Elvis Presley, as most would agree, sang beautiful songs. But he was wise enough not to attempt composing any of them. Peggy Noonan has written beautiful words and phrases, but she should have the wisdom to collaborate with a sound thinker whose thoughts, not hers, might be expressed through her belles-lettres. In her attempts to appear thoughtful, writing rhythmically from an Olympian perch, she dispenses vapidity disguised as wisdom. Her recent column, “A Republic, But Can We Keep It?” unwittingly shows the danger of a lack of critical thinking to our republic, not, as she claims to demonstrate, the dangers to the country of President Trump’s unconventional, decidedly not pretty, style.
This article purports to tell us all the ways that President Trump has violated our republic’s sacred norms and thus endangers the republic. There is no doubt but that the president is often vulgar, profane, and insulting, offending those who value dignity in our country’s officials. These are fair criticisms. But there is arguably a kernel of common sense in many, perhaps most, of his substantive projects that is lost on citizens who judge primarily on appearance.
What our republic urgently needs today are thinkers who can separate wheat from chaff and argue about this frantic presidency on substance, not style.
As John Stuart Mill so eloquently wrote in 1835, our republic was founded on liberty, which in turn is achieved by principled argument and discussion. Thus, what our republic urgently needs today are thinkers who can separate wheat from chaff and argue about this frantic presidency on substance, not style. We have plenty of TDS victims and Rachel Maddow commentators in the vast legacy media, and do not need any more reflexive bombast. The problem with Ms. Noonan joining this vapid, uncritical crowd is that she claims the conservative mantle of Reagan and Bush Sr. Peggy Noonan is a conservative and a Republican, so her criticisms of Trump must be valid. So, to the extent she cites conclusions that are supposedly beyond principled argument, she thereby uses her status to stifle the very debate that is so crucial to our democratic republic. (RELATED: Trump Is the Colossus That Bestrides the World)
Noonan lists many ways she claims that Trump has crossed the republic’s “lines,” and therefore, pearls be clutched, endangers our republic. They sound good on the surface, but just a small dose of critical thought shows them not to be profound wisdom, but rather, lofty drivel. She does not explore the arguments that what Trump is attempting in many areas is a rough, bullish correction to reform our republic, consonant with its core traditional values. We do need, then, a discussion as to how he may be destroying the norms of our republic versus how he may be making America great again.
Let’s start with her superficial treatment of our elections, which, we all can agree, are at the heart of preserving a democratic republic.
It is one thing to contend, as we do here, that the citizenry must, however begrudgingly, abide by the 2020 election results. But it is quite another to say about this election, as Noonan does: “You can pretty much trust the numbers even factoring in the mischief of any system built by man.” This is didactic, above-the-fray sentiment, but it does not address the problems that serious people have concluded about this serious subject. As a result, in effect, Noonan is denying the need for election reform, not salutary for the republic she cares about oh so ardently. (RELATED: SCOTUS Just Missed a Big Opportunity to Stop Election Meddling)
Ms. Peggy, for instance, ignores a five-year study by the bipartisan Carter-Baker Commission, which in 2009 found that the biggest problem with achieving fair elections is absentee voting. This is especially so, the Commission found, when vulnerable populations, such as nursing home residents, vote through intermediaries, i.e., vote harvesters. This finding was made well before the special pandemic circumstances of 2020, when mail-in voting was put on steroids, and ballot harvesters, by many accounts, cultivated an unusually bountiful crop. (RELATED: Ensuring Greater Trust in Mail-in Voting)
So, while Noonan advises us to “trust the numbers,” Jimmy Carter and James Baker advise otherwise, even in a normal election, if absentee ballots are used. In 2020, abnormally, millions of unsolicited ballots were sent to the dead, relocated, and uninterested; the resultant 155.5 million votes were nigh on impossible, after 136.7 million in 2016. Nursing homes? In Wisconsin, a state with a 20,000-vote margin, normal government election monitors were not as per usual sent to nursing homes, leaving Democrat workers to preside. Turnout in Milwaukee homes was close to 100 percent, with 95 percent voting for Biden. In Arizona, residents without proof of citizenship were allowed to vote. Foreign mail-in ballots were, oddly, heavily for Biden. None of this required a reversal of the results, but it suggests the need, per Carter-Baker, for reform of mail-in voting, not the reckless expansion that occurred.
To make it appear that Trump, not suspicious Georgia voting, was fraudulent, she quotes him saying, famously, “I just want to find 11,780 votes.” As she knows well, he was not suborning the manufacturing of votes, but instead the finding of the likely illegal ones. This is a cheap shot from an opinion leader that harms our country. It perhaps escaped her memory that Al Gore tried similarly to find wrongly tallied ballots, which she then said was the essence of the democratic process. So what is sauce for the goose is apparently not sauce for the gander.
By writing, “your governor won, your congressman won,” she implies that Trump’s true 2020 fate can be discerned from congruence with his down-ballot ticket. In Pima County, Arizona, a whistleblower reliably relayed a scheme to insert 35,000 phony ballots. Consistent with that allegation, Trump led his Republican ticket in precincts with normal turnout, while, in a “fishtail” graph, consistently trailing it in unprecedentedly high-turnout precincts, where votes appear to have been injected in a 10,000 margin state.
She is therefore arguing against election reform and improving voting security, since, after all, mail-in vote harvesting is a system “built by man.” According to Noonan, there is no “worry about our democracy” by any “erosion” here, even though there is such worry about Trump’s complaints of obvious voting irregularities. Really?
Only a person with willful blindness toward history or one with entitled Manhattan ignorance would say:
Are we maintaining our republic? Is our equilibrium holding? The last nine months, a lot of lines seemed to have been crossed — in the use of the military, in redirecting the Justice Department to target the president’s enemies, real and perceived… The executive branch takes on authority to bend its foes, defeat them.
One must conclude that Noonan was not around when Obama sicced Lois Lerner on Tea Party nonprofits, preventing them from participating in elections, or when Biden sent the DOJ’s Matthew Colangelo to New York to prosecute Trump on disgustingly specious non-crimes. Is John Bolton wrongly prosecuted by Trump’s DOJ for carelessly allowing Iran our most sensitive secrets, so Bolton could collect a million in book dollars? (RELATED: Karma Comes Calling for John Bolton)
The use of the military is in conformance with her idea of “equilibrium,” she implies, when it is used to enforce desegregation in Arkansas and Alabama in the 1960s. Why was that not a danger to our republic, but calling on troops to protect immigration enforcement officers is? How about Washington using the military to put down the domestic Whiskey Rebellion? Was Washington not crossing lines in protecting controversial excise tax collection, but Trump is in stopping violence against lawful deportation orders? (RELATED: Trump’s National Guard Deployment and the Art of the 80-20 Issue)
Is Noonan arguing that the use of the army to enforce Reconstruction and the Civil Rights of freed slaves was right, but Trump’s use to enforce a safe District of Columbia was not? Was Thomas Jefferson correctly using the military to fight Barbary Coast piracy, but Trump is not correctly using the military to interdict Venezuelan drugs that kill millions of Americans? Is she claiming that Rutherford Hayes was noble when, in exchange for the 1876 presidency, he quit using the military to enforce Reconstruction, thus sanctioning Jim Crow Laws?
In yet other claimed “lines … crossed,” Trump’s tearing down the seemingly useless East Wing, an FDR addition, was purportedly “disturbing” and “upsetting.” Are tents a good look for the free world’s greatest country? And does Noonan know of the frequent major remodels of the White House throughout our history, including the addition of the West Wing? What is a better venue to entertain foreign dignitaries, a ballroom or Obama’s $376 million basketball court, built with taxes? Since her thesis is about Trump’s departure from traditional republican norms, why would she conceal abundant relevant comparisons? (RELATED: Trump Improves the White House East Wing)
While some may reasonably think that Trump’s use of private donations to fund the ballroom is a good thing, Noonan frets about what favors might be gained by “donors who are paying for it.” Are these folks more corrupt than Obama’s, or Biden’s, or any candidate’s donors? Why would she write something so jejune, if not to gratuitously throw shade on Trump?
Any student of American history knows that the boundaries between the three branches’ “specific powers and duties” by design are ill-defined. But, according to Noonan, it was Trump, not Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson, FDR, Nixon, or this fellow Washington, who first energetically tried to exert executive power.
Unfortunately, this fine wordsmith no longer expresses the wise sensibilities of Reagan, or the traditional wisdom of her hero Edmund Burke, but, rather, her superficial, half-baked thoughts as an intellectual poseur.
It takes courage and intelligence to give voice to critical conservative thought. So the question is, does Peggy Noonan lack critical thinking skills, or does she lack the intellectual courage to live in snooty New York and openly entertain the possibility that Trump may be, in some ways, yes, making our republic great again?
READ MORE:
Trump Steers Conservatives Away From ‘Crackpot Alley’
King Trump! At Long Last, a Crown!
Trump’s White House Makeover Rankles Washington
John D. O’Connor is a former federal prosecutor and the San Francisco attorney who represented W. Mark Felt during his revelation as Deep Throat in 2005. O’Connor is the author of the books The Mysteries of Watergate: What Really Happened and Postgate: How the Washington Post Betrayed Deep Throat, Covered Up Watergate and Began Today’s Partisan Advocacy Journalism.
