First, watching a smiling Joe Biden welcome Trump back to the White House caps off an eight-day period of whipsawed memory-holing. Leave aside that just a few weeks before, Biden was reported as calling the man next to him a fascist, the media has been legitimizing the American Hitler’s victory on a daily basis by alternating between breathlessly reporting his nominations and wailing about why they lost.
That’s not how you go about stopping Hitler.
Second, this is in a sense the max dopamine mark of the second Trump Administration. There is the post-election glow of victory, all things seem possible, and all nominees are virtuous and fair; even John Thune is trying to give off airs that he isn’t (quite) the craven Blob weasel that we all know him to be. Historically, administrations start with a set amount of energy and intellectual capital at the beginning of the term, and then the Second Law of Thermodynamics intervenes and entropy takes over.
Third, the Democrats and the Left in general are in great disorder as they face two great lessons from the election: 1) Trump’s victory in 2016 was not an aberration and 2) while the 2024 Election was not a landslide, it was decisive and heralds a realignment in politics. The tripe that the Democrats have been serving — that they alone represent “people of color” and that Trump and MAGA are just a bunch of white supremacists — has been blown out of the water.
Fourth, regardless of the long-term prospects for the Democrats I expect the Left to find its tactical footing quickly. Losing parties in elections are typically despondent and self-critical because they are responding to a situation which is by nature amorphous and open to interpretation. However, within the first few months of the new administration the losing side of the election finds its footing, because there is now a concrete target for it to focus its energy and rally support.
Using Gödel’s Second Incompleteness Theorem, the Trump Administration will provide the necessary external frame of reference for the Left to cohere and take action. Enjoy the Left’s circular firing squad while it lasts.
The strategic problem the Democrats needs to resolve before 2028 is how to reconcile the various parts of their coalition. There has been a lot of ink spilled over the past eight years about the incompatibilities between MAGA and the “Never Trumpers,” but that all missed the point about the nature of the Democratic coalition. The Democrats have had problems dealing with the progressive movement since 2012. In fact you could interpret their entire 2020 primary process as organized around the central theme of how to deal with the progressive movement as personified by Bernie Sanders.
Take the establishment Democrats, a healthy dose of the Blob, corporate interests, and the various groups of the leftist spectrum from progressive to radical, and you have an unwieldy mess of a Party. Joe Biden’s nomination nomination in 2020 was meant to patch that mess together and for a while it worked. Each part of the coalition got its hand-outs from the Biden administration, whether in the form of Green New Deal subsidies or transgender policy trinkets, all with the threat of the Trump-MAGA bogeyman to keep everybody in line.
Well, all that works until it doesn’t. Party coalitions are like magnets, some parts attract and other parts repel. The Republicans in the form of Trumpist populism attracted blue-collar votes to their coalition at the cost of repelling large numbers of the college-educated. The problem the Democrats have had is that the various parts of their coalition were transgressive. Those parts wanted to radically change America, so the polarity of their various magnets were aligned in relation not to one another in a stable intra-Party equilibrium, but rather towards an external entity as personified by Trump. For them to lose the 2024 election to any Republican would involve a lot of soul searching; to lose it to the man against whom their entire cosmology was constructed is catastrophic, as the various Party factions realize they really don’t like each other.
Or as a friend put it to me, “The Democrats were like a bicycle, it works great as long as it moved forward but when it stops even for a moment, it falls down.”
So, to the fourth point above, I already see the Democrats and Left in general trying to find their tactical footing in relation to Trump. One method is to blame their loss on “misinformation,” with their wayward Hispanic and black male voters being led astray by the the politicized cesspools of hate known as X and Joe Rogan. Witness the various media types quitting X in the last few days. Another method focuses on their long-held belief that Trump will suborn the military for his own fascist ends. Witness the severe reaction to the nomination of Pete Hesgeth as Secretary of Defense and the proposed introduction of “plucking boards” to weed out the flag ranks.
Long-term? I have read from some that it will take losing a few elections, analogous to 1980-1988, for the Democrats to finally get their act together. There’s some wisdom to that folk psychology in terms of how many times a lesson needs to beaten into someone for them to properly learn it, but there are no laws in history or politics, only guides.
The larger question is, Are the problems we are facing now political in nature or something larger? If they are largely political, then a few determined presidential administrations will be all that is needed to finally crush the last remnants of DEI, the anti-fossil fuel fantasy, and drain the rest of the fever swamp so the system can return to its former equilibrium.
However if you think that it is something larger, something more on the lines of a civilization-level crisis, then with this election we are really no better than at the end of the beginning. As people like Mark Steyn point out, we had the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s, the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the End of History and everything else for the past 40 years, and yet the American experience and indeed the West in general has never seemed more in peril.
I tend toward the civilization-level crisis thesis, and that it’s going to be a long haul from here on out. Keep in mind that even with the disaster of the Biden Administration, where only 27% of Americans think the country is on the right track, and with perhaps the worst presidential ticket in history, Kamala Harris still got 48% of the vote. There’s a solid, motivated core out there who still thinks the traditional American way of life is illegitimate, and we have an educational system at all levels that is pumping out more of these people.
This is going to take a while, but you have to start somewhere. We’ll know we’ve won when the Democrats finally run their 21st-Century version of Bill Clinton (1992 edition).
and perhaps the worst presidential ticket in history Kamala Harris still got 48% of the vote.
In spite of record low credibility for the MSM, and arguably the worst presidential and vice presidential candidates evah, The Kamala Harris/Tim Walz ticket still got 48% of the vote.
Were you copying me? Or did I inspire you? Or do great minds think alike?
:)
… Kamala Harris still got 48% of the vote.
Nope. No way I believe that.
I think the one giant reason the demonrats are so shocked is that their vast machinery for vote fraud turned out to be not vast enough. I have been unable to train the X algo to show me cat videos or cosplay girls or anything else I might actually enjoy, so I see a lot about voting irregularities- just today, stories about thousands of votes disappearing in Nevada, another about one of those patented 3 am ballot drops, this time in Milwaukee, a chart showing Wisconsin votes for Harris going straight up in a manner reminiscent of 2020, etc, etc. And that’s just what happens to pop up in my feed. I wonder what would be discovered if- say- a government agency with a lot of time, people, and money went and actively started looking for fraud.
If Trump and his friends can get any sort of genuine election security measure enacted the left is screwed six ways to Sunday. Yet it’s actually much worse. Voter ID measures have overwhelming public support- 84% approval was the last number I saw- but the left has to scream hysterically against them simply because they can’t win without the fraud. That is, they’re on the wrong side of an 84-16 political issue. Obviously not good for them.
Apologies for grabbing the one thing about this post I disagree with, but I think that’s rather important. The country has degenerated into a sort of Temu Soviet Union where the government does nothing well but at great expense- and the people in charge are too incompetent even to manage fraudulent elections without being caught many times.
That’s not a sign that these folks have a bright political future any time soon.
There are some comments here and there to the effect that Biden seems more … with it it, less addled than he has appeared for months. They wondered if he had been drugged to the gills — and now they have stepped down the doses, he is not so stressed and maybe actually glad to be out of it all. He can go back to his summer home and doze away the afternoons, without everyone expecting him to be the puppet president.
YMMV.
something I haven’t seen mentioned: if the economy is issue #1, the border #2, and “reproductive rights” #3, Rudy’s Rutabaga Rule (Gerald Weinberg, The Secrets of Consulting) comes into play. Once problem #1 and #2 are solved, #3 gets a promotion. And, boom, the D’s have a (potentially) winning agenda.
Gringo – I saw your comment, too funny. I actually wrote the post on a plane, I think I wrote in Kamala part over Kansas, checked the vote % on RCP when I got off and posted. It was forefront in my mind because on a flight 2 weeks ago the people across the aisle were talking loudly about politics, anti-Trump, and said “I can’t believe the election is this close.” I replied back that I couldn’t believe it either given that Kamala was an idiot but I said that’s what makes this country that anybody can grow up and have a chance to be president. That shut them up. Yes, while the election was decisive and those 2 to 3 percentage points is a steeper climb than usual, the fact it was that close worried me
As far as the fraud angle, yes I think Trump’s victory was too big to steal but steal they tried (or if you are following Maricopa, steal they are steal trying)
Joe Biden? There’s a great book waiting to be written say the next 7 to 10 years, maybe longer looking at today’s times through him. It would reflect on Obama, the decadence of late empire DC, the corruption of the media, and the fact that the president of the United States was a drugged puppet. Not to mention we had a 2+ year campaign depicting someone as Hitler and then Biden seems giddy to welcome him to the WH in what seems to be a staged bromance. We just aren’t quite sure yet who was doing the drugging and what for… I always assumed it was to keep him on his feet like at the SOTU address but maybe it was to keep him quiet. Who knows? He seems happier.
As far as the bromance part, this is just too funny.
Richard Fernandez on his Twitter feed has this as far as Trump’s way forward:
Trump’s challenge will be to earn as much political capital as he must spend. To palpably improve life even while he takes an axe to the deadwood. The only way to maintain popularity while plying the weed whacker is to reduce inflation and gas prices.
Trump’s challenge is going to be maintaining momentum. Somebody reminded me that Reagan, for all of his success from the 1980 Election, was in deep trouble the first several months of his supposed saying by Yammato that Japan could expect to “run wild” for the first 6 months after Pearl Harbor, after that…
I’m still puzzling out the Gaetz nomination for AG. On one hand it seems an unforced error on the other… A pattern has been emerging over the past week that Trump isn’t going to be following much of the old DC pattern of handing out positions to various party factions. This is his party and after getting whipsawed by disloyal subordinates in his first term he’s putting a prize on loyalty. However I sense that he’s looking for puppets as much as payback; Gaetz, Hesgeth, Ratcliffe, Gabbard and the rest are there to take an ice axe to the bureaucracy. It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that earlier this year we leaned that Gabbard was placed on a watch list by air marshals and was being tailed while being on planes; I wonder when it came down to choosing a spot in Trump’s Administration if she asked for DNI.
I am quite curious to see who the deputy and asst. secretaries will be in each of these depts, my guess is that they will be expected to keep the work moving while the higher-up is tasked with providing the political muscle to clear out
Back to the Trump agenda, he’s been here before and he knows you can only focus on a few things and only has a few years to do it before he becomes lame duck. It looks like taking on DC is part of that agenda. Keep in mind that his new buddy Elon has had a similar experience of being a target and they both understand that they are in a fight to the finish, war to knife, knife to the hilt. Just remember when it comes to politics that they reason you don’t go for the throat is that if you don’t finish off the target they come looking for you with nothing to lose.
“Shoot to kill” is more than just a cliché.
Two other points –
We are in a critical period for AI, sort of analogous where the Internet was 1993-94 in terms of how its potential will be used. AI has tremendous power for domestic surveillance and control. Having a grip on the WH and crushing the security state bureaucracy will go a long way to helping fight off a totalitarian future. That’s a possible background for why this election was portrayed as a high-stakes Hitler election by the DC establishment.
To Yara’s comment, there’s been money on the table for the Democrats to scoop up for the past 8 years if they just stopped acting insane. The fact that Kamala basically ditched her beliefs and not to mention Biden Administration policy in her campaign, the old “govern left, run right” maneuver, shows where they are. There are two interpretations to why Democrats put themselves in this electoral bind. One is that they want to actually subvert the existing American way of life, the “system”, and like good revolutionaries are going to try and hide their true freak flag for now. The other is that they recognize that playing with Woke and abortion and not addressing key voter interests like immigration and the economy is killing them, but they have to do it because abortion and Woke is what keeps their coalition intact.
For 2026 they won’t be so constrained because they will be running against Trump and not on their own performance.
Trump’s agenda seems to be keyed to not having the House after 2026. He’s going to get what he can from Congress but DOGE and all of that will be an Article II executive function.
By 2028, the economic problems created by decades of de-industrialization, excessive FedGov spending, and the miasma of Big Law litigation will loom much larger than today. The knee-jerk reaction that has had millions of people voting for the same Party that their parents voted for will be in danger of/may have broken. It has happened before — the Whigs disappeared. And the Institutional Republicans are as much despised as the Institutional Democrats.
The future at this point has only one safe prediction — things are going to change! Will the change be that we all die in an unnecessary thermonuclear war over Zelensky’s regime in the Ukraine? Or will the US continue our slide into an Argentinian-style impoverished backwater? Or will we get our act together and start the decades-long task of repairing the damage? Time will tell.
Each party is stuck with a fragile coalition, each subject to change in a time of turmoil. Trump world is giddy with recent success, despite the weak Congressional majorities. Many voters when given the recent choice concluded Trump team would be an improvement over the alternative, but now must come results. Voters want lower prices, steady work, an end to border chaos and unpunished crime, and assertive national security. That’s their brighter future, and they are willing to undergo the chaos around Trump only if his team delivers.
There is a big temptation to over-interpret the win, every Trump world character sees a chance to push their favored agendas. The man himself may see settling scores as primary tasks ahead. But in America, drastic changes take time and consensus, horse trading and persuasion, with many detours along the way. Ruin can happen quickly, but repair and renewal takes a long and winding path.
Noem and especially Gabbard were risky choices, and Matt Gaetz is a preposterous prospect for Attorney General. Gaetz has zero chance of confirmation, so something else is at play here. I suspect consistent with Trump negotiating style, he’s a throwaway to furious condemnation so that his replacement nominee can squeak in. This gives the establishment players a free vote against Gaetz while making the probably hard-core second nominee a much harder No vote situation.
Gaetz likely wanted out of the House where he is despised and ineffective, just in time for ethics charges to be unwound. Now he can be a free agent with even higher profile in his future grifts.
Meanwhile the Musk/Vivek faction and the most personally loyal cabinet members will try to reorder the administrative state without getting carried away and undermining the ability to deliver, through all the noise and chaos, the results the 2024 voting public were asking for. It would be a disaster if those needs and desires are not met.
The coalitions are not done changing, a long term realignment is not clinched, and the political world of 2026 and 2028 may look very different than Trump supporters now believe.
With the section of Thune, the Senate Republicans are promising the same dynamic actin that’s they’ve been known for the 30 odd years.
Ed: “Trump world is giddy with recent success, despite the weak Congressional majorities.”
That makes the key point — lots of us voted for Trump, and NOT for the Institutional Congressional Republicrats. That is why Trump’s victory had only relatively minor coat-tails, because the DC “Republicans” stand for nothing except themselves. For good reason, we despise the Institutionals. They stick an R after their name, but their hearts are solid D … or maybe they only care about their own bank balances.
Without Trump, the Republicrats have nothing to offer.
Gaetz likely wanted out of the House where he is despised and ineffective, just in time for ethics charges to be unwound.
I think you’re correct to say that the Gaetz nomination is an obvious throw-away but I have no idea what these ethics charges are, and worse, I don’t care.
The regime has a longstanding habit of filing bogus indictments, making up phony ethics claims, and outright lying about anyone who dares to threaten the status quo. If I recall about Gaetz, members of the regime media were caught threatening an ex-girlfriend of his that if she didn’t testify against him they’d wreck her life, so I figure any “ethics charges” against him are just more regime lies.
They’ve obviously been trying the same trick with Donald Trump, with the same lack of success. Presumably it cost him some votes but not enough to matter, and that failure came at a cost.
It has long been my take that the left has been doing everything they can do to whip their supporters into a deranged frenzy, because otherwise they might just defect to the other side or just not vote. Every Republican has to be Hitler, no matter what.
This sort of tactic has been key to their success for many years, but now it’s plainly stopped working. I found it hilarious to watch the Trump-loves-Hitler story be deployed just before the election and immediately become a joke. I find it equally hilarious to see the thoroughly corrupt incompetent senator John Cornyn whine about Matt Gaetz.
Just my opinion, but I think the present regime is finished. To survive, it needed to become a de facto police state where people are jailed for dissent, and that seems rather unlikely now. We’ll see.
I think the Keft’s portrayal of Trump as a Hitler or Caesar is just for the rubes, the historical figure that they see him as is Genghis Khan
What we sometimes lose sight of is that the DC area is not the home of the Blob but it is a community. There are homes, neighborhoods, schools; if you walk the neighborhoods even in DC there are birthday parties and little league in the parks, The local home improvement stores do a roaring business on the weekends
Of course beneath the surface there are differences, it’s for the most a one-company town in that everybody is connected to government work in some way. It is also fabulously wealthy. with 5 of the top 15 counties by media household income located in the metro area, and extremely Democratic,
So along comes Donald Trump in 2017, the ultimate outsider and defeater of the sainted Hillary. Trump was the one who seriously upset the DC gestalt. Well DC knows how to deal with outsiders. They have faced Nixon, Reagan, Gingrich, the Young Guns. Some they have had to whack with Deep State Magic like Nixon, others they simply played rope-a-dope like Reagan, and others like McCarthy and Ryan they assimilated to K-Street. As the saying goes many a Republican has come to DC to drain the Swamp and they end up finding it’s really more like a pleasant hot spring.
They figured they couldn’t assimilate Trump, given his MAGA hordes and their barbaric customs involving guns, God, and gasoline, so they tried crushing him: Russian collusion, various media hoaxes, the connivance of Lt. Colonel Vindman and the first impeachment. When Trump fought one last stand, they brought up January 6th.
They thought they had finally defeated him, but then he showed back up outside the city walls and this time he had learned his lessons, he didn’t come to claim title, he came for vengeance. If Genghis used pyramids of skulls, Trump was coming with pyramids of Reductions-in-Force and armies of followers which will descend on the capital city and strip it to the foundations and massacre its property values. Trump won’t quite wdo hat Genghis did to Baghdad but he’s going to be just as destructive
You wonder at some dinner party in Georgetown this past summer, the various guests look at each over the pate and realized that this was it. Nothing they had tried; not indictments, assassination attempts, impeachments, was going to stop Trump and his barbarian horde this time and putting the capital to the sack.
Trump won’t quite do what Genghis did to Baghdad but he’s going to be just as destructive.
Alas, but I’ll take what I can get.
Anyway, I think Trump was terribly vulnerable in his first term. If he had done anything plausibly impeachable the entire GOP establishment would have turned on him and he would have been tossed out of office in a millisecond. Then we would have gotten to watch Mike Pence grovel apologies on the way losing to whichever demonrat the Uniparty wanted to install into the presidency. I would have enjoyed watching Mike Pence being humiliated since he richly deserves it, but it didn’t happen. Instead we had Trump impeached over silly implausible things no one outside of the media fever swamps took seriously, and it didn’t take. Twice.
I no longer think Trump is politically vulnerable to anything the swamp can throw at him. Perhaps the swamp realizes that and perhaps that’s why there haven’t been the predicted riots. Or perhaps they’re just waiting to after the inauguration to unleash chaos- but I note that FDR and his bad decisions extended what became known as the Great Depression by almost a decade and yet his supporters stuck with him through it all.
I think we’re at that point with Trump. Almost everyone I’ve talked politics with or read online expects rough times ahead for the country, for reasons that should be well known to anyone reading this. My guess is that the swamp’s plan to deal with Trump is to bring further disaster to the country, which will cause his supporters to abandon him, because reasons.
They should recall FDR. Enough rambling.
Xen: “I no longer think Trump is politically vulnerable to anything the swamp can throw at him.”
We can’t be sure. Doubtless someone remembers that when Trump was 12 years old, he failed to help a woman cross the road to an abortion clinic because she was a black lesbian. Impeach him now!
More to the point — it looks like neither the Republicrats nor the Demonrats have much bench strength. Are there currently any standout candidates on either side for 2028? Not to mention that the Republicrats need to replace pretty much their entire crowd of backstabbers in House & Senate — but where are the hundreds of needed rock-ribbed replacements? As the saying goes — we are not going to vote our way out of this mess.
Are there currently any standout candidates on either side for 2028?
OK, more rambling. On the left, it doesn’t matter. Their last candidate thought bacon was a spice and all the leftards dutifully fell into line to vote for her. They’ll do what they’re told the next time as well, even if they get told to vote for a bag of turnips.
On the right, the establishment has plainly been prepping Jeb DeSantis as their next candidate. Yay.
I note he continually gets good press by doing obvious things any competent governor would do when faced with any disaster, such as a hurricane. I also note that in 2022 the expected red wave actually happened in his state. My take is that the establishment turned off the vote fraud machine to make him look better, in the hope that he could win over the Trumpian hordes for 2024.
That didn’t happen, which actually surprised me. There was a time I thought DeSantis was a better version of Trump, without the baggage- and then I found out that DeSantis had taken tens of millions of dollars from the actual Jeb and Jeb’s pals. My interest in him ended right then and there and will not return.
My guess is that millions of others had the exact same reaction as I did, which is why he did so badly in the 2024 primaries. My further guess is that he’ll face the same problems in 2028, which still leaves him as the establishment’s best bet.
Hence we might get a Vance v. DeSantis primary in 2028. But events are the saddle and ride mankind, etc.
Gandalf in LOTR: “Be merry! We meet again, at the turn of the tide. A great storm is coming, but the tide has turned.”
We (literally) dodged the bullet- No time to rest on our laurels. We need to keep pressing our advantage and continue the political realignment so that 2028 is a cakewalk for JD Vance.
“that 2028 is a cakewalk for JD Vance.”
I’m just trying to get to 1/20/2025 w/o the yahoo in Israel doing sumthing stupid.
“ That’s not how you go about stopping Hitler.”
If course it isn’t. The resistance turns to the grand old statesmen to box Hitler in a coalition government. If only McCain were still alive. Or Romney. Wait. He is still alive.
Harris won 87% of the electoral votes of the 15 states that do not require ID to vote.
Trump won 82% of the electoral votes of the 35 states that do require ID to vote.