The Tribune

With CHARLIE HARPER

The first two amendments to the American constitution, which were ratified on December 15, 1791, have moved back into the forefront of the news in the past couple of weeks. The First Amendment’s right to freedom of speech and the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms are both being tested, in settings ranging from the backyard fence to public opinion polls and corporate boardrooms.

Let’s take the Second first. Ten people including a police officer were murdered in a large food store earlier this week in one of America’s most sought-after places to live – Boulder, Colorado. Job availability is famously low in Boulder and the cost of home ownership is notoriously high.

Not far north from the metropolis of Denver but without most of its racial and other sociological tensions, Boulder boasts cleaner air, the majestic front range of the Rocky Mountains in your backyard and the intellectual draw and public prestige of its flagship public university, the University of Colorado.

While details of this latest mass killing are still trickling in, it’s safe to predict that this most recent American gun outrage will reinvigorate efforts by Democrats and liberals in Washington and elsewhere to impose greater limits on the sale and licensing of firearms in the US. In fact, some observers are puzzled that it has taken so long already for the new administration to prioritize gun control legislation.

It may be a propitious time for such efforts, inasmuch as the National Rifle Association, America’s leading gun rights advocate, has been debilitated in recent years by leadership fights, allegations of massive financial fraud and revelations of embarrassing indiscretions by some of the NRA’s most public spokespersons.

But gun control will likely have to wait its turn. The Biden Administration has obviously prioritised pandemic recovery on its to-do list, probably followed by infrastructure and immigration reform in some order.

A $3 trillion infrastructure bill to upgrade deteriorating bridges, roads and waterways and other ties that bind the country together has been rumoured for weeks. Coming on the heels of a nearly $2 trillion COVID-19 relief package, Biden and Company will certainly not be restricting their ambitions for public spending.

But the protections and benefits afforded to voters across the US by both pieces of legislation will be significant and should go far to promote Biden’s expressed goal to slash unemployment rates while his Federal Reserve Bank and Treasury Department endeavour to limit to acceptable levels the monetary inflation theoreticians believe must inevitably follow such heavy government borrowing and spending.

Biden clearly hopes the beneficiaries of his largesse will remember who provided the cash and jobs when elections roll around next year and in 2024.

That the surge of immigration at America’s southern border has caught out the new administration is surprising. After four years of Trump literally begging, borrowing and stealing money to build his famous wall along the US-Mexican border and fulminating regularly about the hordes of illegal aliens threatening the US from Central America, Biden arrived in office restoring the Dream Act and promising a more liberal immigration policy.

Did Biden imagine that impoverished and politically fearful dreamers from the Panama Canal to the Rio Grande River would not suddenly sense an opportunity to improve their chances at entering the US and securing social protections and employment in its giant economy?

Whatever the new administration may have anticipated, they certainly appear to have been unprepared for the surge toward their southern border. But no matter how relatively humane the Biden immigration stance may be, the US was swiftly deluged with opportunistic would-be immigrants. Biden needs to get a grip on the situation and establish border stability even as his government tackles huge infrastructure, voting rights and other challenges.

Biden can at least be thankful his predecessor is likely somewhat preoccupied with vengeful political thoughts and a looming avalanche of legal difficulties. Furthermore, since his exclusion from Twitter, Facebook and Instagram in the days just after the January 6 assault by his followers on the US Capitol, Donald Trump has been unable to publicly gloat as he might previously have done at his beleaguered successor’s travails.

That is not to say Trump is now silent. You just have to look much harder to find out what he is saying. The following Trump response to the current American southern border situation comes from his statement cited by the Conservative Direct web site:

“We proudly handed the Biden Administration the most secure border in history. All they had to do was keep this smooth-running system on autopilot. Instead, in the span of a just few weeks, the Biden Administration has turned a national triumph into a national disaster. They are in way over their heads and taking on water fast,” Trump wrote.

“The pathetic, clueless performance of (new Department of Homeland Security) Secretary Mayorkas on the Sunday Shows today was a national disgrace,” Trump said. “His self-satisfied presentation - in the middle of the massive crisis he helped engineer - is yet more proof he is incapable of leading DHS. Even someone of Mayorkas’ limited abilities should understand that if you provide Catch-and-Release to the world’s illegal aliens then the whole world will come.

“This Administration’s reckless policies are enabling and encouraging crimes against humanity. Our Country is being destroyed!”

Trump urged Biden to “immediately complete the wall, which can be done in a matter of weeks - they should never have stopped it”.

“The only way to end the Biden Border Crisis is for them to admit their total failure and adopt the profoundly effective, proven Trump policies,” the former President wrote.

It certainly appears Trump has lost none of the bite in his public statements. Has it been a relief to have been relatively free of such venom for the past couple of months?

But is that about to change? In the name of his First Amendment free speech rights, is Trump poised to recapture his much more amplified public voice?

While Trump’s Twitter ban is supposedly permanent, time will tell. Facebook, meanwhile, has referred its Trump ban to a distinguished panel of worldwide experts for their advice. Some response is due next month. What if Facebook’s luminaries recommend Trump’s free speech rights need to be restored?

Naturally, there has been public opinion polling on this issue. To the surprise of no one, over 75 percent of Republicans favoured Facebook restoration for Trump and a similar number of Democrats opposed it. Independents were almost evenly split.

And even as the topic gains greater currency, there have been signals from Palm Beach that the former President is preparing to take matters into his own hands.

Jason Miller, a spokesman for Trump’s 2020 campaign, told Fox News the other day that Trump would shortly re-enter the social media sphere with a new platform of his own that would “completely redefine the game”.

The idea makes sense. Trump could not only regain a potentially very potent megaphone for publicising himself, but he could very likely make some serious money in doing so. Returning to the centre of the American political and social discourse while raking in lots of cash? Sounds so like Trump.

A sting in the tail

Whatever individuals may feel about Trump’s recent relative public silence, the news media has missed him terribly.

Consider these facts, reported by Nielsen Media Research: CNN, still regarded by most Americans as the most politically neutral cable news network, has lost a staggering 45 percent of its prime-time audience in the past five weeks! Left-leaning MSNBC has dropped 26 percent over the same time frame. Even Fox News has seen a six percent decline.

That this could be foreseen does not diminish its import. CNN’s president told reporters in 2018 that “we’ve seen that, any time you break away from the Trump story and cover events these days, the audience goes away.”

And Trump didn’t just boost TV ratings. The New York Times had three million digital subscribers at the beginning of Trump’s term. In four years, that number had jumped to 7.5 million. The Washington Post tripled its online subscription base over the same period.

Trump himself predicted in 2017 that “newspapers, television, all forms of media will tank if I’m not there. Because without me, their ratings will go down the tubes”.

He looks right so far.