Doug Gibson

It has been a nasty and disappointing midterm election campaign, and few will be unhappy to see the end of it. The irrational and almost sociopathic hatred of President Trump, even in ostensibly Republican circles, reveals less about Trump than about the intellectually corrupt and mediocre Republican Party whose headship he seized ten years ago. The Democrats have been reduced to an incoherent pantomime horse of anti-American extremists and exhausted hacks. More disappointing is that surviving Reaganites are so hostile to Trump that they serenely overlook the blight of wokeness, the bottomless corruption in places like Minnesota, and the ambition to turn the United States into a one-party state. They want his last election to be a “rout,” in Peggy Noonan’s words, so they can return to business as usual. It won't be. Trump has produced strong and rising economic growth, cut taxes, drastically deregulated, closed the border, deported over two million illegal entrants, mortally assaulted DEI, and prevented Iran from becoming a nuclear power. He has done the last at a cost of fewer combat deaths than occur every couple of weeks in many Democratically governed American cities. His methods are irksome at times, and his public personality is an acquired taste. But he has pierced the pomposity and complacency of the bipartisan system he displaced. He has been a very effective president.