President Trump’s response to leftist critics over his request for Ukraine to reopen an investigation of alleged obstruction of justice in Ukraine by former Obama Administration Vice president Joe Biden was this:

“Yes, and I’m thinking of asking China to investigate Biden and his son (Hunter).”

The left had become so used to seeing conservatives quail and submit whenever challenged about opposition to their schemes to turn the United States over to a socialist international system, that it doesn’t know what to do when President Trump pushes back.

That is, nothing except to run crying to their co-conspirators in the mass media to get them to spread more propaganda about what a bad guy President Trump is.

Joe Biden’s son served on the board of a Ukrainian Gas company and made quite a bit of money from it. When the company got caught in a scandal and was under investigation, Joe Biden used his influence as Vice President to get the prosecutor fired. Then Joe Biden went on a news report, bragging he did it.

He told Ukrainian officials that unless they fired the chief investigator, the U.S. would withhold a $1 billion defense grant Ukraine needed desperately.

The Democrat-controlled House of Representatives is using the request for a Ukrainian Biden investigation as the basis for a long-awaited impeachment attempt of President Trump.

An Associated Press article last week by Zeke Miller and Jill Colvin, heavily laced with editorial comment, would have been more suitable for an editorial page than a straight news article.

Commenting on the China investigation, the article reads:

“In the case of both Ukraine and China, Trump has made his allegations against Biden without evidence of any wrongdoing.”

Later in the piece, it says:

“The president and his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani have for days been raising suspicions about Hunter Biden’s business dealings in China, leaning heavily on the writings of conservative author Peter Schweizer.

“On Monday Geng Shuan, a spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, called the allegation that Chinese government business gave Biden’s son $1.5 billion totally groundless.”

So there you have it.

China, which is engaged in negotiations with President Trump on unfair Chinese trade practices, says it isn’t so.

So that’s the final word, if you are part of the major media: “Nothing wrong; nothing to investigate.”

In his book, “Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends,” Schweizer makes the case that Hunter Biden took advantage of his father being the Obama administration’s point man for dealing with Ukraine and China to land lucrative business deals in those countries that he would otherwise have been unable to make.

Speaking at a FNC “Special Report,” Schweizer added:

“Joe Biden is appointed the point-person to two countries on policy: China and Ukraine. And in both of those countries, they happen to be the epicenters of Hunter Biden’s business activities,” Schweizer explained.

“In December of 2013, Joe Biden flies to Beijing, China on Air Force Two. On the plane with him is his son, Hunter Biden,” Schweizer stated. “Frankly, he gets criticized on the trip for going soft on Beijing. What we now know is that 10 days after they returned from that trip, Hunter Biden’s small investment firm announced a $1.5 billion private equity deal with the Chinese government.”

Wilfred M. McClay, the G.T. and Libby Blankenship professor in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, recalled that President Trump is not the only American president to be ravaged by the media.

In a column in the July/August edition of Imprimis, publication of Hillsdale College, an article appeared based on a speech McClay gave at the Michigan college.

After citing the importance of history as a guide to present problems, he recalled the problems and vitriol that President Abraham Lincoln faced in preserving the union, he said:

“A … lesson of history is that acts of statesmanship often require courage and imagination, even daring, especially when the outcome seems doubtful. Take the case of Lincoln. So accustomed are we to thinking of Lincoln in heroic terms that we forget the depth and breadth of his unpopularity during his entire time in office. Few great leaders have been more comprehensively disdained, loathed, and underestimated. A low Southern view of him, of course, was to be expected, but it was widely shared in the North as well. As Lincoln biographer David Donald put it, “Lincoln’s own associates thought him ‘a Simple Susan, a baboon, an aimless punster, a smutty joker.’ “Abolitionist Wendell Phillips called him “a huckster in politics, a first-rate, second-rate man.” George McClellan, his opponent in the 1864 election, openly disdained him as a ‘well-meaning baboon.’ For much of that election year, Lincoln was convinced, with good reason, that he was doomed to lose the election, with incalculable consequences for the war effort and the future of the nation.”

McClay wrote…”let me suggest that the story of the ending of the Civil War in April 1865 might hold a lesson for those of our fellow countrymen today who seem to regard America’s past with contempt:

On April 9, after a last flurry of futile resistance, (Gen. Robert E.) Lee faced facts and arranged to meet (Gen. Ulysses S.) Grant at a brick home in the village of Appomattox Court House to surrender his army. He could not formally surrender for the whole Confederacy, but the surrender of his army would trigger the surrender of all others, and so it represented the end of the Confederate cause.

“It was a poignant scene, dignified and restrained and sad, as when a terrible storm that has raged and blown has finally exhausted itself, leaving behind a strange and reverent calm, purged of all passion. The two men had known one another in the Mexican War, and had not seen one another in nearly twenty years. Lee arrived first, wearing his elegant dress uniform, soon to be joined by Grant clad in a mud-spattered sack coat, his trousers tucked into his muddy boots. They showed one another a deep and respectful courtesy, and Grant generously allowed Lee’s officers to keep their sidearms and the men to keep their horses and take them home for the spring planting. None would be arrested or charged with treason.

Four days later, when Lee’s army of 28,000 men marched in to surrender their arms and colors, General Joshua L. Chamberlain of Maine, a hero of Gettysburg, was present at the ceremony. He later wrote of his observations that day, reflecting upon his soldierly respect for the men before him, each passing by and stacking his arms, men who only days before had been his mortal foes: ‘Before us in proud humiliation stood the embodiment of manhood: men whom neither toils and sufferings, nor the fact of death, nor disaster, nor hopelessness could bend from their resolve; standing before us now, thin, worn, and famished, but erect, and with eyes looking level into ours, waking memories that bound us together as no other bond;—was not such manhood to be welcomed back into a Union so tested and assured? . . . On our part not a sound of trumpet more, nor roll of drum; not a cheer, nor word nor whisper of vain-glorying, nor motion of man standing again at the order, but an awed stillness rather, and breath-holding, as if it were the passing of the dead!’”

At the end of his talk, McClay added:

“Such deep sympathies, in a victory so heavily tinged with sadness and grief and death. This war was, and remains to this day, America’s bloodiest conflict, having generated at least a million and a half casualties on the two sides combined, [including] 620,000 deaths, the equivalent of six million men in today’s American population. One in four soldiers who went to war never returned home. One in thirteen returned home with one or more missing limbs. For decades to come, in every village and town in the land, one could see men bearing such scars and mutilations, a lingering reminder of the price they and others had paid.

“And yet, Chamberlain’s words suggested that there might be room in the days and years ahead for the spirit of conciliation that Lincoln had called for in his Second Inaugural Speech, a spirit of binding up wounds, and of caring for the many afflicted and bereaved, and then moving ahead, together. It was a slender hope, yet a hope worth holding, worth nurturing, worth pursuing.

“We all know that it did not turn out that way, due in part to Lincoln’s death at the hands of John Wilkes Booth. But the story is illustrative nonetheless. If Chamberlain’s troops could find it in their hearts to be that forgiving, that generous, that respectful of men who had only days before been their mortal enemies, we certainly ought to be able to extend a similar generosity towards men in what is now, for us, a far more distant past. Lincoln himself said something similar, at a cabinet meeting on April 14, the very day of his assassination:

“‘I hope there will be no persecution, no bloody work after the war is over. . . . Enough lives have been sacrificed. We must extinguish our resentment if we expect harmony and union. There has been too much of a desire on the part of some of our very good friends to be masters, to interfere with and dictate to those states, to treat the people not as fellow citizens; there is too little respect for their rights. I do not sympathize in these feelings.’

“That was good counsel then and now, and it is an example of the wisdom that the study of history can provide us. May such wisdom be an impetus for us to rediscover such a humane and generous example in our own times.”

American citizens did not elect President Trump as a linguist or orator, but as someone who would fight to preserve the individual rights inscribed in the Constitution and Bill of Rights after the nation seemed poised to slide into a socialist morass.

He is doing that despite constant harassment by a petulant minority determined to destroy his presidency.

History undoubtedly will give President Trump a better review than today’s mass media, entertainment figures and embedded bureaucrats.