OPINION:
Donald Trump is back.
And he was on FIRE on Sunday night in Dallas.
If you missed it, check it out on C-SPAN archives. You won’t find it on any of the big tech companies’ platforms. They have already ghosted it.
That is how good President Trump’s speech was.
Like frogs boiling in water, America has been lulled into accepting incomprehensible gibberish from a doddering old coot shuffling behind a podium bearing the White House seal. The “new normal” is a fossilized old swamp gargoyle fumbling through notes to answer a simple question about Russia from a soda jerk in an ice cream parlor.
American leadership has been defanged and replaced by a set of loose dentures incapable of commanding a cone of soft-serve ice cream — a president whose Secret Service code name is “Silver Alert.”
But the Devil in Dallas is back! And in full form — reminding us all what a live wire in the White House was really like.
Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Mr. Trump was viciously funny, scathingly honest and electrically entertaining.
“Like socialist and communist movements throughout history, today’s leftists do not believe in freedom,” he said.
“They do not believe in democracy. They believe in Marxist morality — anything is justified as long as it hurts their political opponents and advances the radical agenda of their party.”
See: George Floyd, global warming, children killed in school shootings, flooded New York City subways, the Florida condo collapse and the China virus pandemic. There is literally no catastrophe known to man that Democrats in Washington will not exploit to increase their own political power.
Mr. Trump was as vicious as he was personal.
He went after Facebook tycoon Mark Zuckerberg and the $400 million he spent rigging the election for Joe Biden by vanishing critical stories and silencing Mr. Trump’s supporters.
“We are taking Mark ‘Zuckerbucks’ … and the other Silicon Valley billionaires to federal court,” Mr. Trump boomed. “We will keep fighting until we have stopped this assault on our liberties and until we have restored the sacred right to freedom of speech for every single American.”
The maestro of improvisation also was back.
He talked about his Attorney General William Barr — a fine American patriot, who fell out of Mr. Trump’s favor after the election.
“He became a different man when the Democrats viciously stated that they wanted to impeach him,” Mr. Trump recalled. “They went wild. ‘We want to impeach him! We’re gonna impeach Bill Barr! We’re gonna impeach him!’”
Mr. Trump shook his head in pity at the thought.
“He became different. I understand that,” he said of Mr. Barr. Then a light flickered in Mr. Trump’s eyes — remembering the fight and the lights and the smell of canvas and the lusty crowd.
“I didn’t become different!” he declared with joyous abandon. “I got impeached twice!”
The crowd went perfectly insane. The fuse on a stick of dynamite had been lit.
“I became worse!” he roared. “I became worse!”
And as ever, Mr. Trump was the unrepentant bad boy of politics — ensuring all the socials would kick him and his speech off their dishonest platforms.
“We were doing so well until the rigged election came along,” he said.
“You say ‘election fraud’ and you get canceled,” he said. “Unfortunately, this was an election where the person that counts the vote was far more important than the candidate.”
Mr. Trump did not win any new friends in Washington with his Sunday night performance. But he sure made clear that he is back and ain’t backing down.
• Charles Hurt is opinion editor of The Washington Times.
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