The Day After

Some thoughts on last night

First, I think what happened (so far) is the most optimistic election result that anybody could have hoped for. Electoral college? Popular vote? Senate majority and growing? Probably keep the House with expanded majority? Yes, please. Trump’s margins may shrink and the growth in seats in the Senate and House may stall to something less than spectacular but this was an amazing result.

Second, I bet the Democrats will develop a strange new respect for the filibuster and federalism. Always remember in our system where ambition is to be checked with ambition, the reason you keep the filibuster around is not out of some sentimentality but rather because you will find yourself needing it one day.

Third, on the Powerline podcast last night Steve Heyward speculated if this was the election that finally marked the shift from the traditional media model to podcasts. Maybe though we’ve waiting for that death for a while. There was a lot of chatter in the past about how social media was going to be the one to torpedo the “SS Traditional Media”, keep in mind the Russian influence hysteria of 2016 centered on their purchase of ads on Facebook.

Fourth, I would imagine this is finally going mark the fall of House of Obama and maybe even get him to move out of Kalorama. That’s okay, I’ve heard he was renting anyway.

Fifth, you can see Biden’s historical legacy taking shape among the Left. They had spent the past four years spinning him as worthy of Mt. Rushmore, one of the greatest presidents ever and now they are going to pin the disaster last night on him because he decided to run again. It won’t be Kamala, the symbol of the heroic women of color who can do no wrong because today’s Left doesn’t worth that way, so it will be Old Man Biden who will get the chop.

Sixth, the saga of Biden over the last 18 months is the flip side of the Democrats clearing the path to the nomination in March, 2020 for him. Everyone assumed that he was going to be a transitional figure and only be a one-term president, but then he changed the deal and decided to run again and gummed up the works. There’s a lot about what we don’t know about the intra-party struggles among the Democrats regarding Biden deciding to run again, but in retrospect it was a worst case scenario in the way he twisted the party around. If he was more than just a weasel with dementia I could see him doing an imitation of Darth Vader in Spring 2023 telling the Dems he was running again, “I am altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.”

Seventh, even better than Trump’s victory speech is all the wailing and gnashing of teeth among the lefty commentariat. Their spin? Evil, wicked America didn’t deserve Kamala. The country has failed her. The Left no longer recognizes the country they live in anymore and yes they really do think Trump will be a fascist. Almost as good is when some of the other lefties try to point out some things out like, you know, if maybe the Democrats should have had a more inclusive message… they then get beaten to submission by the shrieking harpies. Good times.

Good times all, but it won’t last. This is merely the end of the beginning.

What happens next?

What happened last night was not only the most optimistic scenario in terms of election returns, but also in going forward for the next few months. The Democrats and the Left in general are in a state of shock and demoralization. If the election results were more ambiguous, with decisive races still being counted or capable of being lawfared, the line of resistance for the Democrats would be more clear. The Democrats could have been energized by the possibility of hope. Now there is no hope from the ballot box, rigged or otherwise.

However the fundamentals remain. The Democrats have run a campaign casting Trump as not just a threat to the democracy but as the second coming of Hitler. They see another Trump administration as coming of the dark fascist night over America from which there is no return.

Steve Heyward allowed me to say a few words on the podcast last night and as he caught me by surprise, my thoughts weren’t in proper sound-bite form. However, my point was that the Left has adopted a Manichean, apocalyptic would view regarding Trump. Given that, it would be naive to expect that they would simply throw in the towel on the election and allow him to re-take the White House on the presumption that they can fight him on the same subversive terms as 2016; by their logic, we no longer live in normal times and by extension to treat Trump’s return to White House as a normal (though regrettable in their view) event is a historic act of moral cowardice.

There are other ways of stopping Trump from returning to office then just constitutional means and given the implied intent by the Left, all options probably have to be viewed from the standpoint of utility rather than legal or social norms. Assassination? Color revolution? To assume that these are off the table is to assume that the Left will simply unilaterally back away from all their rhetoric, all their extraordinary actions of lawfare and subversion and say “my bad.”

To top it all off, the fact that Trump grew his coalition over the past few months with the addition of Musk and RFK frightens the daylights out of the Left, because Trump has promised to let them loose on the Beltway

The next few weeks will be critical. I expect between now and January 20th, at a minimum, some violence and Jan. 6 nastiness at least at the level of voting against certification. More than that? That’s going to depend on how broken the Left is by what happened last night and whether they can regroup over the next few weeks to accomplish anything more than spasmodic hissy-fits

Keep an eye out for catalytic actions and other good ole Marxist revolutionary tactics. Large protests say along the lines of the big Palestinian protest in DC last November; actions that bring people together and give them a spark of hope. A crisis, contrived or otherwise, a scandal that can be used to revive peoples’ fears of a Trump presidency. It doesn’t need to have support of the majority of the country, just enough to get large numbers going, just to provide a hook for people to hang their emotional insanity on.

The next few weeks is going to be about getting the Democrats to accept defeat and to go gently into the good night.

If they do that? Good. Because the next step is shock and awe come January 20th.