OPINION:
Success in entertainment stakes its fortune on the notion that the show must go on. So does politics. Donald Trump, with a knack for occupying the sweet spot between the two, would no longer be restrained from taking the stage. With a jolt, he has relaunched his dormant 2020 presidential election campaign for a dash through a minefield of radical strife fueled by national sickness of body and soul.
President Trump chose friendly territory — Oklahoma — for his first stump speech since the coronavirus pandemic forced the shutdown of live events in March. In a state with 4 million residents, more than a million supporters vied for 19,000 tickets to Tulsa’s BOK Center campaign rally on Saturday. His haters also made their existence, if not their presence, felt. They reportedly ordered tickets by the hundreds of thousands to keep them out of the hands of Trump enthusiasts, then stayed home, leaving the arena with empty seats.
Acknowledging the muscle of his opposition, the president challenged his still-abundant audience to view the Nov. 3 presidential election as a stark choice: “Do you want to bow before the left-wing mob or do you want to stand up tall as Americans?”
Like the clash of matter and anti-matter, opposition came into being the moment Mr. Trump rose to challenge the legacy of the “progressive” godhead, Barack Obama, and his eight-year campaign to annihilate the national credo of American exceptionalism. The story of the Trump presidency has been the battle to shoot down the relentless stream of political missiles meant to target the chink in the nation’s greatness — its historical flaw of slavery — and convince Americans that their patriotism is false pride.
On its face, the dump-Trump crusade appears to be making progress. The Real Clear Politics polling average shows the Republican president trailing his presumptive Democratic opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, by more than 9 percentage points.
Despite the differential, the Trump team scoffs at the notion that the president is, realistically, an underdog. In 17 key states where the Trump 2020 campaign keeps a close eye on granular voter sentiment, the president’s numbers are strong, Communications Director Tim Murtaugh tells Fox News.
Like appearances, national polls can be deceiving, particularly when they sample generic batches of registered voters. In 2016, only 61 percent of registered voters bothered to show up on Election Day. It is likely voters — citizens actually planning to cast a ballot — who make for a more accurate predictor of an election outcome.
To be sure, June of election years generally belongs to Democrats. The last time a Republican presidential candidate led in June polls occurred in 2004, when George W. Bush held a one-point lead over John Kerry. In 2016, Mr. Trump trailed Hillary Clinton by five points in June, but in November, he prevailed where it counts: the Electoral College.
Nonetheless, Mr. Trump faces re-election headwinds unfathomed by his presidential predecessors of the past century. Potent bombshells lobbed by Democrats and their ideological partners, such as Russiagate, Ukraine impeachment, the coronavirus plague and the nation’s subsequent economic collapse have all found their target, but none have broken through the president’s resolve to fight back.
Social media giants have joined the fray, mounting sleazy attempts to censor the president’s online posts. Facebook last week deleted Trump ads calling out Antifa, the anarchist movement fomenting violence in U.S. cities, because the ads included a symbol — an inverted red triangle — that appears on Antifa products and was also associated with World War II Nazi concentration camps.
In the view of the Facebook censors, Antifa may adopt a symbol of hate for its purposes, but the president deserves to be penalized for pointing it out. Adding insult to injustice, Facebook features its own inverted red triangle emoji for users’ enjoyment.
For its part, Twitter has taken to stamping some Trump tweets with labels advising readers to be wary of fake or misleading news. Taken together, it is clear the progressives who operate the corporate behemoths that Americans rely on for information are hoping the president’s campaign lacks the firepower to parry ambushes from every angle before the damage accumulates.
Racism and other sicknesses of the soul send people fleeing not from, but to, the United States. The president’s enemies hope citizens don’t notice the distinction and instead, reject his revived campaign to make America great again.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.