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My relations with Peggy Wente of The Globe and Mail have been quite cordial for many years, since she stopped writing nasty things about my wife and me. I want to reassure her and her readers that I am not “shilling” for Donald Trump as she wrote two weeks ago. I have known him for many years as an honest businessman and a loyal friend. We co-developed a property in Chicago and he came in on time, on budget, built an architecturally admired building and filled it in advance with high-quality tenants. He knew what a load of codswallop the charges against me were and he volunteered to come to Chicago and testify on my behalf.

He has never been my preferred choice for president of the U.S., but the cold terror he and Bernie Sanders are striking into the political class in America, the Bush-Clinton-Obama triopoly and their servitors, is refreshing. None of them thought the country would really reject the authors of almost 20 years of middle-class economic stagnation, with the lower-income groups threatened by the departure of 60 million jobs and the influx of 11 million unskilled illegal immigrants. There would be no reckoning for scores of thousands of casualties and trillions of dollars squandered in endless Middle Eastern wars, ultimately to America’s strategic disadvantage, the government-induced greatest recession in 80 years and the doubling of the accumulated national debt in seven years, shambles in education and health care, and a fascist justice system, absurd foreign policy humiliations, and the U.S. government an anthill of corruption and hypocrisy.

Neither Trump nor Sanders has all the solutions, but at least they identify the problems, and it is a sign of American strength that such prolonged misrule breeds opponents who at least believe in free elections and free speech. The U.S. could do worse than Trump, despite his infelicities, and it has in the past four or five terms. It is sad to see such a great country laid so low as it now is, but the trend of recent years is reversible.

National Post

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