this case, locking them up.

As always with them, this time is different because they are morally superior people.

So while history was being made in a Miami courtroom, it’s the kind that inflames the political and cultural chasm while offering no solution to the millions who feel left out.

For many of them, Trump was the reason they had any faith in the political system at all. To see him tripped up by a president and a Department of Justice they believe is rigged against the opposition only fuels their estrangement.

Their disgust suggests some possible meanings to the rest of phrase that “we’re not voting our way out of this.”

A clear one is that the speaker, whom I don’t know, is giving up on voting because he believes it’s pointless since elections don’t bring any benefits to his America.

Another possible meaning is dark in a different way, suggesting there are paths outside the voting process that can bring a desired result. While I have no reason to believe the speaker was talking about violence, it’s obvious that many people on both the far left and the far right have come to believe that politically motivated violence is an acceptable means to an end.

They may vote, but what they really believe in is brute force and instilling fear in their opponents.

After running through these options and thinking about the conversation later, I realized that no matter how you interpret the phrase, all roads end in a bad spot.

Simply put, the speaker is among the many Americans who have lost faith in their nation to do the right thing.

Ultimately, the notion that elections and exercising your voting rights will not correct a mistaken course is a disturbing and depressing idea. It guts the hope that tomorrow will be better, which is embedded in the very spirit of our experiment with self-government.

We are not subject to a king for life or a permanent social class. We control our own fates with our rights to speak, vote and live as we please.

Yet faith in those foundational verities is in sharp decline, and polls consistently show that clear public majorities, upwards of 75% in some cases, believe the country is on the wrong track and failing to deliver on those bedrock promises.

Thankfully, not all of the people who believe that have given up, but many have — and that trend, if it continues, will destroy the country.

Trump, of course, is a major focus of this current level of disillusionment, though hardly the only one.

Cultural totems are a huge contributor, too, with the fight over transgender issues a mind-blowing example of how quickly national and local battle lines can be drawn over a topic that barely registered on the radar two or three years ago.

Unfortunately for Democrats, a transgender woman’s notorious display of breasts on the White House lawn Tuesday shortly after meeting President Biden came as such a shock that the progressives shaping his policies felt forced to denounce the affront.

They created the event as a counterprogramming virtue signal to Trump’s arraignment, but it backfired big time.

Even the lefties who can count votes know flashing your surgical breasts on the White House lawn has nothing to do with inclusion and everything to do with demanding that all Americans surrender to vulgar values they oppose.

As such, the incident fed into the Trump argument that he is all that stands between ordinary people of faith and decency and the madness of the left’s activist fringe.

That dynamic further cements his image as the defender of the forgotten Americans. Recall that his 2016 election was largely the result of his successful appeal to those blue-collar workers in the heartland who were left behind by the globalist policies of both parties.

Many of his supporters had dropped out of the political system because they believed that a uniparty consensus had agreed to lopsided trade deals that shipped American factories, jobs and knowledge to Mexico and China.

Despite some important successes, Trump, too, failed to gain anything like a consensus, but the relentless attacks and false accusations that he was a Russian agent only added to the resentments of his base, much of which shares his claim that the 2020 election was stolen.

So here we are, more than half-way through Biden’s tenure and the dissatisfaction with the alternative to Trump is sky-high.

Biden took office with a vow to unite the nation, promising he would work as hard for those who opposed him as he did those who supported him. Leaving aside the question of whether it was a sincere pledge, there aren’t many people who believe he’s delivered.

A CBS News poll finds him saddled with an approval rating of just 41%, with the remaining 59% disapproving of his presidency. Nearly two out of three disapprove of his handling of the economy and more than two-thirds of all respondents say he should not seek a second term.

Even having Trump in the dock facing charges is not helping Biden. Although most of the media is cheering for conviction, the public sees it differently.

The CBS poll finds that fully half the country believes the prosecution by Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, is politically motivated. That includes 69% of Republicans, a plurality of independents and even 8% of Democrats.

Among the subtexts of the political dynamic in play now, two stand out. First, Biden’s physical and mental decline are so obvious that they simply can’t be ignored.

The fact that he would turn 86 before he finished a second term is weighing heavily on his support, including from Democrats. The idea that he might not be able to finish the term, and hand the Oval Office to the completely unfit Kamala Harris, is an ingredient in the argument against his seeking that second term.

The other dynamic at work is the growing body of evidence that Biden was always part of his family’s corrupt influence-peddling scheme. The investigation by GOP-led House panels is beginning to crack through the media wall of silence, thanks largely to complex bank documents showing that nine members of the president’s family shared in a huge payout from China.

Also, whistleblowers from the FBI and the IRS have come forward to complain that son Hunter Biden is getting kid glove treatment from probers.

On top of all that comes the bombshell informant’s claim that both Joe and Hunter got $5 million bribes from the owner of a corrupt Ukrainian energy company. Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley added another element Monday when he claimed tape recordings exist from the man who allegedly paid the bribes.

An increasingly important development to many Americans is the realization that the FBI has known all this and probably much more for years, and done nothing about it. Now, day by day and drip by drip, more voters are getting wise to the Biden grift.

Perhaps Donald Trump does deserve to be prosecuted for taking and withholding classified documents.

But unless the nation sees Biden being held to the same standards by the same prosecutors and courts, the great divide will grow deeper, wider and more dangerous.

by Michael Goodwin NYP