I largely agree with Andy McCarthy’s requiem. Trump has always been his own worst enemy. I have no hope for the Biden/Harris presidency, other than taking back the House, and perhaps the Senate, in two years. But they’ll only be able to do damage with executive orders, because I think that both houses are already gridlocked, though with nominal Democrat control.
48 thoughts on “The Tragedy Of Trump’s Presidency”
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Uh, yeah, about taking back the House or Senate. They’re just going to stuff the ballot boxes until they get the result they want. Elections are irrelevant now, except for who counts the votes. The courts? What a joke, they won’t even do their jobs at all, absolutely refuse.
I don’t see any way this ends other than civil war.
The courts will help if the lawsuits are filed in a timely manner. Non-Democrats need to start to restore electoral integrity immediately, to prevent a recurrence of this fiasco.
Sorry Rand, you’re not going to litigate your way out of this anymore that you can vote or argue your way out.
Check out the Strauss–Howe generational theory (also known as the “4th Turning” hypothesis). It postulates that Western civilization goes through a major (and violent) social change every 80 years or so. The last “crisis” period was 1929-1945, starting with the Depression and ending with WWII. The previous crisis periods were the Civil War and the American Revolution.
On the plus side, if you make it to 2030 or so, you’re theoretically due for about 20 years of rebuilding and prosperity (the “high” period). I would wager that this will include the founding of a permanent installation on Mars.
Did you not notice how the PA State Supreme Court said before the election “you can’t challenge the law authorizing mailed ballots to everyone until after the election”, then said after the election “it’s too late, you should have challenged that law before the election”? Same court, same judges?
That’s going to happen to everyone who brings lawsuits to prevent election fraud before it happens, or expose it afterward – the courts will find an excuse to dismiss the suits without considering any evidence, and contradict themselves if they have to.
+42
That’s easy to deal with, and any decent lawyer (which includes even some of the rump lawyers) knows it. File suit at the time of the actions, and even if dismissed, you can preserve ypur standing for after the election.
Yet no one in the Republican party in Pensylvania or Georgia seems to have thought about it at the time. Perhaps they assumed they’d win by an easy margin?
I agree, Ed. I’m anticipating and preparing for civil war within 12 calendar months. Best of luck to everyone.
The dems can only carry out such manipulation in cities/ states under their control. My vote in SC still counts, for now.
That’s how I feel right now in Texas, but the Dems now control all the major counties and are tightening lockdown restrictions with Biden now in office to maybe overrule the governor.
You’re not going to get anywhere sane if you stick to this kind of delusional thinking. But I appreciate your willed helplessness.
You want to make yourself sad? Think about what the Democrats can get Trump to do now that they have a good chance of tossing him in prison. Start a new party? Shit talk the GOP? They can get him to dance to their tune now. Trump isn’t loyal to the GOP, he’s loyal to himself, so of course he’d take this out if offered.
Talk about some kooky conspiracy theory misinformation.
Plus, it’s gonna be entertaining as the cabal around the President-In-Waiting start to clash with the other cabal running the Ventrioquist-Dummy-In-Chief. I expect we are going to see conflicting reports about President Gabbo’s mental state (or lack thereof), little hints dropped about the corruption surrounding the other, and all sorts of attempts at displaying how one is more “woke” than the other.
They need him to last two years so Kamala can run for President twice after taking over once Biden is removed.
The cat fight between “Dr” Jill Biden and Harris should be entertaining.
If you guys are done with him, could you ask President Trump if he’d like to run Australia?
Seriously, good luck guys. As goes the United States, so goes the rest of the world. I can’t see voting as relevant and the courts either. Any lawsuits in future will be stonewalled as they were this time.
I think this could be the pivotal event that ends Western civilization.
If SpaceX manages to send people to Mars, I’ll be on the first fleet of Starships.
Elon Musk is in a race against time now.
As goes the United States, so goes the rest of the world.
People on both sides of the spectrum say this, but I’m not convinced it’s true. From my POV I see a lot of people rooting for the US to fail, particularly in Europe. Nothing would make Greta Thunberg and Angela Merkel happier than total destruction of the US.
That occurs to me too, Ed. I see he’s bought a couple of oil rigs for offshore launch and landing operations. Got them at a great price, too.
Might avoid the looming EPA issues on shore at Boca Chica. If there were any endangered species around the current operational site, I hope they are well and truly extinct now.
“Thus were two eminently winnable seats lost in the run-off earlier this month”
Were they winnable? People act like they were slam dunks but then why was there a run off in the first place? And all of the blame is placed in Trump, ignoring the actions of Democrats in that race or even COVID confusion and everything else.
When will our betters realize the game being played against them? It was never about Trump. No matter what Republican was elected, the media and Democrats would have acted the same. “If only Trump acted this way, Democrats would have been nicer, media coverage would have been more positive, and there wouldn’t have been all these riots.”
Trump didn’t order Democrats to act this way. They acted this way as a matter of strategy and they would have done so no matter what Republican was President and they will do so again should Republicans ever get the chance to elect a President.
Trump has character flaws but Democrats have agency. Reading this stuff is like reading articles in foreign policy that don’t allow other countries the agency if determining their own goals and aspirations and how best to achieve them. There are other players and each player is carrying out their own strategy.
Trump was one of the factors in losing those two senate seats in the runoff. The incessant rhetoric about the stolen election and corrupted vote counting had some voters stay home as their votes wouldn’t count. This from someone I know in Georgia that mentioned that at least two Republicans that he knows personally didn’t bother with the runoff because they ‘knew’ the election was rigged. Fraud or not, when people are convinced to stay home, elections are lost. We’re screwed anyway so don’t bother IS a losing strategy.
“stolen election”
Well, maybe if someone–anyone–were willing to actually look at the fraud claims instead of ignoring them or dismissing them for ridiculous reasons, people would’ve dropped it. Instead, the Democrats and courts at every level insisted on acting as if they had something to hide, starting with ejecting Republican ballot watchers and covering up windows so nobody could see what was going on.
Yes, he was a factor, not the singular cause. The candidates themselves were also a factor.
Both Perdue and Ossof had lower vote totals than in the general, with Perdue getting around 250k less votes vs about 100k less for Ossof, while Warnock and Loeffler both saw substantial increases in votes due to the nature of the first round election. Loeffler saw an increase in 922k votes vs the 671k increase for Warnock.
Why did Ossof lose votes?
After any lose, or even a win, there are any number of things that could/should have been done to improve performance. Trump could have done better but so could the candidates themselves and the party as a whole. I don’t know how you could expect Trump to ignore election fraud. He certainly could have handled the issue better but that wouldn’t have changed any of the media coverage of him.
Here is the Fulton Country Director of Elections saying they sent people home at 10:30pm. It sounds like he was about to say because he didn’t think it would be a good idea for them to be around but changed it to say there wasn’t anything for them to do. But we saw the video where after the observers were asked to leave, the counters stopped counting and started running ballots through machines as soon as the observers were out of the room. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pGGOT30GDY
The media has since claimed that this never happened.
You can’t prove after dirty ballots have been introduced which ones are dirty. You can only look at the system during the election and this was a clear sign of election fraud. Was it enough to swing the election? No one knows and no one knows how many schemes the Democrats were running.
I think this is a good summary, and maybe better: Codevilla on Trump.
For the last few months, we’ve heard how Trump was going to “unleash the kraken” and other such hyperbole, how there were going to be pardons and unclassifications and all the other things would be done, and nothing happened. Repeated disappointments and letdowns. Codevilla reminds us that this has been the case since Jan 2017, in that Trump would take on the Swamp, then back off when they reacted. In his way, he was another Bush the Younger, the guy you felt you had to support defend, because the alternative was worse.
I still don’t understand why the attacked him mercilessly, when they could have easily buttered him up and played to his ego and had him “grow in office.” Win the midterms and keep him from accomplishing anything for two years. Then betray him the usual way by undermining him as the election approached. Instead they’ve destroyed huge chunks of the economy and have alienated half the country and they are still trying to start a shooting war. Why?
If Trump won a second term but lost the Senate then his second term would have been attacked and hobbled even more.
At least the Senate prevented fake-impeachment conviction.
If we want elections to be fair then we have to start electing local reps and state legislators who also want fair elections.
The time for waiting around for the GOP to do what is right is far far over.
“I largely agree with Andy McCarthy’s requiem. Trump has always been his own worst enemy. ”
I think Trump had many enemies and mostly disagree with Andy McCarthy. Though if meant Trump the Disruptor is going to have enemies, obviously. But Trump was voted for, not because he is likeable {he might imagine he is, but I doubt it}. He voted for because he wasn’t a wimp, like many Republicans particularly Romeny and McCain. It unlikely if we didn’t have these two useless clowns running before, Trump would not have won his primary.
So Republican base wanted a fighter. And they got more than a reasonable fighter, they got the Disruptor.
And other summoning of Trump relates to the fake news, the bad intel, that got us into wars. And establishment that got us into wars and was selling out America.
So any reasonable rep fighter, would gone with doing something about illegal immigration- polling indicated it was something the American public wanted done. Though matter wasn’t resolve other making 450 mile border wall, which was supposedly just step one.
Ann Counter thinks border wall wasn’t built, that Trump is lying about his promise to build a wall. But seems like Trump did build the wall which was needed. I would not claim that more wall shouldn’t be built, but it was enough, to do the rest of what needed to done about illegal immigration. No matter what the border wall looked like, the important aspect is the rest what needs to be done.
Though I have no confident in politicans doing the rest. Maybe since Joe Biden has already screwed up on the issue, Joe {if he had a brain] might be motivated to do something about it. Though whether Reps actually want solve this problem, is not clear to me.
Politicians tend not want to do what they campaign on, because they are lying bastards. And they are as stupid as bricks- and generally just plain evil.
The singular obsession with “the wall” is tiresome. Somehow Trump got Mexico to cut the flow and close their own southern border for the last three or so years. That was far more important than any physical wall. What good is a [expletive deleted] wall when the next guy orders that the gates at the customs stations be opened and helps ’em through?
I think the wall is mostly about inhibiting Cartel activity- drug and
human trafficking.
And it should lower cost to maintain border security.
Yes, another foreign policy win for Trump that the media hid from view. Can’t have racist Trump portrayed as getting along with Central and South Americans to achieve mutual benefits.
“For the last few months, we’ve heard how Trump was going to “unleash the kraken” and other such hyperbole,”
Trump never said that. That was Sydney Powell.
Yeah, but I heard somewhere that when Sydney announced that, Trump said “She’d better get kraken.” Or something similar, I don’t know. Anyway, it’s his fault, right?
And as it turned out, Sidney Powell had no Kraken.
Or she did and the courts refused to even look at the evidence.
“I have no hope for the Biden/Harris presidency, other than taking back the House, and perhaps the Senate, in two years. But they’ll only be able to do damage with executive orders, because I think that both houses are already gridlocked, though with nominal Democrat control.”
Fat chance. Would have to agree with many of the posters here. The Republican establishment badly miscalculated by not challenging the obviously fraudulent mail-in-ballots. They chose to believe that Trump is a uniquely polarizing figure, once he is gone things will go back to normal (they won’t).
1) Mail in ballots are likely here to stay. The Stacy Abrams’ vote generating apparatus will be duplicated in many other states; vote harvesting and the like.
2) Courts (and legislatures) will be intimidated into not ruling against the continued use of said mail in ballots. They will call such an attempt at “voter suppression”. To some degree this is the chickens coming home to roost for the Republican establishment; their overzealous efforts at selectively closing polling places in minority neighborhoods no doubt provoked this push back. If the courts try to do something even at the federal court level there is the threat of stacking the courts once they get rid of the Senate filibuster rule.
3) Continue the efforts to pass laws at the state level requiring state electors to be allocated based on the National popular vote not state individual votes as currently. Then you only have to “stuff ballots” in California or NY rather than having to do it nationally in battle ground states.
Likely result? Nearly one-party rule at the national level for the foreseeable future.
One defense would be to encourage states nominally controlled by Republican Legislatures (Georgia?, Pennsylvania?, others?) with these corrupt cities to adopt the Maine/Nebraska method of apportioning electors. Let ’em stuff their ballot boxes to their black flabby little hearts’ desire, and all they’d do is assure themselves of a couple of votes they’d get anyway, instead of letting them steal the entire state.
“One defense would be to encourage states nominally controlled by Republican Legislatures (Georgia?, Pennsylvania?, others?) with these corrupt cities to adopt the Maine/Nebraska method of apportioning electors.”
How much longer will the Republicans be in charge of the majority of those States’ districts? With the reapportionment of said districts after the 2020 Census is processed there will be calls for another method of drawing the new congressional and state legislative district lines besides the traditional “gerrymandering”. Figure on law-suited pressured court ordered “independent boards” to oversee the new districts to prevent racist redistricting “voter suppression”. If the federal courts balk at this that’s yet another reason the Dems will favor court stacking. Maybe up to the POTUS level or maybe just the lower district courts. Then the filibuster free Dems will intimidate POTUS into not interfering for fear of their being “stacked” as well into irrelevence. The Rino Republicans IMHO have seriously screwed the pooch this time by not backing Trump; throwing him and his supporters under the bus like they did the tea-party a few years back. This time they will likely live to regret it.
Meant to say “SCOTUS” not POTUS.
Sorry, Rand, but I have to agree with the commenter who said you’re not going to litigate your way out of this situation. I also don’t think secession or civil war are real options, either, since secession would only produce two greatly weakened states, while a civil war would produce generations of bitterness no matter who won. No, I think any resistance should try a modification of Daddy Bush’s “A thousand points of light slogan” apply it to the Left and hit them with “A thousand points of confusion.” Make them play whack-a-mole across a continent-sized country.
https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/adding-strategic-nonviolence-unconventional-warfare-doctrine
I address this to Rand:
Do you know anybody, anybody at all in your social circle, who is openly, unabashedly and without reservations a Trump supporter?
Through a complicated chain of circumstances, I know a man who lives outside The Bubble ™, a professional musician who plays the French horn, a retired school teacher who taught high school band.
He is a union man, driving the smallest US-made GM car that he keeps for a long time and decorates with union and Democratic Party candidate bumper stickers. Not particularly vocal about it with his school-teacher wife standing there giving him the stink eye, he was less-than-enthusiastic about Hillary yet supportive of Bernie.
In August 2015, I was invited to a “bash” he and his wife hosted. Again, this is in a Drive Past portion of Flyover Country where the women gathered on one set of law chairs and the men on a different set of lawn chairs. The alcohol was generously served and this man’s friends got to talking, and boy did they like Donald Trump.
I live in The Bubble ™, and this was quite the eye-opening experience. It is not like I am unexposed to Conservative and Libertarian opinion, but it is all prefaced by “I like what Trump is doing on judges, but his vulgarity and Tweets don’t do him any good . . .”, which I guess is how a Conservative/Libertarian is expected to talk inside The Bubble ™ if one expresses such opinions at all.
At the time, I just did not “get” why Mr. Trump was so popular among the men I had just met. Innocently and naively I asked “What about Governor Walker”? Mr. Walker also had presidential ambitions. He was hated, hated with a white heat by right-thinking people, but he was pretty popular outside Dane County and thought of favorably over at Powerlineblog, Hot Air and maybe even here on Rand’s fine site at a time when these opinion leaders were rolling their eyes about Donald Trump as President.
The response was something along “The Koch Brothers” being backers of Governor Walker. I pressed my informants further, “So Donald Trump is funding his own campaign whereas the Koch Brothers are funding Scott Walker’s campaign? What is there to prefer Donald Trump’s plan for America over the Koch Brothers’?”
The answer I got was “Trump speaks his mind.” It wasn’t anything about “Trump will build The Wall” or “Trump will bring back our jobs” or “Trump will give us Energy Independence” or “Trump will not get us into more wars” or “Only Trump can beat Hillary.” It was “Trump speaks his mind”, and I have seen this in reports of polls and focus groups.
Rand, if you and everyone else here and Andy McCarthy wanted someone who thought carefully about what to say before engaging the neural pathways to his vocal apparatus, who thought carefully about what the Progressive Left might find worth of cancelling or shaming before speaking, you all could have gotten behind Jeb Bush.
Heck, you all could have backed Ted Cruz — prior to Super Tuesday and right after South Carolina, I was telling all of you that you had to rally around Senator Cruz if we were to have any hope, any hope at all of stopping the Trump juggernaut. Did you? I don’t think so.
So to everyone going on and on an on about “Trump is his worst enemy” and “Trump should have made allies”, and “Trump should have backed off the Tweets long before Jack Dorsey bounced him out”, carry on with your life in The Bubble ™ because this is not about you, who will probably do OK under Mr. Biden’s administration given the Wall Street connections of people who have his ear.
All of those Help Wanted banners up and down US 41/Interstate 41 through the Fox River Valley, the world’s center for toilet paper, signaling a Renaissance for factory jobs in America? Maybe those will become a historical memory?
Total extermination avoids the problem of lingering bitterness. Has anybody seen hordes of the old French aristocracy still nursing grievances and causing trouble over the dust-up of 1789? I certainly haven’t.
Now perhaps some think the conflict will deeply divide society, reflecting the nearly even split of votes n 2016 and 2020. But half of those on the liberal side are just virtue signaling, hoping to get a job promotion or a better set of party invites.
Perhaps there would be one or two regiments of volunteers will to lay down their lives for Joe Biden, but most of those will likely have undiagnosed mental disorders. The rest of his army will probably be paid by the hour, show up to take some selfies, and then desert to the nearest Starbucks to talk about how the army needs to hire a catering service.
Now sure, I’m probably as overly optimistic and over-confident as the average pre-war hawk from 1640, 1775, 1860, 1914, or 1938, and the war will probably go nuclear, with many of our major cities getting vaporized. Yes, I am that optimistic. Total victory is attainable.
Plus, hunting mutants in the charred remains of the cities does sound like fun, and perhaps autopsies of them would establish that their really are seven or eight different sexes, and we’ll all realize that the progressives were right about at least one thing, in retrospect.
“But how would either side get their hands on nuclear weapons?” you might ask. Well, quite obviously from all the Trump supporting white cis-gendered males who guard the stockpiles of them!
Headline tomorrow at Vox, and the day after at CNN and NPR:
“US nuclear stockpile guarded by Trump-supporting white cis-gendered males with ties to white supremacist groups. Democrats demand an investigation.”
Then they’ll notice that too many military pilots and ground personnel are cis white men instead of trans people, and things will go downhill quickly as their self-hatred and paranoia kick into high gear.
Old French aristocracy?
Those guys in the Fox Valley are not allowed to wear their powdered wigs and lace sleeve cuffs on account of safety rules for the shop floor, although some of them may trace their ancestry to the Old French Pre-Revolutionary Order from the French and Indian War?
Then they’ll notice that too many military pilots and ground personnel are cis white men
Small beans. Wait until they get around to heart surgeons and oncologists, theoretical mathematicians, nuclear physicists…
“Wait, you have a brain tumor but you’re objecting to Dr. Hermione Flannigan performing the operation because xhe no longer recognizes xer Y chromosome? What are you, transphobic?”
On a serious note, they want to push out all the cops who arent progressive Marxists and restaff departments with loyal party members who will ruthlessly enforce their dictates. That is the end goal of all of the anti-police rioting.
They are trying to do the same to the military.
They already did it to corporations and the education system.
I believe that Trump’s biggest failing was that he believed in the system and the Constitution too much. He wasn’t ruthless enough (think Abraham Lincoln). Early on, he trusted the DoD, DoJ, State and IC far too much. FDR would have set up parallel groups to fight each other. In the summer of riots, he deferred to Governors, the way you are supposed to, instead of sending in troops like Grant or even Bush 41. But most injurious was the fact that he respected court rulings that were staggeringly irrational. He needed just a bit of Jacksonian disdain for the courts. Despite these failings, he remains the most effective and consequential president of my lifetime and that goes back quite a ways. I think that the only way we can restore normalcy is for people to get involved in politics at the local level. The spectacular failure of state legislators this past year should have consequences, but it likely won’t because there is no local news coverage any more. It’s time to pay attention again, even without local newspapers and TV news.
This morning Glenn Reynolds linked an interesting piece in The Tablet: The New National American Elite
America is now ruled by a single elite class rather than by local patrician smart sets competing with each other for money and power.
I wonder if the collapse of the non-coastal newspapers, along with the rise of the Internet, caused the separate local elites to get in sync with each other on the values they espouse?
I think it has more to do with the Bush’s attending Yale. I think if you looked at the majority of elites; you’d find lots of Yale, Harvard, Brown, and Princeton graduates. For the journalist, it will be mostly Columbia.
Back in the early 80’s the local cable TV ran a channel featuring raw feed of AP newsline headers — just white on black ASCII with the title and a few sentences. It was amazing to see how the local newspaper (staffed by University Journalism products and Blue in a Red state) would twist and contort the facts, That was the Eighties and it has gotten more blatant decade by decade.
The standard for reporters and historians used to be clarity, accuracy, usefulness, and timeliness, which, you could argue, are the most important aspects of information, and indeed, the only things that make information worth broadly conveying. But the progressives saw history and truth as just a narrative that must be bent toward their utopian goals. Information must be skewed and manipulated to change the public will and squelch backwards thinking.
In their minds, they’re all producing episodes of Archie Bunker, changing public attitudes, softening, civilizing, and educating John Q. Public to transform society by transforming the people in it. Empty words like “accuracy” and “truth” are impediments that only served the entrenched and eternal enemies of progress (who change month-to-month based on who it’s fashionable to demonize and hate).
But if the past summer of bloodshed should’ve taught us anything, it’s that Archie Bunker was right about everything, especially in season 1. He had a far better grasp of reality than Meathead or Norman Lear – especially Norman Lear.
Our local news has turned in to Democrat propaganda. They always have segments pimping left wing causes and activist groups and give zero information about what politicians are doing in the city or state. They also devote a lot of time to national politics, aka bashing Republicans.
I want news about what the Mayor, city counsel, county commissioners, Governor, and state legislature are doing. Also, news about other cities in the state, how schools operate, how public works projects are being administered, and news about local and state businesses.
“I believe that Trump’s biggest failing was that he believed in the system and the Constitution too much. He wasn’t ruthless enough”
This.
I’ve been politically aware since the last couple of years of the Eisenhower administration thanks to an excellent primary school teacher. Trump is far and away the best President I’ve seen since then with the possible exception of Reagan who only had a dangerous external enemy to fight (he won). Society had not gone off the rails as far by then.
“As goes the United States, so goes the rest of the world.”
Yeah there are people including Euroweenies who would like to see America fail but they haven’t thought it through. One of my wife’s relatives used to say to people who expressed such thoughts, that “things will be much better when Chinese troops are keeping the peace around the world”. They usually back tracked rapidly.