Speaking at Gettysburg prior to the 2016 election, it was obvious that were Donald Trump to fulfil the general thrust of his Maga agenda, he would go down as one of America’s great presidents.

Nevertheless, there has never been, at least in living memory, a president so bitterly opposed by America’s increasingly powerful far left.

On that, we should recall that the current Australian government, almost alone among US allies, is led by the far or hard-left faction.

Its foreign, defence and energy policies demonstrate that it is subtly moving away from the US alliance and would be more at home in becoming one of Beijing’s obedient tributary states.

But realising that the Australian electorate would never accept this, it hides behind the supposed acquisition of some Anglo-American nuclear submarine fleet at some time in the distant future.

Meanwhile at Gettysburg, Mr Trump had warned about what is still the far left’s most powerful weapon, a large slice of the mainstream media no different from ‘lobbies or other financial entities with an agenda’ .

As ‘fake news’ they have not for one moment ceased to engender a continuous torrent of hatred, ridicule and contempt on Mr Trump’s head, encouraging every way of silencing and stopping Mr Trump’s candidature in the recent election.

It is regrettable that too much ‘fake news’  has been mindlessly relayed by other Western media, including Australia’s, without subjecting it to the scrutiny of ethical media standards.

Abandon them too readily and too often, and the result will be a loss of respect and authority, qualities hard to earn and easy to lose.

Those standards clearly allow any media outlet, with the strict exception of public broadcasters established on the BBC model, to adopt an editorial line provided it is distinguishable from the news. In relation to the news, the media’s first duty remains as the Times enunciated it long ago.

This is to obtain the ‘earliest and most correct intelligence’ of the events of the time, and instantly, by disclosing them, to make them the ‘common property of the nation’.

Given that error can occur, a corollary is that whenever they realise they were wrong, they must correct this immediately and with equal prominence.

Apart from their principal weapon, a media without ethics, the anti-Trump far left have also resorted to ‘lawfare’, waging war through the abuse of the law, civil and even criminal, to block his second-term candidature.

When this failed to block his election, the far left resorted to yet another form of lawfare to block the implementation of his clearly and precisely expressed and, indeed, mandated agenda.

This was especially so in relation to the massive influx of millions of illegal immigrants encouraged by the Biden administration.

The principal purpose of the Biden administration’s openly breaking immigration law was obviously to gain an electoral advantage.

This is now confirmed by the emergence of a far-left Democratic candidate, Islamist Zohran Mamdani, as the next likely New York mayor.

With an extreme socialist program including making New York an LGBTQIA sanctuary city with gender-affirming policies and increased taxes on the white and rich, the Democrats, now a far-left party, have no doubt calculated that the likely very large number of illegal immigrants will reward them by putting the world’s financial capital under a far-left mayor.

As ideas flow around the world’s far left, it is likely that the Australian Albanese government’s out-of-control immigration policy, not justified by need and driving the cost of housing beyond young Australian families, has been implemented for electoral advantage.

Returning to the tactic of using lawfare now to block the Trump administration from fulfilling its mandate in some specific area, the tactic has been to bring a case before a cooperative far-left Federal Court judge.

This will be a judge who, on the basis of an argument that the constitution has been breached, will be prepared to issue not just an interim injunction restraining the government from, say, deporting the plaintiff – and only the plaintiff – until the case is decided.

Instead, the clearly activist judge would issue a ‘universal  injunction’ restraining the Trump administration from exercising a similar power against anyone, anywhere.

In other words, a single judge in a federal district court, one not mentioned in the constitution, claims the authority to act as if he were the full bench of the Supreme Court.

But in Trump v. CASA, the Supreme Court has just effectively overruled this far-left tactic.

No longer can lawfare be used to stop, without argument, the Trump administration from putting into effect the policies for which they have a mandate.

There would probably still be an advantage, as this column previously suggested, for constitutional cases to be referred first to a  newly appointed Federal Constitutional Court under the Supreme Court.

Needless to say, this decision has not been received well by the far-left media, particularly when it followed the widespread support President Trump enjoyed as a result of his ending the 12-day war between Iran and Israel through the US strike on three Iranian nuclear sites.

The far-left media tried to use a leaked preliminary self-described ‘low-confidence’ intelligence assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency, suggesting that the Iranian nuclear program may have only been set back by months.

The reaction of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was so powerful and effective that it explained the far left’s attempts to block his appointment, and when these failed, to have him dismissed.

Exposing the far-left media’s purpose in trying to downplay the President’s intervention in the 12-day war, he referred to a succession of sources including the UN Atomic Energy Agency, the Israeli Defense Forces, the CIA and the Iranian Foreign Ministry to demonstrate that the general thrust was that the nuclear programme had been set back for years.

On this, Donald Trump has prevailed as no president has before.

The West is indeed fortunate to have such a leader.