Trump's Accelerationist Moment

Plus Post-Election Analysis

Trump won decisively. It wasn’t quite a landslide by Nixon or Reagan standards, but it’s probably as good as it gets in today’s electoral environment.

In my previous column, I floated the possibility that Trump had not learned the proper lessons from his first term, but early signs of the transition reflect a more loyalist, aggressive approach¹. Most notably, his opposition seems dazed, stunned, and demoralized, nothing like the “resistance” movement of 2016. Trump has an opportunity to move fast and break things, and as a weaker force compared to the federal bureaucracy but with a temporary advantage in initiative, he would be well-advised to adopt the doctrines of blitz warfare to prevent his enemies from regrouping.

This means moving so fast that their primary defensive structures are rendered moot as deeper targets are captured ahead of schedule. The discussions of massive reductions-in-force of the federal bureaucracy, or forced relocations of entire agencies to the hinterland, will simply remove many of those who would otherwise oppose his policies.

I don’t think it will be quite that straightforward, however. What will happen is what happened last time: constitutional actions will be blocked by national court orders in forum-shopped jurisdictions helmed by judges wearing the robes but lacking the substance of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence. Like Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln², Trump will have to decide whether he will cross the judicial Rubicon and defy court orders as a co-equal branch of government. Does Trump have the timber of Old Hickory to say “The Chief Justice has made his decision, now let him enforce it?”

Fortunately, the Supreme Court will likely reverse many errant federal judges, but the damage will be done in loss of time and momentum. Chief Justice John Roberts is obsessed with maintaining the legitimacy of the federal courts, the weakest of the three branches in terms of ability to enforce their edicts, and will, if not externally motivated, slow-roll reversals of lower court orders. The Trump administration must provide a competing motivation for Bush the Lesser’s disappointing squish.

If outright defying orders is a bridge too far politically, the administration must demand that the Supreme Court expedite review of district court orders within 30 days. If they fail to do so, the president should appoint his own “Judicial Advisory Commission” of learned constitutional scholars to review district court orders for their likely disposition upon appeal and take their advice as to when district court orders should be disobeyed.

John Roberts will rightly see this as a challenge to the federal courts’ authority and will be forced to choose between doing his job promptly or seeing his branch become irrelevant to policy actions. There’s no reason the sleepy SCOTUS shouldn’t be working 14-hour days like the executive when legal quagmires demand it³. The fight between Trump and the courts could get particularly nasty and may require preemptive pardons of those who choose to defy illegitimate orders and firings of those who refuse.

Another potential bottleneck for the administration is the Senate delaying appointments. A simple solution for this is, if necessary, having the Vice President serve in his constitutional role as President of the Senate and forcing votes as necessary on appointments rather than deferring to the tradition of being a figurehead.

Hopefully, the new administration has several contingencies for blocking actions of various kinds from different parts of the government. There are certainly more smart, aggressive people ready to push the envelope than last time.

The election itself provides some interesting data for analysis, starting with Florida’s transformation into a bright red state.

The Florida Solution

Florida was the quintessential swing state through the 2016 election, and in 2020 and 2024 has transitioned to a bright red state. DeSantis was elected by a hair in 2016, and he consolidated power by reforming election practices. As the site of “best practices” for election integrity, it occurred to me that it allows estimating the “bezzle” of Democratic shenanigans in its differential results in 2016 and 2020.

Here are the 2016 results:

And then the 2020 results:

If we assume the bezzle in 2020 was zero after DeSantis’ reforms, we can model the 2016 results as follows:

R + (D + B) = T

where R is the total number of legitimate Republican votes, D is the total number of legitimate Democratic votes, B is the net bezzle of Democratic votes, and T is the total number of votes excluding third parties.

Since 2020 included a secular trend against Trump, this will tend to give a conservative estimate of the bezzle. Using this methodology, we get a conservative bezzle estimate of 2%:

Thus, any bezzle-addled swing state won by Democrats with a 2% margin would turn Republican in a zero-bezzle situation. Interestingly, it appears that there is not a single state won by Harris by less than a 2% margin, so at a first approximation nothing would change in the electoral college count, but it would probably add 1-2% to Trump’s popular vote total.

Remember, this is a conservative estimate. If we attempt to correct for the 2020 secular trend against Trump, we estimate a much larger pre-DeSantis-reform bezzle:

It’s all linked in the spreadsheet, but this model assumes a 2.3% national trend towards Democrats in 2020 (estimated from the national popular vote), and calculates a net 4.29% bezzle. This would theoretically only flip Minnesota and New Hampshire in 2024 (though there may be cultural reasons to doubt much of a real bezzle in New Hampshire), but nearly every light blue state won by Harris is reduced to a margin of less than 1%.

Electoral results, however, are not static, but subject to feedback loops. Elimination of the bezzle would make all of the swing states that went for Trump a lock, and allow Republican candidates to invest money in light blue states like Virginia, New Mexico, New Hampshire, and Minnesota, making those states competitive and resulting in a likely landslide.

Exporting the Florida model to all of the states via Congressional action on federal elections must be a top priority for Republicans. Just as lottery winners would be well-advised to invest and compound their winnings, electoral winners must invest a substantial portion of political capital in power itself when the window of opportunity is available.

Abortion Is Still a Loser Issue for Republicans

I welcomed the news that the abortion legalization initiative had failed in Florida but later learned that’s only because Florida requires a 60% threshold to pass. It is still true that 57% of Floridians voted for abortion on demand:

I think it’s a bit of an understatement to say that our future felon-in-chief, Donald Trump, has incredibly canny political instincts. Trump has always touted the need for “exceptions” to abortion law, namely rape, incest, and the life of the mother. J.D. Vance, while remaining personally 100% pro-life (and voting consistent with this), says that Republicans are no longer trusted on the issue. Voters suspect that any abortion restrictions are merely a stepwise progression to a complete ban from conception, including morning-after contraception and IVF, and so reject all intermediate proposals.

Voters may be right, especially as the pro-life movement has purity-spiraled into its “abolitionist” era post-Roe. In becoming more absolutist against exceptions, pro-lifers are sacrificing the good for the perfect.

While it may represent a disordered formal morality, the instincts behind the desire for a rape or incest exception (as the latter almost always involves the former) are healthy. The foundation of the self-domesticating process of civilization is purging the genes of violent males. Medieval Europe, leading up to the Industrial Revolution, executed something like 1% of the male population annually.

Women have a primordial fear of being forced to carry the baby of a defective, low-status male, because maternal instincts, upon birth, will enslave her to raising his offspring. For “she who faces death by torture for each life beneath her breast,” the ancestral environment required stable relationships with high-status fathers who could provide resources for survival.

Yet women are physically weaker than nearly all men, including those men whose only practical choice for reproduction is rape. This is why low-status men who don’t know their place in the pecking order and attempt to play out of their league are seen as “creepy,” i.e. both disgusting and dangerous. This drive for high status in a mate is so strong that in historically monogamous, Christian Europe, something like 20-30% of women chose to avoid marriage entirely given their disappointing options.

Hardline pro-lifers will argue that rapes only account for something like 0.1% of abortions, but that logic cuts both ways. In refusing to settle for a 99% solution, and insisting on no exceptions, they set themselves averse to women’s deepest instinctual fears. To be clear, if I could unilaterally set policy, I would protect developing embryos as human persons from the point of implantation, but I question the wisdom of pushing all the chips in on this one issue in a democratic system.

I am reminded of St. Thomas Aquinas’ distinction between sin and crime. Not all sins can be crimes for practical reasons, and the exceptions strike me as possibly one of these prudential situations. In forbidding them and indulging in abolitionist rhetoric, the most extreme pro-lifers have undermined voters’ trust in any regulation at all of abortion.

The Rhetorical War on White Women

In the lead-up to the election, I saw many trollish right-wing accounts criticizing white women for their supposed support of the Harris ticket. Meanwhile, the Left tried various manipulative tactics of their own in guilting white women into their coalition.

Exit polls showed a different story:

This makes the right-wing criticism seem downright silly. Women overall support Democrats more often than men, but whites are by far the least sex-polarized group. We can compute a sex-polarization index by ethnic group:

White men were only 13% more likely than white women to vote for Trump, whereas black men were 200% more likely and Latino men 45% more likely⁴ to vote Republican than women of the same ethnicity.

White women have been a soft rhetorical target for both sides in recent years. They were excoriated as “Karens” by the Left for demanding basic standards of customer service and public behavior, or else traitors to the Coalition of the Fringes. The Right accused them of being quislings to their natural interests. It turns out, however, that they are the women least likely, as Allie Beth Stuckey explains it, to politicize maternal instincts.

Conservatives ought to exercise the same political caution in a universal suffrage environment in generalizing about women as they do about any other group. “Repeal the 19th” is more of a political loser, in directly alienating more conservative voters, than a politically unthinkable campaign to “Repeal the 15th.” And I say this as someone who sees politics as purely instrumental in achieving policy ends, rather than seeing democracy as an end in itself⁵.

The Elon Effect

I was curious to see if Elon’s concentrated efforts in Pennsylvania yielded results exceeding the other Midwestern battleground states. Unfortunately, any effect appears to be noise:

The good news is that Elon is a rational iterator, and I’m sure he engaged in some hypothesis testing that will inform future experiments. Politics, because it attracts people from soft, non-analytical fields, is ripe for disruption by engineering methodologies. Increasingly, it seems that most areas of expertise are BS except to the extent they can be quantified, and anything that can be quantified is an engineering problem, and for that, Elon is self-evidently among the world’s best⁶. The Left may rue the day they radicalized him.

Trump’s Embrace of the Culture War

Trump, I think due to his personal baggage, has mostly avoided culture war issues on sexuality until this election. However, internal data showing mass opposition to the outer fringes of the transgender controversies made him comfortable opposing both boys in girls’ sports and taxpayer-funded paraphilia-informed cosmetic surgeries. The campaign spent more on the infamous “they/them” ad than any other.

Many social conservatives remain frustrated that these conflicts are fought by proxy rather than directly, i.e. opposition is limited to things like sports, or taxpayer funding, rather than the core issue. I’m sympathetic to these concerns, but I think there may be an explanation for why addressing these issues by proxy is more effective.

For high-investment, k-selected populations, a feature of biologically functional sexuality is a sense of privacy and propriety. Just as an optimally functioning internal combustion engine has seals and valves to control and direct the burning of fuel, optimally healthy sexuality means hiding sex away in private bedrooms in monogamous relationships.

By contrast, a feature of almost all non-reproductive, dysfunctional paraphilias is the enhancement of deficient natural sexual functioning with the thrill of transgression. Necessarily, transgression requires an audience, and of course the bigger the audience the greater the thrill, dare I say a rapey thrill in a sense, of getting off from others’ non-consensual participation in public displays. To normally functioning people, this is too gross to contemplate, and their instinct is one of both disgust and avoidance, to look away and forget.

Proxy issues, like protecting their daughters from biological males in sports competitions, provide a way for normal people to push back without having to directly contemplate the protective disgust they feel when thinking more directly about these issues. I think it’s a winning approach for Republicans, in contrast to past Religious Right rhetoric that was a little too explicit in its descriptions, which normal people simply want to block from their minds.

The good news is that the Left seems to be doubling down on the fringiest fringe of their coalition. The old-school Tejano gentleman who served as chair of the Texas Democratic Party was forced to resign for daring to question the wisdom of pushing this issue in the wake of the election. Black commentators, who know how unpopular these issues are in their community, are being policed by white liberals for engaging in “slurs.” Many more normal Democrats will likely politically disengage, as MSNBC ratings are in the tank.

Perhaps the best Machiavellian move for Republicans would be to develop anonymous Left-coded social media accounts to attack as insufficiently pure any Democrat who questions their narrative, siccing the woke mob on those who might help them fix their problems. Conservatives should want them wallowing in bitterness, to double down, as Saul Alinsky explained: “Make opponents live up to their own book of rules.” Conservatives badly need to keep them believing that not allowing 200-lb. boys to mow over girls on the soccer field is literally genocide, and who can compromise on genocide?

As one Left commenter put it:

Smart Republicans will want to amplify the influence of views like this and suppress the moderate Left, as it will enable a generational dynasty⁷ of power, with time and space to stop and reverse much of our national dysfunction.

1. Particularly in his choice of Gaetz for AG and Gabbard for Intelligence, though most entertaining is the hardline Calvinist SecDef nominee with a “Deus Vult” tattoo on his bicep. As I mentioned to a friend, Trump needs a coterie of “half-crazy” outsider loyalists to get the job done.

2. I find it amusing that the most cowardly Republicans who worship the Constitution and “norms” are also universally the most sycophantic admirers of Lincoln. Such a position is duplicitous or else historically illiterate. Indeed, it’s difficult to find any one of the ten amendments constituting the Bill of Rights that Lincoln did not violate. I am reminded of the old joke where a man makes a woman an indecent proposal for $1MM, which she accepts, and then follows up with an offer for $100, which she indignantly rejects, to which her interlocutor replies, “Madam, we have already established that you are a whore, now we are merely negotiating on price.”

3. I think there’s a strong legal argument here as well. As a co-sovereign, equal branch of government, the executive is not just another plaintiff or defendant who should have to wait in line when there’s a Constitutional question. Delay by SCOTUS that interferes with executive action should be treated as an abdication of their sovereignty.

4. The gains among minority voters, especially men, are remarkable. I’m afraid the GOP will learn the wrong lessons on this, though, thinking that a 45/55 R/D split is a win that they can somehow make up on volume by supporting more immigration. These results will inevitably be overplayed, as the GOP tends to seek validation in these votes, as opposed to their core constituency, and betraying their acquiescence in Left morality that some groups are more equal than others.

It’s also amusing that Trump has achieved a multicultural Right-aligned coalition, the long-held dream of squishes from George W. Bush to Russell Moore, but the rhetoric required to achieve their dream is terribly declasse’ for their tastes. Scott Greer overstates the case a bit but coins the clever phrase “multiracial nativism” to describe the Trump movement.

Jewish voters continued their traditional voting patterns, despite Trump’s good-faith offer to be their advocate on Israel policy. It’s hard to imagine Trump, who is not constrained by dispensationalist fables, spending much political capital to help if they won’t contribute to the coalition. I predict lots of pro-Israel rhetoric to appease Christian Zionists but a deal more favorable to the Palestinians than many expect.

5. I would support disenfranchising myself if people with last names starting with vowels were shown to be statistically harmful to conservative victories and it was politically possible to do so. It would be nothing but upside given voting is an economically irrational act that wastes my time with little probability of marginal effect.

6. Elon seems to be unique among founders in not allowing “best practices” to slow-roll his progress. I’m currently reading a book for founders that includes methodologies like this to help deal with self-centered normies who lack emotional self-control. How does anyone get any work done when bosses must work a part-time job as conflict resolution facilitators? Elon’s approach to just firing people insufficiently on the spectrum to not compromise his mission obsession is coldly rational.

7. There is the risk the Fed uses his election as an opportunity to let some air out of the overpressurized economic tires when inflation re-emerges, after cutting rates leading up to the election. Trump may be the singular politician able to blame this on the other side, just as he broke every economic indicator this year pointing to re-election for the incumbent party.