Trumpism Is On the March
Whoever is inaugurated on January 20, the spirit of Trumpism, which is the spirit of America, is not vanquished.
By Roger Kimball
December 12, 2020
I confess that I do not usually read columns by David Axelrod, the former senior advisor and campaign strategist for Barack Obama. But I chanced upon “History will scorn the cowards who fear Trump,†one of his CNN columns that was linked at RealClearPolitics, and I glanced through it. It is the usual partisan anti-Trump stuff, full of animadversions about President Trump’s “appalling attempt to undermine democracy,†etc. No surprise there. And let us acknowledge that there are plenty of columns written from the opposite end of the political spectrum that are equally partisan.
What interested me about Axelrod’s column was not its partisan nature—that, as I say, comes with the territory—but rather the heat and direction of its rhetoric. Axelrod is a canny writer, and his column is an artfully wrought statement, not so much for its argument—Trump and his supporters are terrible for challenging the election, etc.—but for its cunning deployment of utopian virtue signaling. “History,†he says at the end, will not only scorn Trump and all his works, but it will also honor those who “showed courage and fidelity to the rule of law during this time of trial.â€
“History,†you see. I would like to know what History will think myself. I sadly acknowledge that I do not know. I am not privy to her secrets. Only people like David Axelrod (and his former boss, Barack Obama) know them, or pretend they know them, just as they know that they are on the side of the angels and that Donald Trump and his crew are nasty “authoritarian†dispensers of “blatant lies†setting a “chilling precedent†by daring to challenge the 2020 presidential election.
Some people with a macabre sense of humor will find all this funny. They will chuckle as they juxtapose Axelrod’s talk of “fidelity to the rule of law†with the erupting boils of scandal surrounding what Rudy Giuliani apostrophized as the Biden Crime Family. They will smile when they recall Barack Obama’s refusal to enforce the country’s immigration laws when the state of Arizona attempted to police its Southern border. (“The rule of law? We’re beyond all that. We’re for the rule of virtue.â€) And they will be rolling in the aisles with laughter when they contrast Axelrod’s high dudgeon about Trump’s efforts to contest the election with the behavior of Hillary’s supporters in 2016.
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