There can be little #RESISTANCE to the notion that last years presidential election was a transformative event for America and the world. Up until this week I’d say that the magnitude of the Trump earthquake had not seen an accurate measurement, but now the ground is starting to settle and a view of the broad horizon is possible. A tsunami is building in the sea and moving relentlessly toward the shoreline — time to move to higher ground.
The opportunity that Trump saw and exploited grew out of a historical anomaly fashioned by Bill and Hillary Clinton that opened up the Democrat party to destruction. This irregularity was explored in some depth in a KOTCB blog post titled Prophets and Nomads and builds upon the concepts in Steve Bannon’s favorite prophesy “The Fourth Turning” which holds that a “grey champion” from the Baby Boom generation should, at this moment in history, lead a the Millennials through an American crisis and transformation with lasting impact for our society and politics. In 2008 this grey champion was running but she did not have much love from her parties leadership and they backed a (truly) dark horse candidate who looked and sounded great, drove the Millennials wild and would be easy for K St. and The Hill to roll once he got in office. Thus we got eight years of Obama as POTUS when he should have been, and under normal conditions would have been, VP under an established elder candidate and prepping for his 2016 presidential run which he would have won with ease. In other words, the Democrats got it backwards in 2008 and if the front running primary candidate had been anyone but HRC things would have been very different then and now. HillBilly blew it and the fact that their avarice and maniacal lust for a 1600 Penn. Ave address has brought their political party to the eve of destruction is poetic justice - and that’s the only justice they’ll ever get.
So 2015 comes around and Hillary Clinton is back, but this time she’s rigged the primary system, the media and the DNC (including the Super Delegates) to make sure she wins. She’s not the only person in the Democrat party who wants to be POTUS which means she’s got to fix it so there won’t be any more neophytes dropping in to spoil her coronation or any old bulls spiteful enough to take her on. There was a solid hit on Hillary early on when the State Dept. (John Kerry) leaked the existence of a private email server that fell outside the law and opened up an existential threat to Her candidacy but you can bet that the rogue server had so much dirt on it that nobody in DC wanted to find those “missing emails.” The Democrats were stuck with Her and had three options to choose from:
Plan B — Shake her up with the private email server and replace her with a better candidate (Obama tried to push Biden in the summer of 2015).
Plan C — Comey indicts HRC for the private email server and Clinton Foundation graft (they passed on this in June 2016 but dropped it big league in October 2016 after tabulation of early voting showed Her to be a sure loser)
Plan D — Drag the Trump presidency into a mud puddle and drown it with McCarthyite hysteria about Russian collusion and general administrative incompetence (i.e. #ImpeachTrump).
Plan B never happened and the Dem Primaries were a bust. Plan C should have happened, but didn’t — except that it did, but too late to do anything but give the Dems a poor excuse for losing. Plan D is a Witch Hunt with a real witch hiding at the end of the trail of bread crumbs. All of this failure brought us to last week and The Crisis of #NeverTrumpism with every media outlet declaring the Trump presidency a bust because, hey, he never should have been elected in the first place. The actual cause of this crisis is never really verbalized by “conservatives” or “liberals” but was explored through metaphor in a KOTCB blog post titles Opening Day.
To describe it succinctly, Trump is playing the political game like a Democrat with a goal of remaking the GOP, the established political order and the United States of America in such a way that it is the Republican party and its “Red Model” that sets the political, cultural and social order for the next 70 years. It’s a bold proposition and The #NeverTrump Crisis Continued all week as events at home and abroad put Trump’s plan to the test. The US senate about to give Merick Garland’s SCOTUS seat to Neil Gorsuch, a shake up on the National Security Council, North Korea firing missals and Assad gassing his hapless subjects in Syria all looked like a trainwreck to those who #Resist change. Even Trump loyalists were getting over heated and sending me crazy emails in the middle of the night asking “WTF is wrong with Trump?”
Then Thursday night Trump tossed his Tomahawks at Al Assad and changed the conversation — honestly, it’s even more effective than tweeting. On Friday a new SCOTUS judge passed through the senate gauntlet with probably two more lined up over the next four years. On Saturday all the #Neocons and #NeverTrump haters who couldn’t wait for Trump to resign were singing his praises and the Plan D (Russian collusion) story sounded stupid to everyone but the Alt-Left that simply can’t drop that bone. Donald J. Tump is going to be POTUS for the next four years and nobody is going to kick him out of office. If you Look up in the sky you’ll see there’s just enough light to make out the approaching tidal wave and power surging in its mighty currents.
