A Sigh of Reprieve

It’s good to feel happy and Heaven knows we’ve seen trouble, but let’s don’t fool ourselves — this is an opportunity, not a solution.

The Trump victory in 2024 is an amazing feat, and there will be much written about it.  The campaign ran one Hell of an operation, and this is going to be a fascinating story when it comes out.  Grassroots and big-name support along with great personnel picks and magnificent showings by the boss made this a campaign for the ages.

Part of what made this “mere competence” seem spectacular was the backdrop of doom and corruption.  This 2024 victory is more than the defeat of a vapid woman and her ever more vapid running mate.  The Marxist Alinskyite Obama project is still running a great amount of our country, and even Obama is just a figurehead.  If Solzhenitsyn had had a champion, it would have been a Russian Trumpov, some Donya Frederickovich who faced down Lenin or Stalin.  Had this happened, of course, Solzhenitsyn would be a forgotten engineer who retired comfortably after a long career working for the state.  Without Stalin, there is no Solzhenitsy because there is no need for one.  With Obama and Biden, they went straight from Lenin to Andropov.

But how is all that “end of history” working out for our current relations with Russia?  The Cold War hardly ended — it just gathered its thoughts and here we are right back to proxy wars and the threat of nukes.

The Democrats are on their back foot, and it’s great fun watching their slapstick gyrations to pratfall moment.  But we must not become complacent, which is obvious, and we must not count on Democrat stupidity or Republican competence as some sort of ongoing feature of a new reality.  A million things went right to deliver this Trump 2024 victory, and if any five of them had not panned out, we would even now welcome Madame President Kamala Harris to preside over the end of the country.

American Indians, Amish, blacks, gen X and (magnificently) gen Z turned out in numbers to put Trump over the top.  These all mattered and each fact has specific people to thank behind it.  Yet fundamentally, the American people were pissed off at the current administration, and they did not fall for the last-minute switcheroo.  I do think that the country detects the Potemkin Presidency and the very real ruling cabal which mutinied against Trump and then installed Biden as a cut-out entity.  They bluffed Harris and got called hard.

The problem remains, however.  The cabal hasn’t gone anywhere, and because tyranny is their day job, they won’t return to their normal programming after the election.  They will provide just enough resistance and mayhem to seem accounted for until we go back to our lives, and then the shenanigans will begin in earnest.  This is just a baked-in fact — we will take our eyes off the ball and then the ball will be stolen.  Again.

I am enjoying this moment, but I do not see it as any sort ofr solution.  Nothing has been fixed, and not just because the inauguration is months away.  Nothing will be fixed until hundreds of government functionaries are in prison, and the executive branch becomes so terrified that it returns to normal, Constitutional limits, and behaves itself at work.  There remains a massive amount of unpleasant and unpopular work to be done, without which, the glorious future of Trump/Vance/Vance/Somebody or whatever will not happen, because the machine will once again amputate a successful Republican Presidency.

I am massively relieved.  I am becoming re-energized for the fight.  I am not above recon by fire, that is, shooting into a bush to find out if there’s a bad guy in it.  Hell, might even be a good guy who unwisely decided not to show himself.  Well, be on the team or don’t, but the recon must happen, and the plinking is just prelude to fire for effect.

We have a Hell of a fight on our hands, and this second Trump administration will not be a victory lap.  We must not fall for the Siren song of reconciliation except where well-justified.  At the same time, we have an opportunity to expand the base.  What is required is that the new folks actually *join the base* and not the other way around.  What makes this possible is the fact that many of the supposed incompatibilities between the Republican base and some newcomers are artifacts of Marxist identitarian indoctrination.

Scott Presler and Elon Musk may be responsible for delivering Pennsylvania, as well as a lot of halo performance, such as the rest of the battleground states.  Presler is a hero, and after all, just a guy who gives a damn.  No shade on Musk, but Presler did his bit on a shoestring.  Musk is a hero as well, and risked much more than most Americans can even comperehend.  There’s a reason that every federal agency that could possibly touch him started getting sticky with permits and investigations as this campaign heated up.

But Presler is a gay Republican who risks much as well.  He presents a tremendous opportunity for Republicans to strress that we can oppose policies without opposing people.  I don’t support gay marriage — I’m firmly against it, but then I don’t have to approve of it in order to admire Presler, and to be grateful to him for his hard work and his personal commitment to the Republican cause.  He did more to get Trump elected than I did, that’s for sure.

Much of the new support that put Trump over the top is already evaporating as the uncanny valley cabal recedes back into the shadows for a moment.  This is just how people are.  Some will stay, to be sure, but just as surely, many will not.  We have an opportunity to solidify some of the undecideds who broke for Trump due to their (apparently belated) recognition of the greater threat.  We need not go chasing them with pandering policies, however, and if we do, it won’t work anyway.  We need to make them feel comfortable enough to stay by just being “who we are” and allowing them to do the same.

It will serve for the Republican party to agree on a subset of things.  We are not identitarians, and must not attempt to forge a pure party in which all agree on everything.  The proper approach to diversity and intersectionality and all of that garbage is the time-tested individual liberty.  If we are smart, we do not fall for celebrating diversity or any of that.  Instead, the smart (and moral) move is to ignore diversity.

Shifting gears and wrapping up, this Trump administration should focus on meaningful, massive changes which produce positive results well within four years.  Auditing the Fed, outlawing public-sector unions, eliminating tax exemptions for unions themselves, wiping out the Department of Education, cutting taxes, and allowing markets to find equilibrium — these are undeniable concrete actions which will have positive effects.  Critically, they improve everybody’s situation, without picking winners and losers.  After all, the teachers and machinists will still have jobs, and if a union rep or school bureaucrat is any good, they should be able to find work anywhere.

That list can go on, and I’m sure there are pages upon pages of bullet points being haggled over for Day One announcement (and in some cases, execution) in the upcoming Trump administration.  And all of it is work not yet done, fights not yet won.  This victory is not the end of a fight, but the beginning.

As ever before battle, nothing will benefit us as much as some good sleep.  Self-care should be the only last-minute priority before being measured, and we are about to be weighed out by the dram.

But Damn it feels good to be a Trumpster!