The guy that “wasn’t going anywhere” is now gone. The Democrat party axe, poised squarely over Joe Biden’s head for days, has finally fallen. “Four more years,” a charade exposed for some time as preposterous on its face, has reached its ignominious end. Now thrice Covid-infected, Biden was not even able to withdraw with dignity in an Oval Office statement as did Lyndon Johnson in 1968. Instead, he was forced to release a letter on X while holed-up in his Rehoboth Beach retreat fighting a virus to which he’s particularly vulnerable and clearly not yet out of the woods.

The only real question left is whether the fading Biden can serve out the rest of his term; hopefully without inviting some national calamity due to the inattention to duty inherent in his obviously worsening condition. Vice-President Harris, the favorite (as of this writing) to be crowned the Democrat nominee at what will undoubtedly be a very raucous August convention in Chicago, offers little comfort as a stand-in for our ailing president. Despite her well-proven inadequacies, expect the 25th Amendment arguments to arise in short order.

Meanwhile, the joyous Republican National Convention has just concluded. Jubilant if humbled, perhaps even a bit chastened by the relief accompanying a tragedy avoided, it was nevertheless conducted with typical Trumpian showmanship. The Republicans left Milwaukee united and with the firm feeling that their miraculously-only-grazed candidate was, in echoes of the past, “walking with destiny.”

July has already seen the near murder of a former president seeking re-election, and the withdrawal of the sitting president for consideration as his party’s nominee. And as this nervous summer progresses, we can only expect things to become more tense.

The warm, bright, cloudless weather juxtaposed against gnawing anxiety and hovering peril recalls another July, this one across the Atlantic in the United Kingdom of 1939. Jumpy as we understandably are, we can take some solace in a look back eighty-five years ago. Then, the outlook for the Brits, and consequently the whole of the civilized world, was even more ominous than that which we face today.

Appeasement of Nazi Germany, the failed policy now discussed with justifiable derision and synonymous with craven weakness, was just a few short months earlier, widely supported by a sizeable majority of the British public. But as the summer of that year wore on, it became painfully obvious to most that Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s efforts to peacefully sate the voracious appetite for conquest of German dictator Adolf Hitler had utterly failed.

The Munich Agreement, in Chamberlain’s mind his signature achievement, had been torn to shreds. The desperate attempt by Britain and France to save the peace by abandoning and dismembering democratic Czechoslovakia in September 1938 had all come to naught. By March of 1939 Germany had swallowed up what remained of the Czech nation, and — as thoroughly predicted by appeasement’s opponents on both ends of Britain’s political spectrum — Hitler had now shifted his sights to isolated and outgunned Poland.

Reacting to this humiliating failure and seeking to project strength and protect his political position, Chamberlain suddenly and without proper consultation issued a blanket guarantee of Poland’s sovereignty.

Still however, there was one show of British resolve that Chamberlain resisted taking: bringing Winston Churchill into his government. Churchill, and other notable parliamentary opponents of appeasement such as Leo Amery, Harold MacMillan, Robert Boothby, Alfred Duff Cooper, Harold Nicolson, and Archibald Sinclair (among many others), had long decried Chamberlain’s weakness and had urged rapid rearmament and other economic preparations for war with Germany — something they considered inevitable given Hitler’s implacable fanaticism.

For that prescience, for a long time their sole reward was condemnation and accusations of warmongering; attempting to consign still another generation of British youth to the early deaths and horrible wounds experienced in the First World War. Even the Nazis joined the debate: Making public pronouncements that giving Churchill or other anti-appeasers posts in the British cabinet was tantamount to an act of war.

But by the summer of 1939 the grudging realization grew that Churchill and his supporters were correct in their assessments, and that as the threat of war loomed, Chamberlain’s somewhat weak team, despite an enormous Conservative majority in Parliament, needed to be bolstered. Without divulging their sponsor, all over English cities billboards popped up — the most prominent of which appearing in London’s Piccadilly Circus — declaring simply: WHAT PRICE CHURCHILL?

Brief though the message was, it asked how many blunders and missteps needed to be endured before Chamberlain finally showed proper commitment to preparing for war by giving Churchill a job.

Those familiar with the history of the time know that there were far greater shocks to come. The next month, August, saw the announcement of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, the non-aggression agreement between Germany and the Soviet Union which cleared the way for the German invasion (and secret partition with the Russians) of Poland on September 1st, obliging England and France to declare war on September 3rd.

Upon Britain’s declaration of war, Chamberlain finally relented and brought Churchill into his government, awarding him the key post of First Lord of the Admiralty — a position Churchill also held at the beginning of the First World War until forced to resign in 1915 over the Dardanelles debacle. Chamberlain, despite not being suited for war leadership, managed to hold onto his premiership for another eight months until the German invasion of the Low Countries and France in early May, 1940, when he was forced out and replaced by Churchill.

Calling President Joe Biden America’s Neville Chamberlain is to do an injustice to the memory of the late Prime Minister. Deluded and wrongheaded though his policies may have been, he was not demented. And on his best days, even before his seemingly accelerated descent into senile incapacity, Mr. Biden never achieved the level of public approval — however misguided it later proved — that Chamberlain received from his people upon returning from Munich waving that now infamous piece of white paper.

Joe Biden, as a political “force” — perhaps cutout is a better word — has reached his end. Nature has seen to that. But the question is posed: Can Donald Trump, in this crucial time, be our Churchill? At one time the mere suggestion would have evoked laughter. No longer; now Trump, fist in the air, “walks with destiny.”

The threats to the nation facing us today are not as singular and focused as England’s 1939 confrontation with Nazi Germany. The tyrants we face today are multiple and dispersed throughout the world. Many of our greatest dangers have been generated from within. Yet the opposing forces are fierce and fanatical, some just as committed to purveying death and destruction as the late German führer.

Meeting these manifold challenges will require a person of rare strength, insight, and wisdom. Will Donald Trump turn out to be that man? We are obliged to stake our futures on the hope that he indeed is, and on the possibility that he’s been spared to lead the fight to save this country before it’s completely lost — a fate that’s much nearer than many people recognize.

Alas, the miracle that saved President Trump did not extend to Corey Comperatore; with his family watching in horror, he was murdered for having the temerity to take part in a political process of a “democratic” nation. That sad fact should give us all pause.

So What Price Trump you ask? What will it cost us to help him redeem America? Mr. Comperatore and his family paid dearly, illustrating that there are evil forces at work that will stop at nothing to prevent Trump’s return to office. But like our British cousins during that long ago July, our fight is just beginning; the costs are still unknown.

While our final bill is not yet close to being tallied, we can pray that whatever the trials ahead, whatever the ultimate price, we find ourselves equal and prepared to make the sacrifice.

Image generated by AI.