President Trump Has Already Won

By Conrad Black,

The attacks on him are piffle.

As the year ends, the Trump legal drama winds down towards its tawdry end. The immense fraudulent fantasy of a Benedict Arnold on steroids collaborating with a foreign enemy, a Manchurian Candidate “groomed for the presidency by his Russian controllers,” has come down to a squalid dispute between the president, his crooked former lawyer, and the publisher of the National Enquirer over the nature of incentivizing the pre-electoral silence of a porn star and a former Playboy bunny.

It is the same pattern as the Clinton investigation, which began with the financial improprieties of Whitewater and meandered around to checking the president’s semen against a White House intern’s carefully preserved dress. The lust to tear down a president leads ostensibly serious and responsible people to act contemptibly, and ultimately to become absurd.

Many of the president’s enemies do not, cannot possibly, realize what is happening to them.

His enemies attacked savagely, invented the Russian-collusion nonsense, have been forced off that ledge, and are now scruffing around in the gutter with this bunk about paying off indiscreet female claimants of former intimacy. It is very hard to make a serious claim that the payments to them were campaign contributions, or that anyone but Trump ultimately paid the money, but impossible to take the word of Michael Cohen and the publisher of the National Enquirer, David Pecker, over that of the president to an extent that meets the required threshold of being “beyond a reasonable doubt.” And no one with the slightest acquaintance with American history or jurisprudence could conclude that whatever Mr. Trump did with or about these women (no coercion of or contemporary payments to the women are alleged), it amounts to the “high crimes and misdemeanors” stipulated by the Constitution for removal from office of a president.

In assaulting him, the political elite has abased itself. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and their chief collaborators invented the Russian canard, dispatched the intelligence services and Justice Department, including the FBI, to put meat on the bones of this fraud, tried to legitimize the monstrous malicious fabrications and defamations of the Steele dossier, and are now trying to maintain their threadbare credibility by inciting their congressional and media lackies to amplify completely pedestrian tales of sexual dalliances. Even these facts are contested and unprovable…

All of these attacks — on the Trump charities, the Trump inauguration committee, and by the two angry (and greedy) women — is piffle. The president can’t lose this match politically, and as his opponents have descended beneath him, he has already won morally.

More From National Review: