Historian and financier Conrad Black has published a column in Canada’s National Post arguing that President Joe Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan proves that Donald Trump’s election defeat in 2020 was a global “catastrophe.”
Black notes that beyond Trump’s offensive tweets and petty personal fights, he was an effective leader who strengthened America and the West, in ways that NATO allies are beginning to realize, and even Trump’s enemies are forced to admit:
Seven months into the Biden regime, the truism that dare not speak its name is now almost too obvious to bear stating. It was a catastrophic error to evict Donald Trump. No one, and certainly not I, would try to whitewash the stylistic infelicities of Donald Trump. He said many things that were toe-curlingly embarrassing coming from the holder of so great an office. But he proved in government as he had in the private sector that he was capable and forceful, and although he had the terrible handicap of personalizing everything and escalating all disagreements, he had a clear conception of domestic and foreign national interests and pursued them very successfully.
…
President Biden and his entourage determined to leave Afghanistan practically as quickly as aircraft could remove American military personnel, without consultation with NATO allies who had three quarters of the international forces in Afghanistan, without a thought for the many thousands of American civilians in the country, and without any regard for the tens of thousands of Afghans who had worked with the Americans and are in mortal danger with the Taliban in power. As the operations swiftly degenerated into a cowardly fiasco and the American president was for the first time depicted by the British Parliament as a figure of shame, Biden and his principal colleagues lied to the public, contradicted each other, and magnified America’s monstrous humiliation at the hands of a bunch of primitive and barbarous, flea bitten, terrorists.
There is open discussion of trying to reconstruct the Western alliance without American leadership. Biden’s own partisans are silent as his standing in the eyes of his countrymen crumbles. Is there any sane person who in the dark and quiet of their bedroom in the dead, vast, and middle of the night would not prefer Trump with his gaucheries to this horrifying immolation of American national credibility and of the unbroken right of the West over 2500 years to be the preeminent influence in the world? Possibly, but they are no longer numerous or outspoken.
Read the full column here.
Black, who has written biographies of many presidents, including FDR, received a pardon from Trump in 2019 for what many said was a wrongful prosecution by the George W. Bush administration.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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