Conservative pundit and former media mogul Conrad Black says President Donald Trump will be “one of the most vividly remembered presidents and characters of America’s history” who is “reversing” America’s decline.
In a National Post excerpt from “Donald J. Trump: A President Like No other,” which will be released next week, Black suggests that Trump is not only fulfilling every major aspect of his promised economic and foreign platforms, he could well be a historic figure who offered his public service at just the right historical juncture.
“Whatever happens, Donald Trump will be one of the most vividly remembered presidents and characters of American history. Difficult though it may be to believe at times, the office of the presidency, in that astonishing, ineluctable, and fateful American way, may have sought the necessary man again,” Black writes.
Black, the first Canadian-born political writer of prominence to not only endorse Trump but predict he would win the presidential election, says Trump has defied his detractors while remaining true to his populist credentials.
“He speaks for the people, he has been a very successful man, and he has repeatedly outwitted his opponents, which is why he is attacked with such snobbery, envy, and spitefulness. But America is reversing its decline and wrenching itself loose from the habits of lassitude, elitist decay, appeasement of foreign enemies, and domestic inertia. His record is impressive; his foibles are not durably relevant.”
Black even defends Trump’s perpetual use of social media to communicate his messages — both personal and presidential — to the public, writing, “there is nothing unconstitutional, or even irrational about his use of social media and his aggressive tendency to counterattack (sometimes preemptively).” Black notes that Twitter posts are often “his only available method of surmounting dishonestly partisan and hostile media.”
Calling the president “a throwback to [President Ronald] Reagan,” Black writes that Trump has reversed decades of “fruitless war, bone-cracking recession, humanitarian disasters, collapsing alliances, oceanic deficits, and the erosion of economic growth…” that did not define Reagan’s tenure.
“Trump is a throwback to Reagan in that he rejects the chic defeatism of the establishment; and despite all the media and Democratic Party and Never-Trump calumny of him, his political program is essentially conventional, moderate, conservative wisdom lifted in large part from the policy recommendations of thoroughly respectable conservative think tanks…”
Black writes that we should take Trump at his word: “He wants, as his slogan says, to make America great again.” Those trying to take down Trump with scandal or investigations “are tenacious but unimaginative and they have yet to seem to prepare for the possibility, now more of a likelihood, that he might be a durable and effective president.”