Trump, Johnson and Netanyahu are flawed leaders

T. Belman. Melanie blames Trump for insisting “that the 2020 election was stolen from him through fraud so widespread that it reversed the true result” causing a rift in the country. I see it differently, Trump is unifying the country as more and more Americans flock to his banner.

(JNS) Boris Johnson’s decision to quit as prime minister of the United Kingdom followed unprecedented scenes in the British parliament this week, as he clung on to power despite the resignation of more than 50 of his ministers in an attempt to force him out.

The immediate cause of the revolt was a series of last straws over his perceived personal dishonesty—first by breaking his own COVID laws and, most recently, lying about his promotion of a “sex-pest” Member of Parliament.

The deeper issue was a profound disillusionment among those who had voted him into power for delivering Brexit. These constituents concluded that he had failed to use Britain’s newly recovered independence to free up the country’s capacity for progress and prosperity.

Nor was he resisting the culture war being waged upon core values, particularly the loss of control over illegal immigration and the trashing of Britain’s history and identity.

For two crazy days, it seemed that Johnson intended never to surrender and would go down fighting to the bitter end.

Eventually, however, he was forced to realize the game really was up. Conservative party leadership contenders will now be declaring their candidacy in a further debilitating and destabilizing process which will probably last until October.

Johnson is to serve as a caretaker prime minister until then. Given, however, the calls for him to step down immediately to avoid a dangerous vacuum, he may yet be forced to do so.

Despite the singular characteristics of this British implosion, there are striking similarities between Johnson and two other extraordinary world leaders—Israel’s former prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and America’s former president, Donald Trump. All three were brought to power by voters repudiating the defeatist and self-destructive story being told about their nation by a progressive elite that had lost touch with reality.

In Britain, a majority of the public revolted against an establishment that had sacrificed to the European Union the United Kingdom’s power to make its own laws and govern itself as a sovereign and democratic nation.

In Israel, the public had turned decisively against a left-wing bloc that remained committed to empowering Palestinian Arabs whose real objective was the destruction of the Jewish state.

And in the United States, millions were outraged by a political establishment mindset that denied American exceptionalism, undermined the rule of law and surrendered control of the country’s borders, without which a nation ceases to be a nation.

In these different contexts, Johnson, Netanyahu and Trump were all seen to deliver what the public had so desperately sought but been denied for so long. All three, however, are flawed characters.

Trump was narcissistic, impulsive, erratic, vengeful and paid no attention to detail.

Netanyahu became increasingly paranoid, dictatorial and abusive, and concentrated more and more power on himself.

Johnson was shambolic, dishonest and desperately sought everyone’s approval. As a result, he refused to make hard and necessary choices and was driven instead by one objective alone: to stay in office.

All three refused to accept their own loss of power, a refusal that harmed their countries.

Johnson refused to face up to reality even while the house of cards was tumbling down around him. Now, Britain has been left with a ghost-ship government at a time when there’s the biggest war in Europe since 1945, China is menacing Taiwan, Iran is poised to get the bomb, and there’s a gathering fuel crisis and industrial unrest at home.

To this day, Trump insists that the 2020 election was stolen from him through fraud so widespread that it reversed the true result.

The consequence is that while the Biden administration is careering into economic and cultural disaster at home and courting catastrophic dangers abroad, public trust in American institutions has been further poisoned, and the Republicans are deeply divided.

Netanyahu’s refusal to stand down as leader of the Likud Party—despite the fact that he had become so divisive that many ideological soulmates refused to vote for him—condemned Israel to four stalemated elections and may result in a fifth such inconclusive result this November.

All three men have been sustained by their belief that there is no alternative to them because no one else can match their stellar talents.

Now, this is both true and untrue. In all three countries, there is no shortage of impressive candidates who display many of these leaders’ strengths while not replicating their flaws. However, Johnson, Trump and Netanyahu all possess characteristics that made them uniquely valuable despite their all-too-obvious downside.

In Britain’s Conservative party, able as many leadership candidates are, none possesses Boris Johnson’s secret sauce—his unbounded optimism and ebullience, the fact that he made people feel better about themselves, and that he was not a creature of the establishment but a rebel against it.

He broke the mold of Conservative politicians because of his ability to make working people feel he was one of them—precisely because he was flawed. He acknowledged this through a kind of implicit knowing wink that made people feel that he was just like the rest of imperfect humanity and therefore would always be on their side. Until, that is, they became disgusted by him.

Not dissimilarly, Trump’s unique selling point was that he was the ultimate establishment outsider who busted every convention of political behavior. This enabled him to break the hidebound and prejudiced inertia of the U.S. State Department by moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and helping to broker the 2020 Abraham Accords. And his very tendency to behave erratically and unpredictably meant that the bad guys in the world were always kept off-balance.

Like Johnson, his secret sauce was the line of communication he established with blue-collar workers—principally through his Twitter feed—precisely because he spoke in a way they understood and appreciated while the intellectual elites did not.

The question is whether a Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley or any other able candidate could do what Trump managed to do—bring to the ballot box for the first time so many voters who previously had been alienated from the entire political process.

Netanyahu’s unique quality is different. It is his unrivaled strategic and analytical ability that enables him to see regional and global trends almost before they happen and to be several steps ahead of everyone else in working out how to manage them.

In a country where security issues are always paramount in voters’ minds, that’s what previously carried him to victory. Now, with the country also under a caretaker prime minister in the centrist Yair Lapid, both opponents and supporters of Netanyahu are terrified—the former that he will win power again in November’s general election and the latter that he might fail to do so.

Rather like Trump, who may or may not run again in 2024, the question for Israeli voters is whether Netanyahu’s perceived character flaws are more important than his gifts and the great benefits he has brought to his country.

The free world is currently at a critical inflection point. The threat posed by hostile regimes such as Russia, China and Iran has never been more serious. The public’s needs, interests and values are being systematically trashed and destroyed by moral relativism, identity politics and “victim culture.” The very future of the West is now at risk.

Johnson, as a boy, wanted to be “world king.” Netanyahu thinks he is indispensable to the world. Trump thinks he can cut a deal with it.

In Britain, America and Israel, there’s an overarching and urgent need for leaders who will robustly defend their nation against the onslaught being mounted against it both from within and without.

Nothing else matters. We can live with most flaws. We can’t live without a stalwart, patriotic and courageous heart.

Melanie Phillips, a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column for JNS. Currently a columnist for the London Times, her personal and political memoir, “Guardian Angel,” has been published by Bombardier, which also published her first novel, “The Legacy.” Go to melaniephillips.substack.com to access her work.

July 10, 2022 | 30 Comments »

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  1. The three gentlemen mentioned are indeed flawed leaders. The problem with this observation is that all leaders are flawed, even the best and greatest of them, because all human beings are flawed.

    Winston Churchill had many flaws. He was an alcoholic and nicotine addict. Goebbels mocked him for his drinking, saying that his defiance of Nazi Germany was fueled by ‘liquid courage.” Many Englishmen agreed with this assessment. Earlier in his career, he was responsible for the terrible debacle of the Gallipoli campaign, which caused Britain, Australia and New Zealand to lose thousands of young men. Yet I still believe he was a great man, because he saved the world from Nazism and helped to mobilize the West’s resistance to a Communist takeover of the world.

    You could say the same things aboutGeorge Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and the great industrialists such as Thomas Edison, Nicola Tesla and John D. Rockefeller. They all did some wrong things, because they were human. But America would never have become a wealthy and powerful country, and Americans would not have their high standard of living and relative security from foreign conquest without them.

  2. Individual commenters here and there will say this, buy why is this not a big official issue: Nixon opened China. One can wonder if it was Kissinger´s fault, but Nixon was the shill for it. In a better universe, this never happened. China is still struggling, exporting crude bamboo kitchen tools, because its only patron, Russia, can’t afford to invest in modern factories. The USA still makes its own appliances, employing American workers.

    Watergate is nothing, nothing, nothing but a coverup of the real issue. The good news is that Kissinger is still with us. He should be arrested, given a show trial and hanged for treason. But this won’t happen because, thanks to Nixon and co., we can’t arrest traitors, because they are the government.

  3. @ Sebastien Zorn: ]note I used your full name] First of all they are not “Breakfast Tacos”, they are called “Breakfast Burritos”. And, also for information, my pronouns are it, that, and hey yawl.

  4. @SEB-

    Yes she’s pretty ridiculous “De Dakta” “take my pulse”..”what is a pulse”??

    Actually Nixon had a pretty good sense ofhumour, in a rueful kind of way. Unfortunately for him, he inherited the war that Kennedy began, and Johnson beefed up to disastrous levels and Nixon bore the brunt of the youth anger and lack of discipline. As we know both Kennedy (who cheated Nixon of the Presidency helped by Mayor Daley) and Johnson werre 1 term Presidents.

    I personally believe that Nixon didn’t really know what was going on with theb”Plumbers” except in a vague, delegated way. The tapes seemed to me that Nixon was trying to find out exactly what was doing, and pretending he knew more than he did. he was a crafty campaigner, and except for Watergate, would have been ranked as one of the better Presidents.

    The snaky John Dean, from the beginning was secretly taping his meetings and talks with Nixon. Not for any good purpose. He was corrupt from his beginnings, sucking up to prominent Republicans even in school.

    He was fired from his very first job with a law firm for trying to use information gained in the law firm about a major client, behind their backs and profiting from it personally. I don’t know how it was that he was not then disbarred.

    Obviously the Republican Party didn’t vet him before giving him a job.

  5. @SEBASTIEN-

    We actually had a couple of Presidents with senses of humour, but maybe not directed outwardly. For instance, Think of Obama laughing to himself and intimates at the stupid voters who handed over the USA to straight Socialism. Then the Prize Clown signing Executive Orders in the middle of “dallying” with Levinsky. With his red bulbous nose he’s always reminded me-ina way- of W.C. Fields, facially only of course.

    Who could ever forget, his appearance at the Grand Jury saying “it depends on what the meaning of “is” is…..”.

  6. @SEBASTIEN-

    Yes that repetition also bothered me-until I figured out why he was doing it. I assume 2 reasons. One….. a vital item that is repeated will no longer pass over the listeners’ heads and become absorbed into their thinking.

    Then….he always had massive, overflowing crowds who may not all have been within proper listening reach, so to repeat would fill them in on missed words. I think the first was maybe the real reason.

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  7. not the intended purpose of the statement of leanmarc@ii.net

    I accept all your corrections and lists of accomplishments.
    In my opinion, best President of my life time.
    I voted for him twice.
    It’s the WARP SPEED crap that bothers me – I don’t think it’s ever been adequately explained.
    And it happened near end of his Presidency – last year I guess.
    He was early advocate of EARLY treatments as you say but he also advocated these vaccines and with all the evidence out has not changed his mind publicly other than to say he would not support mandates (I think) while still saying, he thinks they are great.
    Really?
    Is our friend’s roommate in Tel-Aviv, 21 yr old woman who had stroke after her 2nd shot and clots in her neck and subsequently another 5 or so strokes…is that great?
    Or another friend – a 21 yr old girl in Australia with her “Crushing Chest Pain” after 2nd Pfizer shot?
    Or all the other 1000’s who have died and millions with adverse events etc etc
    Check YellowCard, VAERS, etc etc
    With all his inside knowledge as President for 4 years it’s hard for me to accept his relative silence on the matter.
    It doesn’t add up to me – maybe like he always said, he was the ultimate insider giving money to the Clintons and all of them.
    How can we keep saying he fought for Americans when so many have lost their jobs for not having the vaxx, 60,000 military just lost their pay for refusing the vaxx, the FDA, CDC etc are totally corrupt it would seem with such large income streams from vaccine patents and Big drug company money and Trump says nothing about this or very little?
    To me there is no other issue that matters with such an Elephant in the room.
    Really – how do we keep talking about Israel and the Jewish People if our leaders like Netanyahu, Trump, Bennett can use the Jewish People in the Land Of Israel to trial these experimental vaccines – how is that okay, ever?
    How many miscarriages, injuries, deaths, strokes, shingles, excess mortality, is acceptable to deal with this Covid poison?
    How many people not able to work due to these mandates, injured pilots and all the mental health, national debt and other disasters like a stolen generation of children from these lockdowns, masks, vaccine mandates, track and tracing green cards before we realise that this is the only issue?

  8. @Sebastien

    It would be hard to think of all of his accomplishments in one sitting, they are so many.

    Fairly stated fact. It is simply disingenuous to ignore the enormity of the Trump presidency despite it being crippled by being under a constant state of siege. I am quite certain that this was easily not the intended purpose of the statement of leanmarc@ii.net, but I think a certain sense of perspective should be maintained. In fact these accomplishments helped motivate the various administrative elements in the govt to act in concert with special interests and foreign entities to perpetrate the plague and execute the fraud. The overlapping points of concern which drew these disparate parties to support such obvious acts of sedition are contained on your list, my list and the list of all the thousands of detailed reforms missing from both of our lists.

  9. @Peloni Great list. It would be hard to think of all of his accomplishments in one sitting, they are so many. Here’s a few more, he allowed Israeli engineers to fix the bugs in the F-35 and sell the fix back to the US gor 2 million dollars. It’s the Israeli version everyone is using, he allowed veterans to go to any health provider instead of having to wait on long lines at often poor VA hospitals.

    He signed a bi-partisan bill to permanently provide $250 million dollars ayear to historically black colleges and other schools that have many minority students.

    His crime bill provided a path back to society for many low level offenders.

    His policies generated historicaly low unemployment rates for minorities, especially blacks, and women.

    He defeated ISIS and destroyed the Islamic state, assassinated Soleimani and Al Bagdadi. He followed through on Obama’s red lines in Syria.

    He started no new wars.

    He bolstered South Koreas missile defences, faced down North Korea’s threats and then reduced tensions to an all time low with his economic development proposals, also a key element of the Abraham Accords.

    He was generous to his peers, most importantly. He gave a viola to the new emperor of Japan, a violist, and starbursts to Angela Merkel, telling her, “don’t say I never gave you anything.” Boy, are the Krauts regretting not wanting to pay their measly 2 percent of NATO costs and buy their gas from us as he had demanded, right about now.

  10. @Edgar

    Not brag because he carries out what he’s bragging about

    Actually, the only thing that annoyed me about his delivery was/is his tendency to repeat sentences. While it drove home the points he was making, it didn’t give him enough time to list his amazingly numerous accomplishments and when I am deciding who to vote for, that’s exactly what I want to hear!

  11. @leanmarc@ii.net

    Trump was best President of my life time.
    Not sure though that is saying much.

    I think this is an exceedingly fair statement, that is, if you don’t consider any of the things that Trump actually accomplished during his term in office, and there were an innumerable achievements during his presidency to consider.

    He rebuilt the military, secured the borders, provided a return of well paying jobs, reduced unemployment to its lowest level, decreased unuseful regulations, replaced NAFTA with USMCA, decreased trade deficits, including those with China, forced China to pay massive penalties for their unfair trade practices, grew the stock market to historic high on a near daily basis (til Covid), made America energy independent and a net exporter of oil, passed the Taylor Force act, reformed Title VI of the Civil Right Act of 1964, ended the tolerance of state sponsored terrorism, ended the forever wars (nearly), moved the US embassy to Jerusalem, recognized Israel’s annexation of the Golan, proposed an ambitious peace plan based on reciprocity and deadlines, sponsored the Abraham Accords, pushed the Sunnis towards a regional recognition of Israel and Isolated Iran, settled a peace between Kosovo and Serbia, forced the price of insulin to about $35/month, massively dropped the cost of pharmaceuticals by eliminating kickback policies, permit international purchase of pharmaceuticals, and forcing Pharma to maintain US costs of pharmaceuticals as lower than those in any other nation.

    These are just some of the more obvious topics(to me at least) that come to mind, ie tip of the iceberg.

  12. @Edgar
    Nicely explained, but I have a few further details to share on this topic to add to your explanation.

    @leanmarc@ii.net
    In fact Trump was one of the earliest advocates of early treatment – not the earliest of the politicians, but among the earliest of anyone, to advocate for early treatment. All the others who advocated early treatment were ostracized, attacked and silenced, and some were to be seen to be arrested and confined simply due to their advocacy of early treatment. Hence, as Trump spoke out for early treatment, he was quite nearly alone in doing so on the world stage. On March 23, ten days after the lockdown began, he acted.

    He actually overruled his entire advisory board, the Task Force which was led by Pence and which was staffed with all the medical advisors including the Lying Leprachaun and the Scarf Model. He stood up to them all and made no requests while doing so. Rather he issued a direct order to have the HCQ in the national stockpile to be made available to the people around the country in coordination with their private physician. He employed the expanded Use IND protocol, also called “compassionate use expanded access”, where patients could have unfettered access to experimental treatments. It was an aggressive plan to place HCQ within reach of every American as soon as possible and end the plague.

    It was at this point that the multiple members of the Deep State acted in coordination to directly circumvent Trump’s orders and thereby maintain their concocted plague while preventing all treatments. His orders were made to Alex Azar at the HHS, who handed it over to his General Council who handed the task to Rick Bright at BARDA. Bright was desperate to block the release of the HCQ and consulted with multiple members of the medical govt administrators. He finally coordinated a plan to block the HCQ being released to the public following the advise of the acting head of FDA, Janet Woodcock.

    Despite the fact that HCQ has been a staple of medical treatments for decades and therefore required no authorization, they pretended as if it were a new drug requiring it to go thru managed stages of testing and issued an EUA for this drug which had been approved for medicinal use decades ago. The significance of the EUA was to specifically indicate the conditions in which this drug could be used. They required it to be withheld til the patient was hospitalized, knowing that any benefit of the drug could only be obtained in the first week to ten days, ie during the pre-hospitalization period. They then used it to treat, as Edgar very well describes, people who were nearly dead, and proscribed 6X the highest level of normal dosing, ie the dosage was well into toxic dosages. People were killed being dosed at that level. Part of these studies were funded by Jeremy Farrar of the UK’s Welcome Trust, which is among the UK’s most prestigious medical research groups, and Farrar was a member of SAGE, which is the UK govt’s premiere advisory body. Following this, there was the Sturgisphere study, claiming that people all around the world were dying simply due to the use of HCQ. Within two weeks the Sturgisphere study was seen to be a total scam that had been printed in the prestigious Lancet and which Francis Collins, the head NIH, had helped to have printed.

    As Edgar also states, Trump does not have a background in medicine, he is a businessman. Still he had the sense to realize that a safe and effective treatment in hand was far more preferable than an unknown, at best partially tested vaccine that would require months to a year to develop. As with Trump’s Russia policy, and his policy to reform the intelligence apparatuses, his policy on early treatment was quite effectively blocked by the actions of the deep state which opposed him from the very beginning.

  13. Trump backed Hydroxychloroquine, Zinc and the rest of the protocol in a big way, Took it himself publicly, nd went around in public otherwise unprotected for months. But was eventually worn down by the “experts” – like Fauci-, who presented him with faked up poor results where they did not mention that they used massive doses on mortally ill patients and much later than the first 5 days which was advocated to be vital.

    In effect the killed patients who were dying anyway from extreme age and other diseases, and told Trump that it was because HCQ did not work.

    he had no alternative he is not a medical researcher or any way medically knowledgeable. ;

    The “whole world” which is being injected etc, have their own experts who we may assume , examined the medications beforehand.

  14. LEANMARC
    I notice that every time you refer to Trump you always mention his “Brag”.

    I don’t mind his ‘bragging’ so much – it’s just WARP SPEED is nothing to brag about. We shouldn’t be injecting the whole world with experimental shots. I would be happy for him to brag about killing these beastly shots and exposing Israel’s contract with Pfizer and re-listing safe effective EARLY treatment medicines etc.
    That would be something to brag about.
    Trump was best President of my life time.
    Not sure though that is saying much.

  15. Some great comments today – even from those who try to “explain” someone like Pres. Trump!! Lots of food for thought – and even some minor disagreements….

  16. Boris Johnson’s character flaws are more pathetic than anything else. He ruined his prime ministership by attempting to cover up and deny minor picaddillos, such as attending office parties during athe lockdown, when all parties were forbidden. But this rule was absurd and unjust, and useless as a means of preventing the spread of Covid. Surely many other people throughout England also broke this stupid rule. If he had just ‘fessed up” to partliament as soon as the press got hold of the story, it would probably have been quickly forgiven and forgotten. His character flaw is an inability to admit fault, even in relation to very trivial wrongdoing.

    That is unfortunate, because through Brexit he freed Britain from the rule of European Union, which had deprived Britain of sovereignty. Wth their long history of being a major world power, the British were right to reject this loss of sovereignty.

    Now that the Conservative party has destroyed itself in massive infighting following Johnson’s resignation, the Labor party is a shoe-in to win the election. That will mean the return to high office, and possibly the prime ministership, to that antisemitic, ant_Israel and Pro-Hamas Jeremy Corbyn.

  17. In fact Trump was no political dandy entering into the political foray to strum his ego. He saw his nation in a state of utter political corruption, caught in the snare of special interest and crippled by unequal trade agreements and unilateral regulations. He saw a way to greatly improve the livelihood of the American people and the accountability with US trade partners. He also sought to end the global political turmoil which had been the consequence of state sponsored terrorism that had for too long held the world in a state of political siege, while also ending the constant state of war in which the US had held too great a role for too long a period. In all of this he pursued a policy of meritocracy, accountability, reciprocity and national sovereignty for the US which in turn shook the nations around the world who came to demand the return of their dependency upon the American economy.

    These policies angered those whose wealth and power were to be threatened and drained by the reforms that benefited the American people rather than special interests. They responded with a fury and treachery that has had no precedent in modern history. Politicians conspired openly with foreign adversaries, while special interests concocted a plague in which to obscure an illicit election fraud. As he had noted before even knowing the full breadth and weight of his words, these forces were coming after him, but their real target was the American people whom he had come to protect.

    As they leveraged nearly every ally from him, Trump called on the American people to demonstrate the strength and support for his policies, his presidency and their own authority as sovereigns in the land where their consent is requisite to be governed. The audacity of the people to demonstrate a personal voice over the powers within the state establishment and their financial power barons, both foreign and domestic, required that an example be made of both leader and followers of the MAGA movement.

    Despite the legal treachery, the political abuses, the personal attacks and the assault upon his assets, his family and his reputation, Donald Trump still stands to fill the void of leadership for the American people against their state enemies who have hunted them, caged them and persecuted them for choosing the dignity of men over the posture of servants.

    The flaws that Melanie and her anti-Trump allies find such affection for noting are, in fact, distortions of the assets of a man that has the spirit, the will, the determination and the ability to face all his enemies, knowing the odds laid against him are long and the outcome of failure would lead to far more devastation than his own destruction. The envy and enmity of his detractors lead them to employ projection over detail, and pejoratives over supported realities.

    In fact, the greatest insult that Melanie found useful in charging against Trump was the gross defamation employed with the comparison to Boris the blowhard. In stretching for a comparison to reproach the one, she makes seismic mis-charictarizations of the other which defy logic, reason and any fair association of the truth.

    I honestly lose more respect for her judgement with every article in which she challenges herself to abuse the character, ability and accomplishments of the man who did so much for so many, while being blighted by the character assassinations such have become quite routine by Melanie and her anti-Trump allies.

  18. LEANMARC

    I notice that every time you refer to Trump you always mention his “Brag”.

    This is pejorative, and it is NOT brag because he carries out what he’s “bragging” about. or it has already been done. And he’s trying to be political in his own tyro way.

    Do you think he should modest, self effacing, with lowered eyelids, and soft speaking-suffer in silence sort of thing..

    G-D Help us all if that were the case. Politicians can not be judged by the standards that you and i might fall under.

    The only successful “modest” politician I ever heard about or saw was Ghandi, and he was really anything but modest, His actions were calculated for effect -items like his dhoti and his peasant food. . His private personality was boastful and egocentric

    You could also call him a “Community Organiser”-but on a large scale.

  19. Trump was vengeful?? And no mention of the fact that he delivered on his promises and reversed the policy of empowering Palestinian Arabs she decrys in the beginning. No mention of the fact that Trump and Bibi made their countries stronger and more independent. Sometimes they changed their positions but they were never caught in embarassing lies ending in, “I forgot”.

    Johnson ran on Brexit but governed as an EU technocrat and weakened the UK. The comparison is apples and oranges. Saw an informative interview on Youtube with Nigel Farrange.

  20. NETANYSHU- as delineated by Phillips had “personal” flaws. Yet she admits that he has done wonderful things for the State of Israel, and has unique gifts.

    So what the hell. It’s the State that counts, We all have what OTHERS might describe as “personal” flaws…all but Phillips it seems.

    She regard’s Trump’s being “erratic” as a flaw, yet acknowledges that it keeps “the bad guys of the world off balance”,. This is NO flaw, this is pure STATESMANSHIP, a STRATEGY, as advocated and practiced by some of the greatest world’s past leaders.

    I think she’s getting past writing a purely factual article, except “like the curate’s egg” , And should describe herself is a prognosticator.

  21. The question is whether a Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley or any other able candidate could do what Trump managed to do—bring to the ballot box for the first time so many voters who previously had been alienated from the entire political process.

    The notion is a silly one. The voters that comprise the MAGA base personally identify with Trump. He has bled with them, and for them, forming a personal bond that no other potential candidate can possibly hope to wield. Furthermore, for all of DeSantis’ remarkable actions in Florida, he has yet to make a single pronouncement on any topic on foreign affairs, a key discriminator between MAGA and Rhinos. He is not running for Federal office, so his silence is a tactically acceptable stance, but his shrewdness does stand as a sharp contrast to the frank statements which MAGA is seen to prefer.

    It should also be noted that whereas DeSantis can not be easily described as Rhino-like in anything he has done, based on his Florida record, he has some explaining to do on some things he has failed to do. He has not moved the needle on the 2020 election fraud, he has not supported the Lindell lawsuit or explained why he has not, and he has not directed his own state’s 2020 election be investigated. To offset this inaction, he seems to have created a new election crime unit with nearly $7million in funding, but herein lies the telling tale. Fraud is a crime. Election fraud is a crime. It was a crime in 2021, it was a crime in 2020 and it remains a crime today. With less than six months left to at least secure the Florida election ballots, DeSantis is creating new agencies to investigate future crimes while ignoring the fact that crimes have purposefully been left uninvestigated and unexplored.

    The Canvass report in Florida on the 2020 election registration, as of Jan 2022, demonstrated a 31% discrepancy. This was a shocking result, which has never been addressed. Recall that the state was won by merely 3% in 2020 and has been much closer than that in prior races. Furthermore, the canvassing ignores the pivotal data stemming from the machine fraud, as described by Pulitzer and O’Donnell in AZ and CO. Are there similar fraudulent findings in Florida? Good question for DeSantis to answer, and yet, DeSantis’ hand has yet to stir, except in an empty motion towards future elections, in which this new agency may be seen to act with spontaneous precision, or it may be seen to sit on the bleachers as the already existing agency has been doing since 2020 – it should be noted that they did prosecute a high-school prom queen as an adult who faked 246 votes in her own prom election (not joking here), so election integrity seems to only draw Florida’s attention where the very most important cases of fraud are concerned(yes, this was sarcasm).

    Election integrity and transparency is not an issue with MAGA, it is the issue with MAGA. It is the reason that MAGA is being prosecuted in political show trials, and why gun rights are being challenged and why unsafe vaccines are being forced upon people and now given to babies. I would like to say that it is not too late for Desantis to act on this vital topic, and yet he has fairly well demonstrated his position quite clearly on this issue, even as he has yet to mention a single word on foreign adventurisms now ongoing around the world.

  22. Hi, maybe it’s a ‘generational’ thing but these flawed leaders are really flawed…unfortunately.
    See here for a start about President Trump: https://www.facebook.com/fogcitymidge/videos/659074981882836/
    Maybe they are the best we have but not saying much for humanity
    The Covid response ie lockdowns, masking, unsafe and ineffective EXPERIMENTAL vaccines forced on most of the Public thru job, health and other mandates are unforgiveable.
    President Trump brags about ‘Warp Speed’ rather than at least blaming the Administrative State for it
    Netanyahu same.
    Boris…please
    Melanie Philips, Ruthie Blum, D Greenfield, Caroline Glick and all the rest: Unless they speak up about this vaccine disaster they cannot be taken seriously.
    Bannon and his minions are speaking up in big way thank G’d, but how do they explain Warp Speed?

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