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What if he Actually Wins?
One of the constants of the political coverage this last year has been “Donald Trump cannot win because… ” Anyone who offered a scenario contrary to the cited “because” was self-delusional, a wishful thinker, or just plain stupid. And through it all, Trump just kept advancing, advancing, and advancing right through to the nomination. The conventional wisdom may still hold and he may yet lose in a landslide in November. But what if he does win? What if the conventional wisdom is actually a conventional delusion?
There will be plenty of theories to be sure. It was a year of historically horrible candidates. The vote was too fractured. Too many of this or that faction stayed home. Too many of this or that faction showed up. But like the financial commercials say, past results should never be seen as a guarantee of future returns.
In all honesty, I don’t think anyone knows. Circumstances constantly change. There were newspaper-only elections, radio elections, television elections and, now, internet and social media elections. In 1896, the winning candidate never left his house. In my lifetime alone, three major “that’ll never happen” presidents happened: We elected a Catholic, a divorced man, and a non-white.
The truth is that every election is unique and the circumstances that align the electorate are hard to repeat or predict. I don’t know what kind of president Donald Trump would make, I only know that if he gets a chance to show it, there’s a lot of people who make their living professing to know how to win elections are going to look unconventionally stupid.
Published in Politics
If Trump wins, and it looking increasingly likely that he will, there is a good chance the Republicans will retain a majority in Congress and even perhaps the Senate. Many if not most of these Republican representatives will be member of the evil Establishment (insert scary organ music here). If Trump is to get anything done he will need their support. Which means he will have to make nice. Oh, and then there’s the Constitution. Trump will be forced to get acquainted with that musty old thing whether he likes it not. So – no disaster. We never Trumpers will just shrug it off, and those participating in the NR cruise will no doubt laugh it off, perhaps with the aid of copious adult beverage. We survived Warren G. Harding and Jimmy Carter, we can last out four years of Donald Trump.
Have someone post the video.
I…. didn’t need to see that.
You’re welcome.
“Success has a thousand fathers, while defeat is an orphan.”
Obviously this comment is in no way related to what I said but since it makes no sense to me outside of that context I’ll bite anyway. What makes Trump, say, the seventh smartest president in history?
There’s been a post floating around in the back of my brain about how Trump’s success and the success of the alt-Right are because they have played the game by the rules of the left and are winning. Borderline racist comments? Aggressive victimhood? Cult of celebrity? Anything goes as long as it succeeds?
All hallmarks of how the left does business and all hallmarks of the Trump campaign*.
A few years ago, Ace blogged at his site that in order to win, the right should take up the tactics of the left. Well, we have, and we might just win it.
But at what cost?
* And I say this a Trump supporter. I am but mad (for Trump) north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a huckster.
It’s a disarmament game. The Left has been using nukes and we’ve been saying nuclear weapons are too dangerous to use, that’s not who we are, etc.
Is noble defeat more worthy than ignoble victory? It depends on the stakes.
We won’t have to put with the likes of Whoopie Goldberg, Barbara Streisand, Al Sharpton, Jon Stewart, et al., all of whom have promised to leave if Trump wins.
Oh, wait–they’re all Progressives. Their commitments are…unreliable.
Eric Hines
It is truly rudderless at this point. Still employs lots of smart writers, but Lowry has shown himself unwilling to countenance much of conservative heterodoxy or to engage in rigorous debate. The old guard writers like Derbyshire and Dalrymple are no longer welcome. Goldberg and Williamson are smart writers but no longer challenging either themselves or their readers.
There was someone here on Rico (I think) who used the turn of phrase “Constitutional fetishism” to describe the problems of outlets like NRO, as well as certain candidates. While they rightly lament that the government under both parties (but particularly under Obama) has drifted from Constitutional limits, they lack the depth of understanding to see a clear way back other than yelling about Constitutional fidelity as if it is some mantra or paper fetish (in the cult sense) that they need to repeat or wave around.
Casey points out that Trump in part signifies a shift to “Our guys over their guys” – this is true, but it will take a strong leader to seize the power NRO deplores and then turn that power against the entire edifice. Waving the Constitution won’t fix this.
At the cost of actually having to fix the republic and make it better instead of declaring how awful the left is while funding their every whim and acceding to their court appointments and cringing at the media. Heckuva cost.
The cost is the right has to get to work instead of donor service.
And I’ll be curious to see who’ll lose more marbles–the likes of Andrea Mitchell, Anderson Cooper, & Chris Matthews, or some of the people on this site.
And they’ll do everything in their power to keep it that way.
I predict the operable line will be along the lines of “I failed to recognize how stupid lots of Americans are.”
Trump has adopted the air-game of the Left, but the ground-game of a high school student council candidate.
You leave Kelly out of this! Her plan for Homecoming is detailed, well thought out and available on her website.
There are leftist tactics I consider out of bounds. However, aggressiveness, attacking the media if they ever attack you, and putting your opponents on the defensive are hardly inherently immoral.
In WWII we adopted some pretty brutal military tactics, weren’t particularly worried about becoming Nazis of Japanese Imperialists in the process, won, and didn’t turn into fascists ourselves . I think it’s time we have a little more faith in ourselves and what we believe in.
I think for once we should actually call them on it and hassle them to no end to leave the country (in legal ways like Twitter, of course). None of the people mentioned above should ever again be able to be in the same room with a conservative without hearing “Why are you even here? You said you’d leave, so GO. Or at least admit you’re a liar.”
As I have said before, I think conservative Trump supporters are going to be extremely disappointed by year two of a Trump presidency. I do not think this election is do or die. The outcomes of a Trump or Hillary election will be nearly the same.
No matter who is elected, we will have single payer healthcare by 2020. No matter who is elected immigration will be an issue in 2020. No matter who is elected, we are in for <2% GDP growth for the next decade. No matter who is elected, abortion will continue to be legal in all 50 states. Poor whites in the rust belt and Appalachia will continue to be poor and plagued by alcohol and drug use. Blacks in the inner city will continue to be mired in poverty and violence. Muslims will continue to terrorize and colonize the West.
Even on guns the public is largely on the side of the 2nd amendment. Yes, a new SCOTUS can overturn Heller and other pro-2nd amendment decisions, but there is no way gun control passes through Congress.
It ought to be amusing. Why couldn’t he just lose with dignity like Mitt instead of winning.
Tremendous Homecoming. Really, just tremendous.
Not. Happy. The embrace of the Reformicon bribery agenda is yet another reason to not vote Trump. And, as Ace puts it, he wouldn’t have to do this if he wasn’t constantly shooting his mouth off.
Still I’m sure Avik Roy is pleased a Republican candidate is finally embracing his ideas.
So Priebus says their ground game , based on bodies and not offices is much improved over 2012. Do you have information that he is not telling the truth?
Offices are what you do when you have more donations than brains. Real estate is not a ground game, it is people.
So is the ground game that bad or are you repeating memes from the media?
Or maybe the ones that make my life annoying running a small business. I only hire post menopausal women though so I don’t have to worry about breeding. Or menopause.
If the worst case scenario is improved economic conditions, immigration laws are enforced and undoing 50% of debt/Food stamps dependence seen during Obama’s years then. . . I’ll take it .
You could not be more wrong.
There is so much pent up demand to grow the small business sector, so much needed capital investment required to replace aging equipment, the US economy has been held back from the last ten years and all capital is sitting in the stock market or on the sidelines.
Stop the regulation, adjust the tax code and step back for the explosion of new business activity will explode out of the gate.
A savvy investment in small business can yield far larger returns than the market. Investing in capital when the added expenses of labor regulation is removed will become the preferred choice of entrepreneurs.
We are choking our own growth but you can only hold down the US Economy for so long.
Stand back.
I’ll add a tweak to this. Stop taxing dividends, capital gains, and interest income–and expense–differentially. These simply distort the market and represent Government’s demand on where money should go, not the citizen’s choice, or the businessman’s, or the investor’s. They’re income, or expenses to income; tax them like income, or expenses to income. One more tweak: income taxed at a single, low rate.
Fat chance of getting any of that out of four/eight more years of Progressivism.
Eric Hines
Heck, this alone would be a massive boon. I can’t tell you how much people are holding back from hiring just on account of the DOL and NLRB constantly putting its thumb on the scales of corrupt old unions, or in
twerkingmaking major changes to wage and hourly rules, or hosing up health insurance plans year after year after year. No one at this point knows what the laws will be in 6 months, and we’ve been dealing with that for 8 years now – cripplingly short time horizons.Would you expect the RNC chair to say anything different?
Hey, maybe Reince is right. Maybe they’ve discovered some new magic formula that defies everything everybody has ever thought they knew about winning political campaigns ever since Quintus Cicero wrote the first known campaign manual in 64 BC. What do I know?
My understanding is it will come from the unemployment fund. If that is true, not that big an impact on business cost of operation over todays conditions.
If we couple this with job growth, it may become the biggest Pro-Life initiative ever delivered by the GOP.
It beats the hell out of free college tuition for Victim/Ethnic/gender Studies majors.
My daughter makes a healthy six figure salary and has 24 weeks of paid maternity leave. I expect most conservatives who think this is a horrible idea may have similar coverage. Hard to muster moral outrage when you are that comfortable.
We have a nation of single mothers who have a choice of abortion or motherhood. Somehow, this idea seems less stupid than the Lesbian couple Farmers Grants and politically smarter. The funding model is a bit better.
Unless you want to forever cede the blue states, this is how we move forward. A blend of conservatism, small government, big government, entitlements and opportunities. A rapid conversion of the US to pure conservatism is a fever dream that will never occur.
If we are lucky, we get to shift the direction where it is important to the future and create a blend that allows more reliance on the private sector than public sector over time.
Unfortunately, the Scotch we drink will always be a blend rather than a true single malt.