Downfall
Yesterday’s events were mostly the doing of a president who, in defeat, proved unable to contain his base impulses.
Let’s get the following three disclaimers out of the way.
#1: Yours truly would have crawled over broken glass to vote for Donald Trump in November twenty-five times had the law permitted it. If the clock could be dialed back two months, I’d do it all over again, and the barrel of a gun on my temple couldn’t persuade me to vote for Joe Biden instead.
I’m surrounded by those considered to be part of the Trump “base”, many of whom have truly gotten the shaft in our globalized economy and deserve our sympathy. Twenty years ago they might have resided under the banner of such Democrats as John Edwards, who lamented the existence of “the two Americas” in his failed 2004 presidential bid. Today, they’re disparaged as “crazies”, “deplorables”, “chumps”, “racist” and “dumb” by Democrats just like Edwards. The loyalty of politicians demands blind reciprocity from voters.
The Democrats have done nothing in the past twenty-five years to sustainably relieve the plight of these people, quite the opposite in fact, and will do nothing in the next four.
#2: Please spare us the progressive crocodile tears in the wake of the storming of the Capitol yesterday. The extreme Left set entire city centers on fire all summer with nary a peep from Democrats and their PR sock puppets in the media. Democratic mayors tumbled over one another to exhibit their wokeness in the face of an outright Marxist insurrection, advancing the argument that, to quote weepy Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey, the BLM riots were “the result of so much built up anger and sadness.” Our next president himself had the audacity to call Antifa “an idea, not an organization” during one of the presidential debates.
The customary deterrence from politically-motivated violence — a firm display of force by the police and if necessary the National Guard — was thoroughly dismantled in 2020. Now we’re reaping the whirlwind. The rules you make for yourselves you also make for others. For what it’s worth, some guy named Mark Alexis has been writing about the prospect of ochlocracy for two years now. But who ever listens to me?
#3: Finally, let’s not forget the years which led us here: The highest echelons of the FBI and CIA essentially colluded with the Democrats and the media to concoct the narrative that the Trump campaign had colluded with the Russians. In retrospect, it’s safe to say that the Trump presidency never fully recovered from these allegations, the invalidation of which surely didn’t require two years of investigation by Bob Mueller. This level of undermining of a duly elected president of the United States amounted to nothing short of treason.
It’s interesting to observe how both the professional pundits in the media and the empty-headed nitwits on our social media timelines now poo-pooing what went down in our nation’s capital conveniently gloss over half a decade of Russia, Ukraine, Kavanaugh, and race riots fomented by the Left. Trump has every right to be bitter and resentful about all of it.
All this said, yesterday’s events were sickening, and, setting aside the actual perpetrators, Donald Trump deserves the majority of the blame for this debacle.
It’s one thing to challenge the outcome of an election in the courts. It’s quite another to keep revving up your base with the elusive promise of evidence, never materialized, that the election was stolen by Biden. Few people believe that the vote counts in Atlanta, Milwaukee and Philadelphia happened without irregularities. But the outlandish claims made by Lin Wood and Sydney Powell served not so much as assertions to be adjudicated in the courtroom but as rumors intended to set a narrative in postmodernist fashion.
After two months of frenzied litigation, who would think it would be a splendid idea to bring thousands of people to the grounds outside the Capitol building only to rile them up even further with more heated rhetoric?
I regret to say this, but Trump has derailed. Incapable of accepting his defeat, he is dangerously close to becoming the silly caricature the Left has painted of him. While Trump was never the latent dictator so many nonsensically claimed he was, one is currently reminded of Adolf Hitler in his final days in the Berlin bunker, pushing army units around on the map which in real life no longer exist. Those around him look nervously at each other in disbelief as their leader is giving them their impossible marching orders.
It’s hard to overestimate the damage Trump is doing to his party. Energy which should have been spent on winning the Georgia run-off elections was squandered on sulking over and chasing after imaginary fraud. Partly as a result of this, the Democrats now control the Senate. As they will seek to eliminate the Senate filibuster, statehood for Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia is now on the horizon, as are higher taxes, a Green New Deal, and packing the Supreme Court, which will subsequently be rubber stamping all of the aforementioned. The United States will be a fundamentally different country (not to mention a bankrupt nation) when all is said and done, and Americans will suffer for it.
In addition, the Woke will feel emboldened by this Democratic electoral success to ramp up their scorched earth policies in the culture wars. The limits of speech will close in on us ever further as new protective classes are identified whose plight concerned nobody the day before yesterday. Big Tech grows more resolute by the minute in its censorship of those outside the mainstream, perhaps encouraged by the silence in the wake of Twitter and Facebook’s decision to temporarily suspend Trump’s accounts on these platforms yesterday.
Though cloaked in a veil of “niceness” and “respect”, social justice grievance politics presents instead a looming specter of tyranny. A resounding Trump win in November would have dealt it a humongous blow. Instead, the opposite happened.
Finally, Trump’s downfall also brings with it the prospect of an intra-party war in the GOP. The Democrats and their allies in the media will hold yesterday’s events over the Republicans’ heads for the next four years, and this will energize the Never Trump faction within the party.
Nothing lasts forever, as they always say, and this is especially true in democratic politics. However, if I had to wage a bet, I’d say there are hard times ahead for the GOP. Establishment Republicans will try with all their might to root out Trumpism and push the party back to the center. They may succeed in their efforts, but it’s hard to envision electoral success with such a strategy, estranged as the Trump base will become in result. These folks are not going to turn out for Mitt Romney 2.0 in 2024. After yesterday, do we think they will take the continuous abuse and alienation lying down?
Yesterday was a sad day for the United States, and regrettably, it was mostly the doing of a president who, in defeat, proved unable to contain his base impulses. What makes it even worse is that Trump’s downfall may also inaugurate America’s.
