Like many an American, I was stumped by Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. Miraculously surviving an assassination attempt, emerging triumphant as case after legal case against him crashed and burned, starring—there is no other word—in a photograph of defiance comparable to the image of soldiers raising the flag at Iwo Jima, his speech seemed the perfect moment for Trump to seize History by the throat and rip through a speech that would bring down present-day politics once and for all.
Nope. He blew it. He walked on stage, accompanied by a Pirandello-esque dummy of the gentleman murdered at his Butler rally, opened with an admittedly riveting description of what it felt like to get shot, and then just dithered away, dissolving into over an hour of the usual embarrassing Donaldbabble. Rarely has a political opportunity so rich been so casually thrown away.
Sure, there were occasional good lines; now and again flashes of that invigorating Norman Vincent Peale Trumpian optimism shone through. Who else could say with a straight face that a Golden Age, and not a Zombie Apocalypse, is just around the corner for America? He may actually believe it. But so few of the comatose listeners remained awake by then that one could feel the crown slipping from his hands, and History resuming.
Resume it has. The visible and invisible hierarchs underlying the Democratic Party, dead set on removing Biden from office, lopped off the old man’s doddering head. Cast to the side like an old sock (whose cognitive profile he shares), Biden will not be the Party’s nominee in 2024. But as he was being pushed into the waste bin of history, Biden exacted a bitter revenge: he endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as his successor.
Does Kamala have a chance? Well, in American politics, anything is possible. For one thing, though her skin is even lighter than the ruddy Trump’s, she is loudly, overtly, capital-B Black. That gives her the BIPOC vote. Also, she is a capital-W Woman so bent on making on-demand abortion the iron law of the land that I suspect she’d gladly perform the procedure herself on the debate stage. To blacks, browns, gays and abortion aficionados we must add the Anybody-But-Trumpers, those TDS sufferers so allergic to the Donald that they would vote Real Hitler over Orange Hitler.
This alliance is not small. I’d estimate it at at least 40%.
There is also the matter of money. By the time of his excretion, the anticipated ’Biden-Harris’ brand had raised about $100 million from donors. If Biden goes and Harris remains, Harris’ campaign will get it all. If someone else is picked, the Dem nominee will get none of it. Democrat party managers are not going to turn away that kind of cash. For that reason alone, Kamala is surely in.
And yet one is puzzled. Kamala Harris has to be one of the most disliked and disdained pols ever to seek elective office. When primaried, she came in rock bottom. As Veep, she has been the very picture of incompetence, a byword for vacuous non-leadership. The inane word salad dribbling from her mouth makes Trump look like Demosthenes. As with Biden, her lack of ability or even presence is such that one wonders whether the Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz behind the Democrat curtain selects such dummies precisely because their very mindlessness makes them a more flexible hand puppet.
Whatever. Kammy has gotten the nod, and so the media apparatchicks are leaping into action as we speak. Politicians and journalists who mocked or ignored or despised Kamala now sing her praises in mighty choruses rivaling Handel’s Messiah. Social media accounts that lambasted her as a drunk, a bitch, a descendant of slaveholders, an incarceration-crazy prosecutor, an Affirmative Action incompetent only passing for capital-B Black now present this Proud Black Granddaughter of Slaves as Obama Redux, the last best hope for American Democracy. Any negative assessments and disrespectful tweets from days gone by are assiduously being scrubbed. The propaganda is exploding with incredible velocity, and the new content is wisely geared to the lowest possible intellectual denominator: Kamala, we are interminably told, is “BRAT!”
‘Brat’? I suppose this re-labelling, so like Bud Light, is an attempt to position our sitting Vice President and nearly sixty-year-old former Border Czar as a funky-ass young sistah giving the finger to The Man. But does it matter? Yesterday Oceania was our enemy. Today it is our trusted friend and ally, and always has been. Players change. The only thing that never changes is the daily Two Minutes for Emmanual Donald Goldstein.
Can the Dems saturate the airwaves with enough pro-Harris wokebabble in only four months to secure victory, or at the very least to make an engineered cheat plausible? Maybe. What then?
More of the same, I expect. Neither I, nor (I suspect) the Democrats themselves know who really calls the shots in the Democratic Party. But the general direction is always the same: a constant expansion of bureaucracy circulating ever-more-inflated funds into the pockets of associated bureaucrats and NGOs. The anti-straight, anti-white, anti-male Democrat agenda will no longer have straight old white male Joe Biden as its mask. But who or whatever is behind that mask will continue playing the same tune.
What of The Donald? There we have a real mystery. There are two Trumps in the world: the actual man, and the mile-thick 24/7 media cocoon of acid vituperation that passes for the man. Virtually everything we see, hear or read about Donald Trump is an exercise in mind-reading and character assassination. Trump is bigoted, racist, crazy, vicious, a Nazi, Hitler, etc etc. Discussion about Trump is never a calm description of a proposed policy of his, followed by a dispassionate discussion of its pluses and minuses and likely outcome. It’s nearly always an exorcism, another tossing of logs onto the flaming witch pyre, an operatic aria of appalled moral revulsion at Trump’s personal vulgarity, venality, cupidity, stupidity. Trump presents less as a political figure than a mythic one, a norm-crushing flame-spewing Godzilla rampaging through Tokyo, angrily yet mindlessly stomping shelters and skyscrapers into dust and rubble.
This is myth. Since we cannot, in fact, read minds, the only thing such over-the-top portrayals actually reveal is the inebriated state of mind of the journalist replicating the standard hit piece. But, flawed though the mind-reading approach is, allow me to indulge:
Trump, as a President, is a known quantity. We’ve seen him in office, we know what he’s done, so we also know what’s likely to happen. Past performance being the best predictor of future performance, we may expect Donald to blather talking points that inflame liberal hearts and sear liberal ears, but not to make any serious or lasting changes. Past performance being the best predictor of future, we may expect that ferocious bureaucratic resistance will once again block and obstruct the hated ogre. After which, subsequent Democratic regimes will eventually take office, undo all the ogre has done, and drag the reluctant country kicking and screaming ever farther left and down the road to perdition. The wise path for the Democrats, therefore, is to foster as much blockage and sabotage as possible throughout Trump’s next, and last, term, as they rehearse a new and better dummy to represent their Party.
But will the second-term Trump be a reprise of the first? I am not so sure.
Trump in exile has not been snoozing. He has spent the past four years planning the comeback that has already earned him the Republican nomination once again. But surely he has also been thinking about what to do after the campaign, once in office. Surely he’s been analyzing the problems and difficulties he faced during his first term. Those problems include fanatic opposition, disloyal supporters and appointees, lawfare-style harrassment and sabotage, and monolithic assaults from the mainstream media.
But the greatest problem Trump faced was his assumption that politics operate in the same way as business. In business, when a CEO sets policy, his subordinates execute it. They may disagree, they may express their concerns privately, they may even form coalitions sub rosa to replace him, but they do not sabotage that policy, certainly not explicitly. If so, they are fired. Such was the mindset that allowed Trump to retain James Comey or appoint John Bolton. They would do, he thought, what he had hired them to do.
Experience has taught Trump otherwise. Hence we can expect no such leeway. Rather, we can expect him to discharge as many bureaucratic opponents as possible under the guise of reducing government, appointing rock-hard loyalists to all Administration positions, and raising an army of attorneys to battle the armies of attorneys and judges waiting to stymie him. He will do this not because of any opposition to Big Government per se, but because the more bureaucrats he fires, the fewer he can expect to knife him in the back.
And that expectation of a knife in the back is literal. Trump 2016 was a lifelong Democrat who seemed to believe that, rhetoric aside, in the end NeverTrumpers and even Democrat opponents were reasonable people he could work with—tough competitors, sure, but the sort of tough competitor with whom one could work out a deal.
That was before what he believes was a stolen rigged election, Star Chamber proceedings to nail him for insurrection over J6, legal moves to ban him from State ballots, attempt after attempt to drag him into court and bleed his finances and put him in jail, and—when all that failed—to put a bullet in his head.
I don’t know what Trump, in his heart of heart, truly believes. But I believe there’s a good chance Trump believes that he has opponents who have tried to murder him once and are going to try again. He probably imagines that once he leaves office, the return of the opposition to power will result in his imprisonment or death. He is probably right.
If so, the stance of Trump 2 is going to be radically different from the attitude of Trump 1. Because he now believes that unless he breaks the back of the opposition once and for all, he’s going to die. And very likely his business empire, his family fortune, and possibly his family with him. It happened to the Romanovs, after all.
If he wins, he’s going to strike first and hit hard. Very hard.