The Mandate of Heaven is a concept that goes back a long way:

The Chinese philosophical concept of the circumstances under which a ruler is allowed to rule. Good rulers would be allowed to rule with the Mandate of heaven, and despotic, unjust rulers would have the Mandate revoked.

Times have changed since the days of the ancient emperors of C'hin, but human nature has not.  We still think of our rulers in the same way, as individuals who are selected, who are somehow chosen to rise above the common herd, who have been lent a touch of divinity.  All the ideas, concepts, and habits derived from the tens of thousands of years when all humans, without exception, were tribesmen remain, whether we care to admit it or not.  It's possible, in fact, in this age of mass media and the internet, that they mean more today than they ever did.

So how does Donald Trump, Queens tough guy and real-estate magnate, get to possess the Mandate of Heaven when so many of his betters have failed?  One of the features of a leader so blessed is that he endures and overcomes obstacles that would crush a lesser man.  Does this apply to Trump?  Well, just look at what he's been up against.

The Flynn Case — Gen. Michael Flynn was an innocent man selected by Deep State forces to serve as an example.  Recall that Flynn, who devoted his entire adult life to the service of his country, was pilloried for misremembering minor details of a trivial phone call.  By destroying Flynn, the elites could scare off any potential Cabinet picks from working with Trump, assuring that his administration would be hamstrung.

The Emoluments Clause — This long-simmering accusation stemmed from a grotesquely convoluted interpretation of the Constitution's emoluments clause, intended to prevent a chief executive from receiving payoffs from foreign sources.  According to this grade-school reading, Trump's holdings in foreign countries automatically placed him in violation, since they produced income from overseas.

The 25th Amendment — This has popped up repeatedly (the last time from the Empress of Ice Cream only a couple weeks ago) over the past four years, more in hopes of causing uproar within the administration than any successful outcome.  Trump-haters have repeatedly called for administration members to declare Trump "incapable of carrying out his duties" in order to trigger the amendment.

Brett Kavanaugh — Trump's eminently qualified selection for the Supreme Court was attacked with the same weapons used against Justice Clarence Thomas: sexual misbehavior in the distant past. The sole reason was that he'd been chosen by Orange Man.

Several turncoat appointees — A number of appointees who simply didn't work out for various reasons — Scaramucci, with no gifts and no sense, either, most prominent among them — have freely badmouthed Trump in the years since, cheered on by the same people who despised and insulted them when they were working for Trump.

Anonymous — There have been several of these, but we'll concentrate on Eric Ciaramella, the whistleblower who fabricated an accusation that Trump had demanded that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky dig up dirt on Joe Biden.  (That wouldn't have been hard, would it?)

The "Russian Collusion" Case — This is the keystone: the effort triggered by Hillary Clinton, molded around a bogus "dossier" concocted by an English gun for hire, and involving several foreign intelligence agencies along with both the FBI and CIA.  This was intended as a bloodless coup, and as far as the myriad American participants goes, it represents something called "sedition."

The "Impeachment" — Finally we have this, a stillborn effort, carried out while the country was enduring the onset of a serious pandemic, to...well, it's difficult to conjecture exactly what it was about, considering that it was a no-hope scheme to start with.  Suffice it to say that it drew its substance from all the previous efforts in a kind of ritualistic Kabuki performance.

We could add plenty more.  No president has ever been made to walk a more brutal gauntlet than this.  Not even Nixon.  In a saner epoch, people will look back and shake their heads at how most of the government and a plurality of the people of this country simply went mad, attacking their national leader for no reason beyond ideological meltdown.  

But here's the thing — none of it worked.  Not a single one of these little conspiracies succeeded in laying a glove on Donald Trump.  He'd didn't quail, he didn't back off, he didn't panic.  By all indications, he thrived on it.  All this would have — and many times previously, as we know from Goldwater, Nixon, Romney, and many others — destroyed a lesser man.  But Trump has become a living illustration of the Nietzsche aphorism: "What doesn't kill me makes me stronger."

Though the Flynn case drags on due to a narcissistic and vindictive judge, it failed utterly to scare off potential Trump collaborators.  The emoluments clause and the 25^th Amendment hysterias died of simple unworthiness to exist.  Brett Kavanaugh is today addressed as "Justice."  Scaramucci, on the other hand, is scarcely addressed at all (and yet another disgruntled ex-employee, John Bolton, refused to fall in last summer when a bogus accusation arose of the president disparaging dead American soldiers as "losers" and "suckers.")  The  vast array of figures involved in the collusion plot have been utterly humiliated, many of them unemployed, the rest likely to find themselves in that situation come January.  As for the impeachment — personally, I thought it would be a big deal during the campaign: "He can't run for re-election; he's been impeached."  But no, it hasn't even been mentioned.  It's as though it never happened.  It tells you something when people go to that amount of effort and then fail to exploit it.

You look at all this, and you can't shake the feeling that someone or something is watching over Donald Trump.  Call it what you will — Jehovah, the engine of History, the American Spirit...  The Mandate of Heaven rests lightly on his shoulders, and it doesn't seem to be slipping.

This holds true as well with the events of this year.  COVID was weaponized by the left in an effort to destroy Trump, but it resulted in only the revelation that most of the Democratic governors and many lesser politicians — among them Whitmer, Mills, Cuomo, Murphy, Wolf, and Newsom — are dictators in training wheels.  The BLM/Antifa riots were triggered for the sole purpose of overthrowing Trump — he's a fascist, see, so he'll automatically call out his Gestapo and his Panzers, and then we got him...  He did no such thing, instead acting as a president of a federated republic and leaving it to the governors and mayors, almost all of whom fumbled the job, turning their cities into the Detroits, Garys, and Newarks of the mid-21st century — places that nobody ever talks about and nobody sets foot in if they can possibly avoid it.

Let's not forget the vote manipulation — mail voting, early voting, extended voting — all of it aimed at one thing: the downfall of Donald Trump. This past weekend, we were told that the Dems have woken up to the fact that GOP is catching up in early voting in must-win Florida.  (There's also a real peculiarity here in that the Dems appear to believe that early votes somehow won't cut down their votes on election day.  Are all Dems Millennials now?)

On to internet censorship by Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and I dunno...has anybody heard from MySpace?  The Streisand Effect swooped in with a vengeance here, resulting in another spanking from Congress, along with the revelation that Jack Dorsey is channeling the spirit of Howard Hughes.

Then we have the gimmicked-up polls, clearly designed to depress GOP votes, which have succeeded only in driving the party rank-and-file to open fury.

Again we see that none of it has worked up until this point.  So why would it suddenly start working now?

The schemes in play will end up the same as all the others.  They will be embarrassing defeats for the kind of people that the Democrats have become — the type who lie, cheat, and manipulate even in situations where it would be to their benefit to play it straight.

I don't believe the polls.  I don't believe the papers.  I don't believe CNN or MSNBC.  I don't believe Dorsey or Zuckerberg.  I don't believe any of it.

I don't believe that a man can run a successful presidential campaign from a basement.

I don't think you can get blacks, ultrasensitive as they can be, to vote for you by declaring yourself the judge of who's black or not.

I don't think a man who contemptuously tells troubled supporters to "Go ahead and vote for Trump" is a serious candidate.

I don't believe that man whose voters are desperately seeking ways to change or cancel their votes can be elected to anything.

I don't think a man who can't collect more than a few dozen people at his "rallies" is in the lead.  (Even Kamala can pull more than that — at least fifty or sixty, anyway.)

I don't think a man who requires this level of chicanery and cheating is any kind of leader.

And lastly, I don't think the man revealed by the laptop(s), providentially provided at the last minute, just like the 2016 laptop, which indict him as the kingpin of a crime family that is deeply committed to the 21st-century elite's sickening vice of sexual exploitation of the young, is fit to lead anything or anybody at all.

I don't have the gift of foresight, and I'll be the first to admit that anything can happen.  But I will say this: if Trump is not re-elected, then I will take it as proof that the universe is controlled by a malign demiurge, that the United States has gone mad, and that human beings evolved from jellyfish and are devolving back into that state.

Whatever happens, we can say this: Donald Trump confronted the entire malignant panoply of the elites, the Deep State, the suit-wearing criminal class, took them on alone at the head of his people and forced them back for four long years.  That, in and of itself, is an achievement that places him among the Immortals.