Trump's Legacy and Opportunity

The Tough-Talking Merchant Turned Martyr, and His Last, TBD, Act As a Potential Warrior

In this space, I generally avoid discussions of retail politics and focus on bigger-picture topics. But as this month marks over nine years of the post-Trump era, a change so discontinuous with the past that it is a historical earthquake in American political history. Win or lose, we are in the last days of his last campaign.

Potential Energy and the Emergence of Trumpism

In early 2015, on a friend’s blog who ran a prediction contest, I commented that people were underestimating the probability of a populist candidate emerging in the Republican Party. Populism, in my view, exists as a sort of political potential energy when elites in both parties conspire for too long and stray too far from public opinion. On the immigration issue in particular, in which I have always taken an interest due to its salience on all other issues in that it represents an irreversible change to the electorate, national character, and my children’s inheritance as citizens, the difference between public opinion and public policy was vast.

The summer of 2015, just before Trump announced, was also when the Supreme Court declared nationwide gay marriage by fiat, despite a majority of states, including California, explicitly outlawing it. While this issue would not play a major role in the coming populist storm — and indeed, as it often does, public opinion, as on abortion, shifted to majority support once legalized — I do believe the top-down reversal of the public will, particularly among evangelicals, was sublimated into Trump’s rise, as it was a demonstration that even winning elections and following the rules was useless, a general feeling among the electorate that motivated Trump’s supporters to throw this seeming human hand grenade into the highest office.

My initial impressions of Trump were skeptical, as I liked Scott Walker as the most credible conservative candidate. I had recalled Trump’s dishonest treatment of Pat Buchanan in the 2000 Reform Party machinations and assumed his candidacy was another PR stunt. I think he might have thought that too, but his remarkable, and still his best, performance at the first 2015 Republican debate quickly changed the game. And he quickly did some things in the cycle to convince people he was serious. As Joe Rogan put it in this past weekend’s interview, he would say a lot of “crazy s**t” that a lot of people felt privately but was never before said by a candidate. His rhetoric, then, served as a sort of “burn the ships” precommitment that slowly won over the much-abused Republican base.

Also significant was his willingness to release a list of the potential Supreme Court justices he would appoint. After the duds appointed by Reagan and both of the Bushes — who gave us, among them, Stevens, O’Connor, Kennedy, all liberals, and the moderately disappointing John Roberts, not to mention Dubya’s aborted nomination of the pro-Roe Harriet Miers — Trump, without pretending to be what he was not, offered the declining but still influential Religious Right a fair deal. Unlike the Bushes and Reagan, who pretended to be one of them but then wasted the political victories their votes and volunteerism enabled, Trump respected conservative Christians as coalition partners and delivered the goods once in office¹.

The Conservative Id

Trump also served as the id of the conservative base. Having the misfortune of being disproportionately of European descent, Christian, and heterosexual, the base had been subject to decades of media psychological abuse, starting in childhood classrooms, that they and their ancestors, because of their immutable characteristics, were uniquely evil and deserving of disapprobation and defenestration of their unearned privilege. Their supposed leaders would barely defend them and often attack them for their embarrassing lack of diversity².

Trump, however, defended the base, and most satisfyingly, abused their abusers back, and showed, in the most extreme way imaginable, that not being a self-loathing wimp and never apologizing to people who seek your destruction was a viable, even superior, strategy. Joining Trump meant no longer being a punching bag, and instead of turning the other cheek, punching the other guy back twice as hard in the mouth; it might be wrong, but it felt so, so good³. The media, it turned out, needed the cooperation of conservatives to play their part, of apologies and declaring certain untouchables anathema. That Trump refused to play along demonstrated the hollowness of the media’s authority.

He showed they were a paper tiger, with no real moral authority anyone respected unless its target meekly submitted to it. Darren Beattie famously called this “moral imperialism,” the shell game where fundamentally immoral people who support the chemical burning and dismembering of children in their mother’s wombs take advantage of conservatives’ good nature with guilt-mongering, unfalsifiable accusations of racism, sexism, and the like.

Young, online right-wing men learned these lessons deeply. Much like how rappers appropriated a term of abuse in the n-word, the youngest male conservatives, who had borne the strongest psychological abuse of a fully mature politically correct media and education ecosystem, embraced, to varying degrees, their own N-word.

Even though their grandfathers had collectively defeated the Nazis, they were preached at about tolerance and hate because they shared a superficial appearance to 1930s German nationalists, all of this, of course, providing a rationale for overt discrimination against them at every level of society. So, like the gangsta rappers, it was all too tempting to own the libs by “triggering” them with half-ironic, reactionary imagery and rhetoric. It was all very punk rock and a ton of fun for young males when the establishment reacted like prudes not unlike Dana Carvey’s “Church Lady” character.

That moralistic conservative Boomer leaders joined in the condemnation, who had made their way before the full manifestation of PC culture and thus paid no price for their acquiescence to the post-war consensus that harmed their sons, only added fuel to the conservative youth rebellion. Trump himself refused to condemn them but welcomed them into his coalition, to the point that nearly every young conservative staffer loves the memes, surreptitiously follows the “wrong” accounts on X, and knows the score on what were formally fringe, revisionist positions averse to the reigning mythology.

How Trump Canceled the Cancellers

Trump, through his psychological superpowers, refused to engage with the media’s fake morality, and most importantly, demonstrated how to do so. For them to cancel you, you have to cooperate, and that singular lesson is perhaps Trump’s most lasting and historically significant contribution. He not only said a lot of crazy stuff, he managed to slip the noose on a lot of extreme personal behavior that would have ruined any previous politician.

For the garden-variety Republican politician with 1% of Trump’s baggage, this revelation in media relations was revolutionary. If he didn’t grovel for his offensive words in the infamous Access Hollywood tape but masterfully turned the tables by bringing Bill Clinton’s victims to the last debate, why should an ordinary Republican apologize for some insensitive comment taken out of context by a media hack? His media skills will be studied for decades by smart politicians on both sides of the aisle.

How did Trump develop these skills? He was an acolyte, indeed a juvenile parishioner, of the Presbyterian minister Norman Vincent Peale, who famously wrote The Power of Positive Thinking. Trump seems to have a singular power to control his thoughts and create his own reality. But more important was his experience as a media superstar for several decades. Trump, an unmanageable teenager sent to military school by his father, emerged in his 20s as a nobody with a singular vision to rise to the top of the heap: the richest guy who dated the most beautiful women. His early friendship with Roy Cohn, Joe McCarthy’s bulldog lawyer, taught him that perception was more important than reality in pursuing these goals.

He managed to not only become famous, but to make himself famous for being rich, and important to his personal goals, became the most desired bachelor in the country⁴. This despite his not being particularly rich relative to his gilded notoriety, though as my friend points out, he had the luck, like many early Boomers, to invest in productive assets cheaply at a moment of maximum pessimism, in his case New York real estate at cyclical lows with debt that would diminish in real terms due to massive 1970s inflation.

In the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, Trump would get more reps with media skills, of the type most beloved by the masses even if offensive to elite tastes, as he appeared in professional wrestling cameos with his friend Vince McMahon, and then most significantly, with The Apprentice in the 2000s. The weekly ratings gave real-time feedback on which approaches most drew an audience.

I remember an article where Trump discusses this, how he learned that when he leaned into playing a caricature of himself, not unlike Vince McMahon’s “Mr. McMahon” character, going on rants and being angry and more extreme in his rhetoric, ratings for the show would go up. The character Donald Trump emerged for public consumption. And in a saturated media environment, there’s almost no such thing as bad publicity. He rebuilt his fortune based on his image and television character⁵.

Trump took these same learnings to the political realm, where I suspect he had no particular plan other than to promote his brand. When lightning struck, and he had the good fortune to run against the uniquely unlikeable Hillary Clinton, United States political history changed forever.

Interestingly, in unguarded, private moments with his team, Trump is nothing like his character. He listens, polls the room, and seeks consensus as one would expect from a seasoned business leader; indeed his modal office behavior is to be constantly on the phone seeking others’ opinions.

He can seem, if anything, indecisive to naive observers, but in fact is acting rationally to change his position and tactics as new data rolls in. Business experience tends to develop this in leaders, as reality is both difficult to determine and a cruel disciplinarian when disobeyed. This inaction in the face of uncertainty would disappoint many of his followers once he was in office.

The First Term

For many on the Right, Trump as President was bound to be disappointing compared to Trump as a candidate. His most enthusiastic supporters found themselves demoralized initially after the missile strikes on Syria; too many feared he would be another neocon Republican president easily manipulated by media-manipulated foreign policy crises of the day. Others were disappointed with the lack of progress on the wall, despite it being clearly within his executive authority to act unilaterally without Congress by declaring a national emergency on the border.

Those things he did deliver on, notably tax cuts, while good policies, made many on the populist right feel used — meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Special interests get what they want, but the base, particularly on the immigration issue, got the shaft. Overall, Trump deported fewer people than Obama. Ironically, for all the Left’s fears and the Right’s hopes of Trump as a “dictator,” which seemed consistent with his rhetoric, he governed very cautiously.

The Covid crisis perhaps best illustrated this divide between Trump the television character and Trump the cautious leader. Once it became apparent that the costs of Covid lockdowns exceeded their benefits, his political instincts caused Trump the character to begin making populist protests against them. But Trump the cautious leader ended up listening to the experts for too long.

Similarly, when the George Floyd riots broke out, his rhetoric aligned with the base, but not his actions. George H. W. Bush, of all people, invoked the Insurrection Act and used federal troops to shut down the Rodney King riots in 1991, but Trump hesitated, listening to generals who told him he couldn’t do what a former President had done.

Some in Trumpworld thought it better for him politically to let blue cities rot on the vine, to marinate in the anarcho-tyranny of masked rioters set loose on the populace while law-abiding families had to mask their toddlers. This, however, rang hollow overall with the American people. Trump’s whole schtick as a candidate was that of the decisive leader, the outsider candidate from the business world who criticized his foes as “all talk, no action.”

Yet, in the critical moment of dual crises in 2020, in a matter of clear public emergencies where the President has maximum authority to act unilaterally, he flinched. He tweeted and whined but ultimately did little to fix the exact sort of problems Americans expected him to fix. It made him, for the first time in the public eye, look small and impotent. That critical turn created the sort of weakness Machiavelli warned his princes against, and he became neither feared nor loved, but rather pathetic.

This lack of action, I believe, directly led to the temporary cultural triumph of wokeness. All public order is based on violence or credible threats of violence, and allowing the violent, authoritarian Left — on both the streets and in the public health bureaucracy — to run wild was disheartening and disorienting to broad swathes of the population. Normal people, for generally good and adaptive reasons, do not form opinions based on abstract principles but rather conform their opinions to whoever seems to have the “whip hand” of power at the moment.

When people were being betrayed by leaders at every level, from their pastors to their governors, Trump retreated at what could have been his defining juncture. This broke many psychologically⁶, as I observed people who ought to know better, from pietist Christian influencers to conservative homeschool moms bending the knee and posting the black Instagram square to beg tolerance and approval from what seemed, for a long moment, a new societal order.

The Post-2020 Denouement

The resulting political fallout eroded his electoral advantage such that the swollen Covid-enabled “bezzle” of Democratic “rotten boroughs” delivered the election to the hapless Joe Biden⁷. As disappointing as 2020 Trump was, subsequent developments have tended to garner him more sympathy.

Trump was a political neophyte, and the talent bench in 2016 was thin indeed for staffing a populist Republican administration. He’s to blame for appointing people to his administration who would undermine him, though even those he should have been able to count on, like the southern gentleman Jeff Sessions, were stuck in an antiquated mindset of assuming good faith in people like James Comey and the necessity of the “rule of law” in a society lacking the moral undergirding for such concepts to be fair and effective.

Trump, I think, was simply naive in thinking people would work with him, perhaps a defensible naivety in that his actual governing was rather moderate compared to his rhetoric. Knowing what we know now, with the merciless lawfare directed at him, in the dark days of 2020, as rioters penetrated the White House grounds, it may have become apparent to him that if he did anything decisive, the military brass might just allow antifa to give him the Gadaffi treatment.

Perhaps he thought of his family and his safety and thought he could play ball when he discovered how dangerous the Deep State was, and how little power a President actually exercises. His instinct, after all, is one of a dealmaker, whose New York-style extreme rhetoric is just a negotiating tactic.

I think this may have informed his actions on January 6th. Perhaps the greatest betrayal of his base, he baited his most enthusiastic supporters to attempt a coup when he was personally unwilling to cross the Rubicon. Trump probably was not sure whether he could live peacefully post-presidency, yet hoped he could, and picked a middle route that was worse for everyone involved.

The ensuing years, conservatives may hope, surely must have taught Trump that the only way out is through. If he loses this election, he will die in prison, and his companies will be bankrupted. When, this year, he started to win against all odds, coincidental security breaches allowed an attempt on his life that would have been successful but for the most unlikely hairs’ breadth.

If he wins, there are signs of a different, much more aligned administration. The talent bench for Trumpist Republicans today is deep and rich, and the brush with death has raised the stakes of his PR stunt turned political revolution and might just have turned this lucky merchant, big on talk but low on risk tolerance, into a warrior. There’s no prediction here, only a distinct possibility. We simply do not know if our civilization is capable of producing leaders willing to risk life and limb for a political cause, but Trump, at the end of his productive and remarkable life, seems like a possibility.

The Political Fallout

It would be a mistake to identify the Trumpian portfolio of talents as a political Platonic ideal. His three runs of the presidency have featured exceptionally weak Democratic candidates, whether unlikable (Hillary), untalented and untested (Kamala), or literally demented (Biden).

If Biden had dropped out before the primaries, it seems likely Trump would lose against a candidate like Newsom or Josh Shapiro. His being a brash New Yorker, rather than a more traditional conservative like Ted Cruz who comes across as sanctimonious outside of the more religious South, likely helped in breaking the Midwestern blue wall, enabling an idiosyncratic electoral victory in 2016 despite losing the popular vote⁸.

Trump’s rhetoric, while better than the namby-pamby Ned Flanders Republicans like Mike Pence, is not optimally politically efficient. I had a conversation last year at a political event with a recognizable name from Trump’s previous campaigns. According to the campaign’s internal social media sentiment monitoring, Trump’s tweeting from 2016-2020 was extremely harmful to his likability ratings. As much as some were amused by his posting, most normies found it off-putting.

BUT - Trump has made that all-important demonstration that Republicans succeed when they do not play the game on the terms of their enemies. Trump-like candidates without his baggage or lack of rhetorical self-control, like DeSantis and Youngkin or the more edgy J.D. Vance, would likely outperform him in a general election simply because they don’t (as much) offend middle-class sensibilities. It’s important to acknowledge, however, that none of these Trump-like candidates would be who they are today without Trump, who again taught Republicans how not to be wimps.

Trump’s decade-plus masterclass demonstrating that cancellation is optional has further enabled candidates to engage in unguarded conversations in long-form podcasts, the emerging media trend of this election. A smart guy like Vance can relax and have a real conversation with smarter people who had previously checked out of politics, broadening the coalition, without worrying about words being taken out of context to ruin his reputation — like Trump, if you never apologize to and just attack those acting in bad faith, the public mostly shrugs.

Trump’s singular talent, besides entertaining both the less educated base and the more cynical, smart online Right⁹, was driving liberals insane way beyond a rational reaction to his actual implemented policies. Rhetoric, it turns out, matters a great deal, and rather than a grand conspiracy, I’m inclined to the parsimonious idea that democratic politics are simply irrationality all the way down.

Liberals’ reactions to Trump, in extremetizing their worst and most unpopular policies, create an opening for more reasonable mini-Trumps. Trump has induced a fever in the Left, and if he can win, the fever may break as the grownups pick up the pieces from the mentally ill portion of their coalition. Expect a mental health crisis on the Left if Trump outperforms this year’s polls by the same margin as 2016 and 2020, as it would likely mean a landslide and a win in the popular vote.

That Trump is suboptimal as a candidate is a cause for optimism for conservatives going forward if candidates share Trump’s fearlessness without his recklessness. The game of politics is about rewarding your friends and taking power from your enemies, and the ideal operator gets substantial things done quietly without provoking the immune system of the other side, depriving them of energy. Trump if anything does the opposite, constantly provoking a huge immune response on the other side, spending down political capital, but with very little substantial policy progress per unit of rhetoric.

Ron DeSantis¹⁰, for example, was a much more effective executive in implementing Trumpian policies in Florida, yet was lauded by many “Never Trump” types because his rhetoric is more compatible with middle-class status anxieties. In embracing a more extreme, effective Trump candidate who talked more reasonably, they revealed themselves to not be principled but rather driven by their emotions¹¹.

We can perhaps see glimmers of this in the 2012 candidacy of Mitt Romney. Though Romney broke with Trump, again over irrational middle-class status anxieties rather than Trump’s moderate governance, in 2012 Romney was a much superior candidate, in his stated positions on immigration and other issues, than either McCain in 2008 or the junior Bush of 2000 and 2004. Unlike Trump, he faced the singular generational phenomenon of Barack Obama, who offered voters, in his 2008 election, to be a part of “history,” a religiously ecstatic absolution for the guilt-addled masses, as he restrained the abject Cultural Marxism revealed by his second term — even claiming as late as 2012 to oppose gay marriage! — to seek re-election.

Against such a strong incumbent, Romney matched Trump’s 2020 performance in the popular vote, holding Obama to a less than 4-point margin. Exit polls show Romney outperforming Trump in 2016 among whites (59% vs. 57%) college graduates (51% vs. 48%), and about the same among women (45% vs. 46%).

These comparisons are within the margin of error but demonstrate that Trump subtracted about as many voters as he added to the traditional coalition (though the voters exchanged led to a net Electoral College advantage). Romney accomplished this despite being rather unlikeable to working-class voters; he was the kind of passive-aggressive, Patagonia vest guy whose private equity career consisted of buying the local factory with freshly printed Cantillon cash and shipping jobs to China to unlock “synergies,” i.e. strip-mining accumulated value for short-term debt service and paper profits before flipping the corporate corpse to the greater fool up the finance food chain.

A Trump-like candidate who could put part of the old coalition together, and appeal to midwit college graduates, while holding on to the new working class base and intellectual online vanguard, should outperform Trump. Ann Coulter believes the strongest horse to be Glenn Youngkin, who managed to get himself elected in highly elite suburban Virginia on a MAGA platform without the MAGA baggage, adapting the substance of Trumpism to a style more palatable to the middle class. As Trump would say, he’s from “central casting,” tall, with good hair, and looks like a Founding Father you’d expect to see on the currency¹².

Trump’s Opportunity

When Trump raised his fist covered in blood, did a fire rise in his heart, or was it brilliant, opportunistic kayfabe from his television character?

It is still very much an open question whether Trump, if re-elected, will follow the winds of fate and transform himself from a loud-mouthed rhetorician with a merchant’s compromising instincts into the Caesar figure destiny seems to demand. Even after the lawfare and assassination attempt, I’m not sure he has it in him.

It certainly can be done, as the fast-follower conservative Greg Abbott discovered when he defied federal orders on the border, and nothing happened. The Left blinked when the only resolution to defiance was firing the first shot. It is possible, with enough personnel, power, and popular support, to just do stuff and ignore the impotent courts and bureaucracy.

However, Trump’s seemingly unquenchable desire to be loved rather than feared may result in a second term where he resolves his personal legal problems while bumbling along with minor policy wins not inconsistent with a standard Republican president. If he jettisons Elon and RFKJ early in his term, and again staffs up with DC swamp types, this seems likely.

One can dream of what Trump could accomplish if he decided to become Red Caesar. A strong election showing, followed by a “shock and awe” cleaning of wokeness and incompetence from the government, led by Elon, could finally repudiate the post-war consensus. What could follow is a new Era of Good Feelings, with the divides of the past muted by a new expansionist Jeffersonian nationalism, especially if new external projects could unite us, not in pointless wars to police the world, but expansion in the American interest.

Trump loves good real estate deals. My humble, half-kidding proposal is that the failed state of Mexico pays for the wall and reparations for the nearly one million Americans dead from the opioid crisis by ceding Baja California, perhaps the highest quality underdeveloped real estate in the world, which becomes a new federal district for national recreation, a giant Trump National Park, with the Trump Organization awarded a 99-year exclusive concessionaire contract. If Putin gets to keep Crimea, why shouldn’t the more powerful US also claim a climatically ideal peninsula and finish the job intended by arguably our greatest President, James K. Polk?

Perhaps he can close his deal with Denmark to acquire Greenland, but if we are going to fight wars for oil and “democracy,” why not liberate conservative Western Canada, with oil sands rivaling Saudi Arabia, after sponsoring an online plebiscite of secession from the capriciousness of Ontario and Justin Trudeau? If we are a nation who truly care about the oppressed, what if we populated our great empty spaces with Afrikaners, German homeschoolers, and the oppressed conservative masses of Europe whose most basic civil rights are denied? If the Democrats can attempt to elect a new people, surely we can fortify the historical American nation and be the shining light of hope for oppressed conservatives, and future reliable Republican voters, the world over.

New land, new resources, new opportunities, and new conservative blood are the most American things in the world, and an expanding pie is the best salve to our historical divides, at least until if and when Elon opens the final frontier of space. It’s a fantasy, but I dream of making Manifest Destiny Great Again.

1. Trump fulfilled this promise at a political cost. As is apparent now, he spent real political capital that harmed his future electoral prospects to fulfill a promise to the key coalition partner who secured his nomination. That certain pro-life leaders now whine that he won’t support federal legislation when he delivered their victory over Roe, is the height of ingratitude.

The unfortunate reality is that there is no moral majority on abortion in any state outside of perhaps the Dakotas, Utah, and the very Deep South (Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Alabama). Americans strongly value the option to kill their unwanted children. Post-Roe, abortion restrictions have been a loser every time they have been put to a popular vote, even in the reddest states. Abortion remains illegal in Texas simply because the state lacks an initiative process, and the issue isn’t salient enough to flip the legislature. This ground-level reality means the pro-life movement must change hearts and minds at the grassroots first, instead of expecting their greatest champion to commit political suicide forcing the issue at the federal level.

2. The Republican Party to this day, and even the MAGA base, still bears the scars of this abuse, afraid to self-advocate, as evidenced in their enthusiastic support of unelectable, damaged-goods candidates like Mark Robinson, who will almost certainly lose the winnable North Carolina governor’s race, and in their embrace of degenerate, schizophrenic entertainers like Kanye who put on a Trump hat.

3. Christ’s words regarding enemies and turning the other cheek refer to personal enemies in the Greek, not public enemies, which are two distinct nouns. Politics nearly always concerns public enemies.

4. What’s interesting here is that Trump married rather quickly for the world’s most eligible bachelor. I suspect that Trump, always managing his image, promoted a much more macho version of himself than reality. He’s a known germaphobe (with specific preferences for hand sanitizer brands!), for example, which would tend to limit, especially in the early AIDS era, a propensity to fornication. His overcompensation of his sexual prowess through media campaigns I believe was at least partially due to his embarrassment that he was, actually, kind of happy to be a married man, and maybe secretly grossed out by casual sex. In The Art of the Deal, he expressed annoyance at Ivana dragging him to charity and social events when he just wanted to stay home in the evenings, as he, as a Queens native, had contempt for the fake Manhattan socialite world she desired for them to inhabit.

In subsequent books, he chalked up the failure of his first marriage to Ivana being too involved in managing the business, which he credits her as being very talented at, which meant home life was dominated by discussions of business problems. Interestingly, in giving Ivana significant business responsibilities, he was acting consistent with his practice of disproportionately selecting women as managers as he thought they were tougher than men.

I think that could be right, especially in the real estate development business. In my personal construction projects, I find I am often overly sympathetic to the poor-mouthing incompetence of many of the blue-collar trades, and there’s greater pressure as a man to be reasonable and understanding towards their lack of foresight and planning since they are likable dudes who do real, physical work. A female supervisor, however, can be more of a “killer” as Trump describes them, not accepting blue-collar male excuses for getting stuff wrong because they didn’t study the plans carefully enough; a woman who is not trying to be a bro can more easily say, “this is wrong, redo it or you’re not getting paid.”

5. Naive journalists attacked his business prowess because this fame enabled him to merely license his name to projects and let others take the financial risk while collecting a royalty check. Anyone who knows anything about business would think the opposite. The whole game is to extract risk-adjusted value, and royalty income is appropriately named.

6. Even the libertarians, at their moment to shine, revealed themselves to mostly be a weed lobby by dutifully supporting the Covid tyranny. Longtime libertarian leader Jeffrey Tucker laments in a recent article that it appears the only consistent libertarian in the country is Ron Paul.

7. The “bezzle,” from “embezzle,” is an economic term for baseline levels of fraud in the economy, in particular when it comes to insiders looting shareholders’ equity. One reason we have an Electoral College is that the Founding Fathers anticipated highly corrupt urban political machines, “rotten boroughs,” and a state-level electoral system, as opposed to a national popular vote, firewalls the electoral “bezzle” to individual states such that corruption in Philadelphia or Los Angeles cannot nullify the votes of smaller, less corrupt polities like North Dakota.

Much has been written about the irregularities of the 2020 election, but here I think Trump must take much of the blame. If he had acted before the election, using Civil Rights laws already on the books to ensure election integrity, he might have prevented the “steal.” I’m skeptical of conspiracy theories, but it is well-known that Democratic cities inflate vote totals through questionable ballot-harvesting methods. It is simply inconsistent with human nature that the most highly time-preferenced portions of our national population happen to have the highest electoral turnout, and the relaxation of voter laws during Covid simply inflated what was possible.

It’s probably true historically that Republican candidates must win by 3% or so in reality to win in final election tallies, and Covid probably inflated the bezzle to 5%. In many blue districts, these opportunities extended into the 2022 midterms, where Republicans won the popular vote nationwide but underperformed in Congressional seat totals. The key question of the 2024 election is whether the “bezzle” is more like 2016 or 2020.

My guess is somewhere in between, but an overwhelming Trump victory could push the bezzle back to historical levels for this one election (as it’s more risky to engage in electoral fraud if the margin is wide enough that you lose anyway), and if Republicans can recapture the legislatures and governorships of some of these states perhaps the bezzle can be reduced to even below historical levels. The efforts of DeSantis in Florida to clean up elections are extremely impressive and the former swing state is solid red as a result.

At the state level, Red State Republicans really ought to consider whether local control of elections in big cities is a smart strategy. Since states have absolute sovereignty over local governments, there’s no fundamental or practical reason, for example, that the politicians elected locally in Harris County, rather than the state of Texas, ought to be conducting elections after the advent of modern communications technology.

8. Trump and his advisors may have simply pursued a superior strategy given the rules of the game. Like in football, the goal is to put more points on the board, not run up correlates like yardage or time of possession. It’s possible his brashness, while creating weaker wins in Texas and abject losses in purple suburban states, like Virginia, is exactly what motivated working class midwest voters to vote for him, as the Midwest has been uniquely victimized by the globalist consensus of both parties. His extreme rhetoric may have served as a signal of trust to these less religious, more bottom-line-oriented voters.

9. As a Louisiana native, I tend to see politics as performance art and Trump as the GOAT of the genre. He is, like the best Louisiana politicians, an “honest liar.” He invites you to be in on the joke and ridiculousness of the farce that is democracy, and many smart conservatives enjoy him semi-ironically. Working-class people likewise have always known that politics is a racket and appreciate Trump’s dishonest honesty. This is very offensive to midwit wordcels who have always been good little boys and girls who follow the rules and believe what HR and the NY Times tell them. Personally, I find Trump entertaining in small doses, or in more serious, long-form freestyle interviews. The rally speeches are so repetitive and meandering I can’t stand to watch for more than five minutes, but my preferences likely aren’t representative of the broader electorate.

10. DeSantis was my choice in the 2024 primary as I value competence over all. He is unlikely to be Trump’s successor because of bad political advice when he attempted to grandstand over Trump’s legal troubles. Had he promised to unilaterally pardon Trump, avoided criticizing him, and perhaps provoked a confrontation between state and federal law enforcement over the Mar-a-Lago raids, he would be Trump’s natural successor in 2028.

11. It’s really hard to overstate the emotional immaturity of the respectable midwit Republican. Some of these people acted shocked, shocked over Trump’s brashness and sexual sins while lionizing the moral monster George W. Bush who killed millions of people in a fake war, just because Bush talks, rather than acts, morally. Trump’s not starting another war makes him one of the greatest humanitarians of the modern era.

12. My personal preference would be J.D. Vance, whose curious mind and working class background makes him a more reliable enemy of the regime.