Trump Seizes Moral High Ground in Charlie Gard Case

The secret to President Trump’s remarkable outsider success is his fearless willingness to walk into the most politically fraught situations, redefine every long-held prejudice and seize the moral high ground by embracing the simplest truth.

Take little baby Charlie Gard of the United Kingdom.

The infant lies dying in a government-run hospital ward and the death panels have declared that no more shall be done to save his life.

His parents want to move heaven and earth to save their child, who doctors say has brain damage after being diagnosed with infantile-onset encephalomyopathic mitochondrial DNA depletion syndrome.

A professor who testified before the U.K.’s highest death panel said the little boy’s brain, muscle and breathing ability are “severely affected,” leaving him with congenital deafness and severe epilepsy.

Charlie’s parents want to bring their child to the U.S. for experimental treatment.

But the U.K.’s top death panel has been affirmed by the so-called “European Court of Human Rights,” which is apparently some kind of international death panel that convenes in Strasbourg, France, but reserves the right to sentence children everywhere to die. (Somewhere, George Orwell is slapping his palm to his forehead for not concocting such a sinister Overlord on his own.)

In walks a swashbuckling Donald Trump, like a weary American soldier who has crossed the beaches of Normandy to once again bring a glimmer of moral hope to our lost cousins.

“If we can help little #CharlieGard, as per our friends in the U.K. and the Pope, we would be delighted to do so,” the president tweeted.

This, of course, set off yet another frenzy of controversy over presidential tweeting, the politics of abortion and, of course, just how much authority we Americans, here on Independence Day, wish to give our federal government the power to convene its own death panels.

It may be too late to save our cousins from their own suicide by death panel — but there still may be time to save America.

We have beaten unlikelier odds before.

• Charles Hurt can be reached at churt@washingtontimes.com and on Twitter by @charleshurt.

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