William BorstEvery time my wife and I go to a Costco, I head for their small table featuring best-sellers at discount prices. To my surprise Hope, the new autobiography of Pope Francis was available. It had been on my list so I put a copy in my cart. While my wife finished her shopping, I started to read it.
In his Prologue, the pope tells the story of his family, including 21-year old Mario, who would become Francis’ father. He was preparing to move with his family to their new home in Buenos Aires. Pope Francis’ grandfather had bought tickets for the October 1927 departure from Genoa, Italy. For some unexplained reason they never got on.
The ship was named the SS Principessa Mafalda, after the second daughter of King Victor Emmanuel III. It never made it to Argentina. It sank with 314 out of its 1252 passengers and crew losing their lives. The descriptions in his book vividly reminded readers of the Titanic to the extent that the Argentinians call it the Italian Titanic.
The father of the future pope had suffered a near miss. I had a similar one in 1965. I was en route to Chicago as a volunteer teacher for the Catholic Lay Extension. My flight had been delayed because the prior evening, my plane had crashed into Lake Michigan, killing the sixty or so people on board. History is filled with several close calls as I have recounted in my essay from last year, Near Misses.
The most famous near miss in our history, may well have been the attempt on former President Donald Trump’s life during an election rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Something had distracted Trump so that he turned his head ever so slightly that the near-fatal bullet grazed his ear instead of going through his brain.
Before that moment, Trump had been more like a caricature of his former self. He was a billionaire playboy, in his third marriage who had hobnobbed with the Glitterati for a generation. He was a businessman, who had amassed his fortune in real estate, not a politician. Since he did not resemble a doctrinaire conservative, most people did not take The Don seriously. But he was also smart, good looking for his age and charismatic, without any apparent phoniness. And most important of all, he had an authentic concern for his fellow Americans and his country.
Trump is an anomaly among Republicans, who have been weak and ineffective for nearly two generations. Their differences from Democrats have been little more that cosmetic. The political and economic dominance of Franklin Roosevelt, who was elected four straight times, plus the concentrated power needed to fight World War II, with all its attendant social changes, reduced the Republican Party to a mere shadow of itself with little real power. Since the sixties, with the sole exception of the Reagan years, they had become the Me-too Party, or what we call today, Rhinos, Republicans in name only.
The iconic photograph of his shooting captured Trump’s true character. In retrospect, his raised bloody fist reminded me exactly why I had voted for him three times. He was a fighter and not one to nap on the job. You can shoot him but he will never quit. He was the only Republican with the intestinal fortitude to withstand all the Democrats could throw at him.
Something else happened that day in Butler. While it was not a bright light, knocking him off his horse on the road to Damascus, it certainly was a wake-up call. I know the Left will disdain anything hinting of the supernatural but Trump admitted as such. He felt he had been chosen for a mission. I felt safe. Because God was on my side…it was a providential moment. He attached a personal message that God wanted him to be president again. I think this is enough to change anyone. I believe he had undergone what the Pilgrims called a conversion experience.
To prove it, he has noticeably modified his behavior. One can tell that he is more calm and less excited than we have ever seen him. He threw away speeches filled with his usual vitriol. His ego seems to have taken a rest. His friends admit it and most Trump authorities have noticed it. This might help explain how tirelessly he has worked the first months of his new regime to clean up the waste. The 47th president repeated George Washington’s exhortation that religion was an important facet in civilization and therefore we should bring it back! He underscored this with an impressive speech at the annual Prayer Breakfast.
I believe he is on a Divine Mission. While Trump has always been very energetic, I doubt anyone who has witnessed the roller-coaster ride of the past ten years has a full grasp of what has happened to our country. It is as if we have been engaging in an uncivil war.
Little did any of us know that his long escalator ride to the lower level in Fifth Avenue’s Trump Tower would hit the country’s politics like a meteor from space. Trump ran as a Marvel superhero, with the determination to Drain the Swamp. This has become his holy quest. This term created a powerful image of the mosquito-infested area around the Potomac River which ran through metro Washington DC.
The late Rush Limbaugh used to surmise how much money was centered in our Nation’s Capitol. Trillions of dollars passed through the area every year. As a result, DC had become a pig roast barbeque for politicians of all stripes, lobbyists and all sorts of scammers or what used to be called bunko artists.
While Trump’s vow to clean out every smelly section of the swamp endured him to the American people, it also energized the hordes of politicians, attorneys and lobbyists who had profited handsomely from the swamp. They suddenly sensed that their lifelong gravy train was about to be derailed. You can hear them wail every night on the news. This amateur politician had to be stopped…at all costs.
A handful of books have been written about the Democrats viable conspiracy to effect this. I trace its origins to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Presidential campaign, which included ample assistance from the Obama Justice Department. In addition, the DNC contracted an intelligence firm, Fusion GPS, which in turn enlisted a former British counter-intelligence operative, Christopher Steele to dig up dirt on Trump. The Steele Dossier was filled with nonsense and fake news.
They followed this with a faux conspiracy that included an alleged Russian interference in the election. The truth behind this was that the FBI developed Crossfire Hurricane, the code name for the its investigation into the 2016 election. It was basically a hoax. Its machinations were legitimized in Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s investigation. It took him three years to issue his report, which wasted more than half of Trump’s first presidency. This was a bona fide persecution of President Trump’s first term of office which had also been marred by COVID shutdowns and false advice from his advisors, such as Anthony Fauci, Dr. Science himself. This served to undermine what Mueller had missed.
The result of all this political chicanery to stop Trump has seriously polarized the nation. Too many people have fallen victim to hatred, vicious name-calling and an unwillingness to accept the democratic will of the people. For example, January 6th has become a day of infamy, which many people would rank with December 7th and 9/11. At the same time, they ignore the bloodier riots when Black Lives Matter advocates, nearly burned down Seattle, Washington and Portland, Oregon with 35 fatalities in the wake of the George Floyd death in May of 2020.
In the election that year, when all the votes were in, it appeared that Biden had over 81 million votes, the highest total ever. This is unsurprising, since voting standards were drastically altered, changed or ignored due to the chaos of COVID. Biden’s large total seemed to lend some credence to rumors of thousands of votes being duplicated in certain blue metro areas.
Whether the election was stolen or not, the truth of the matter is that given the revengeful nature of the Democrats and even many Republicans to stop the Trump Administration’s attacks on their livelihood, it is reasonable to believe that anti-Trump forces would have done everything possible to stop him, including rigging an election.
My view is that there were ample reasons to support Trump’s suppositions of election theft, given his past experience with the Democratic Party. But conclusive evidence, if any, never survived the aftermath of the tabulations. Trump should have let it go but his pride and belief that he wuz robbed as they used to say in Flatbush, caused him to act petulantly in trying to stop the electoral vote count.
In the aftermath of the 2020 election, President Biden let it be known that he wanted to get Trump. He weaponized his Justice Department and supported efforts by a collusion of progressive attorneys-general, in four different legal jurisdictions to find some legal violations on Trump, so to get him to put him in jail, bankrupt or at least tie up his time in litigation that would limit his ability to campaign and be elected. This added a new term to our political argot: Lawfare, which the Cambridge dictionary defines as the use of legal action to cause problems for an opponent.
When this conspiracy also failed, the Left resorted to loud chants that the former president was a Threat to Democracy or even an American Hitler in the making. The Democratic machine was guilty of projection as they did everything possible to prevent his winning a second term, even the keeping of his name off the ballot in several states. But all this failed and the American people spoke loudly.
After his inauguration on January 20th, the President wasted little time in living up to his campaign promises. His first target was the USAID, the United States Agency for International Development with an annual budget of over $40 billion. Founded in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy it appears that under Obama and Biden it has wandered far from its original intent. The WSJ called it a slush fund for the activist left. It now uses the vast majority of its budget to fund abortions, establish DEI programs, transgendered events and even college tuition for members of Hamas. It has also made donations of several million dollars to political news organizations, such as Politico. With Elon Musk riding shotgun, USAID has been virtually shut down.
Donald J. Trump has implanted his mark on not only our culture but also our history. In my opinion, the media and his rivals for political power have not played by the ordinary rules of fair play and sportsmanship, revered in a Republic. Most people on the Left do not care to know the other side. Their legacy media sources have never been fair and balanced. As for sportsmanship, I mean the ability to talk with the other side before and after an election.
Add to this, Joe Biden’s lack of respect for our basic immigration laws or concern for his fellow Americans. His blanket invitation to several millions of immigrants to sneak through our back door has caused collateral damage to our citizens and our basic institutions, such as the rule of law.
His unilateral actions have created untold problems in our borders states and other large metropolises such as Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. In encouraging this, Biden has divided the nation on these issues. With little or no concern for the harm these illegals inflicted on the American public, many of our churches sadly sided with the undocumented immigrants.
While the Senate stalls on his cabinet appointments, Trump implements his shock and awe attacks on government waste and fraud. According to Senate Minority leader, Chuck Schumer, the Left is aroused and ready to fight, fight, fight. I have recently watched gaggles of Democrats talking on TV about taking their fight to the streets. Like Portland and Seattle? Another assassination attempt? To me this sounds more like a threat of a real insurrection! This is certainly not the talk of responsible citizens, let alone our elected officials. To paraphrase Betty Davis’s famous line from All About Eve in her 1950 film, Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy four years.
Vincent Ryan Ruggiero
