by G. Murphy Donovan (November 2022)
Modern Rhapsody, Salvador Dali, 1957
In order to have your voice heard in Washington, you must make some small contribution. —Elon Musk
Donald Trump is a political vampire, now a mythical figure; folk hero to some and an ogre for others. Try as they might, the American establishment, right and left, are unable to put a stake through the political heart of Trump and his populist/nationalist appeal.
The mirth that accompanied Trump’s campaign in 2016 is gone. The man who slew the dragon lady is no longer a punch line. MAGA is now just another rude four letter word, if you were to ask Democrats. For the feminist left, Trump is the vulgar patriarch who quashed the Hillary quest; the second best wet dream, after race, for the identity and intersectional crowd on the American left.
Albeit, the worst of the Hillary fail was irony.
The far left fembot, who would have been a historic first, was subsequently thrown under the diversity bus in 2020 for a family of white male Delaware grifters who put real vice into the office of Vice President. There is more than a little truth to the claims of 2020 election “deniers,” at least to the extent that many partisans were casting votes against Trump, not necessarily casting votes for Joe.
Biden may well be the first default President in American history. Such are the wages of binary politics. No surprise then that a Beltway of statist camp followers and sutlers swirls around Washington, DC like a self-flushing toilet.
At the moment, king maker Trump seems to be an ominous cypher. The Donald is not running for anything in 2022, but he still reigns as rainmaker right of center. Republicans seem to be ecstatic about prospects for Congressional gains in November, but there are several dark clouds on that political horizon.
First is the state of the American deep state which will still be globalist left, partisan to subversive, and assuredly obstructionist after November’s mid-terms. Sober realists must know at this point that the American nomenclatura (Defense, State, and Justice) is now a bedrock Democrat Party, if not neosocialist, constituency. Partisan politics now skews the administration of law and justice from New York to California. Tenured national and urban American political fixtures are woke, broke, felonious, angry—and now chronically vindictive.
Then there is the possibility, in the next two years, that team Biden may drive American foreign and economic policy wagons off a cliff. Democrat Party nuclear and cyber war precedents suggest that team Biden will continue to up the ante with Moscow too, by sponsoring terror, regime change, pipeline sabotage, and the bombing of Russian infrastructure.
Alas, with winter, the Ukraine turkey comes home to roost. Economic/political folly or EMP will put out lights and hearth fires in Europe. It doesn’t seem to matter.
For reasons unknown, with serial escalations, Biden and Brussels seem to be cultivating a nuclear/radioactive off-ramp in Ukraine for the Kremlin. According to the Cassandras, Armageddon is now back on the table after 75 years of shaky but successful “deterrence.” So says Brandon.
Mixing more than a few metaphors; if Europe doesn’t pump the brakes, when the balloon goes up, Brussels not Washington, will be ground zero. Team Biden doesn’t have the backing of the American electorate, yet somehow a subservient EU genuflects before White House foreign policy like geese looking forward to a Christmas roast.
But then again, given what we know about American and EU urban culture, attention spans, and memes; it is possible that any blooming nuclear threat will not be able to compete with the need for Interpol and NATO to police all those personal pronouns and 100 newly minted genders.
The paint never dries on cultural or political stupidity.
Indeed, no matter who owns the House and Senate after the mid-terms, surely media will be focused on creating or aggravating any rift between Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. National prospects for pragmatists are nil in 2024 without the Trump vote. The next curated political narrative from the American left after November will be Trump/DeSantis fratricide. Legacy media shills like Susan Glasser and Peter Baker are already hustling the “divider’ narrative on CBS’s Face the Nation with yet another literary hatchet job on the Trump presidency.
Trump phobia is a cash cow for the obsessed. When you can’t run on issues, you need to run against a devil. Projection is now the weapon of choice for a very paranoid American and European left. See Katalin Novak or Georgia Meloni.
If Republicans, conservatives, libertarians, and independents take the bait and buy into an internecine war on the American political right, 2024 may be a replay of 2020. Ron DeSantis is no longer a rising star: he has arrived. If Trump gets into a gutter fight with DeSantis, recidivism wins and the perilous, nihilistic, if not suicidal, drift to the dystopian left in America will continue unabated.
Even with half or all of Capitol Hill in hand, pragmatic America can ill afford to blow another presidential election. Trump and DeSantis need to get out in front now by getting on the same page. A Trump/DeSantis one two punch might be ideal, if you crave poetic justice. In this scenario, Desantis plays apprentice for Trump’s second four years, then Ron runs on his own in 2028.
Draining the swamp, after all, is a job that requires a modicum of political consistency. Albeit, two alpha dogs on the same ticket might be too much ego and testosterone in one duet. However, there’s no shortage of distaff talent in the “bullpen” to run with either candidate.
Whilst loath to admit it, conservatives have a yen for intersectionality (nee real women), and here the sidekick possibilities are abundant. Nikki Halley, Marsha Blackburn, Kari Lake, Laura Ingham, Candace Owen, Kellyanne Conway among others come to mind immediately. No second bananas here. All are intelligent, articulate, and courageous. Unlike Hillary, all are attractive and congenial too, with style sensibilities that transcend Mao’s pantsuit.
Politics is visibility. Hard to believe that Clinton’s wife lost in 2016 with all those spousal, fashion, and congeniality assets. Mrs. Clinton is living proof that a man’s coattails are never enough to elevate a woman.
The real gem in any future Republican VP sweeps is Tulsi Gabbard; whahini, surfer, former congresswoman, independent thinker, military officer, ethnic mutt, former Democrat, fashion plate and photogenic to a fault. Politics is the definitive spectator sport after all. Gabbard is golden because she is the antithesis of frumpy, socialist, humorless Stepford wives like Hillary, Lizzie, and Richard, now Rachel Levine. Yes, Rachel used to be a Dick.
If Tulsi were a slot machine, her jackpot would be three tomatoes accompanied by a wolf whistle. Gabbard touches more bases than a plate umpire. She admits to being a wife and woman. If ever there is to be a genuine intersectional ticket asset, Gabbard is on it.
Underlining her moxie, Tulsi is one of few American politicians of any ilk to express any reservations against yet another feckless proxy war with the Kremlin. Larding her luau, Gabbard just called out the Democrat Party as a “woke” joke.
Ouch!
Aloha now means hello, goodbye—and kiss my ass.
The center-right political bench in America today is as deep as it has ever been. All prospects wilt if Trump and DeSantis don’t reach some kind of rapprochement and agreed strategic vision for Republican Party futures long before the 2024 primaries. As a bonus, between Trump and DeSantis, party mandarins can set the stage to insure that America’s first female president will be a lady; proud to be a real woman, not some vacuous sexually ambiguous wokester.
Get on with it, gentlemen.
G. Murphy Donovan writes about the politics of national security. In the interest of full disclosure, the author admits that he used to live in Hawaii, arguably his best years, where aloha and the likes of Gabbard flourish like plumeria.
Follow NER on Twitter @NERIconoclast
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17 Responses
“There is more than a little truth to the claims of 2020 election ‘deniers,'”
On the contrary, there is precisely zero truth to any of the claims that The Demagogue and his followers have aggressively pushed about 2020. Every elaborate concoction has been thoroughly debunked.
I love the clause you follow up with, by the way. People have been voting for the lesser of two disliked candidates pretty much since the dawn of democracy, and no one has ever tried to claim that an election is less legitimate because people were mostly voting against one candidate rather for the other.
I’m pretty sure what you’re really doing is giving yourself an out to equivocate and claim you’re actually talking about something else when you get called out for repeating this worthless garbage.
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“In the four years since, Fox viewers had become even more accustomed to flattery and less willing to hear news that challenged their expectations. Instead of understanding his narrow win in 2016 as the upset it was, they were told forecasters were going to be wrong again. Me serving up green beans to viewers who had been spoon-fed ice cream sundaes for years came as a terrible shock to their systems.”
“The center-right political bench in America today is as deep as it has ever been. All prospects wilt if Trump and DeSantis don’t reach some kind of rapprochement and agreed strategic vision for Republican Party futures long before the 2024 primaries.”
Wrong. Best thing to happen is DeSantis and Trump go at it hammer and tongs to forge a new Republican Manifesto. That Manifesto will then be hashed out on Elon Musk’s new Twitter platform that will now allow freedom of expression so all sides can contribute.
Tulsi Gabard – She has left the evil Cultural Marxist Democrats. Good. She has not yet joined the Party of Freedom and I don’t mean the RINO Party. She has been a gun control advocate in her past so she needs to re-examine her former Democrat Party beliefs and denounce them publicly. All of them.
I believe that we are on the same page JG. The impending competition between Trump and DeSantis cannot devolve to a zero sum game or both, and the country, will lose. If Don and Ron don’t run together, someone must yield. At the same time, I believe that either or both have an opportunity to set the stage for some national distaff role models other than Nancy, Lizzie, or Ketanji. If we buy into the “division” on the right, woke wins – again.
If you had an ounce of integrity, you would agree that Donald Trump should never be allowed to run for public office again after his blatant lies about the election, his incitement of his followers to attack the legislative branch of our government, and his theft of classified materials. But you don’t.
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“In the four years since, Fox viewers had become even more accustomed to flattery and less willing to hear news that challenged their expectations. Instead of understanding his narrow win in 2016 as the upset it was, they were told forecasters were going to be wrong again. Me serving up green beans to viewers who had been spoon-fed ice cream sundaes for years came as a terrible shock to their systems.”
Is it very dark where your head is at? Sewer gas also, perhaps?
Lol, I’m not the one dead set on clinging to my ideological loyalties despite the overwhelming facts indicating how mistaken they are. That you think you’re in a good position to make an insult like that is amusing.
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“In the four years since, Fox viewers had become even more accustomed to flattery and less willing to hear news that challenged their expectations. Instead of understanding his narrow win in 2016 as the upset it was, they were told forecasters were going to be wrong again. Me serving up green beans to viewers who had been spoon-fed ice cream sundaes for years came as a terrible shock to their systems.”
I agree that the Democratic party won the 2020 election by all established standards. I do not agree, necessarily and without having conducted a major research project, with the assertion that they did it without any false ballots or dead voters or illegal voters, since that would be a remarkably unique event in American history. But since that is the prior established standard, so be it. And that’s real agreement- the same I would give any presidential win.
For the record, my assertion here is one with several elements:
1. There has probably never been an American election that was wholly clean, if such a thing has existed anywhere, and American elections are and always have been among the least clean of otherwise developed, constitutional countries.
2. This applies to both parties at all times, though effectiveness ebbs and flows between them.
3. In modern times, the Democrats have been the masters in all regions of all the established methods, using them to great and until recently fairly widely acknowledged effect everywhere from backwater counties to major cities. The recent and massive denial of this reality is new. This applies to everything from dead voters and illegal voters and false ballots and boxes, to tactics now more associated with the Republicans like gerrymandering districts [a practice for which the Democrats were alike infamous when they controlled the House and a majority of state legislatures for decades but have now forgotten ever doing, just as the GOP has forgotten ever condemning it]. The probably only really stolen presidential election of modern times was the 1960 one.
4. Democratic desire to introduce illegitimate votes is at least as strong as any Republican desire to suppress legitimate ones, and even that presumes the Democrats have no groups in America they’d rather not see turn up. I imagine at the county level shenanigans like wrong poll information is common both ways. But sticking with the Democratic and GOP goals as stereotyped- both are subject to a range of arguments- GOP policies might exclude legit voters but are usually legitimate on the face- what could be wrong with requiring proof that a person is a citizen and resident entitled to vote in an age when such proof should be easy to get? There is plenty of room for argument in practice, but a lot of the argument is against the principle itself, which makes it suspicious. Similarly, whether Democrats actually introduce any illegitimate votes at any point is arguable, but that plenty argue for them openly is not. How many argue that non-citizens and even illegals should count, every cycle?
5. Taking numbers 1, 3 and 4 in the round, it is extraordinarily hard to believe a narrative in which GOP voter suppression is everywhere on a large scale, always illegitimate and targeting real voters, and Democratic “voter expansion” in line with the principles many espouse and which history has shown, never happens.
And this is yet what we are supposed to believe. All previous elections have been free of mischief, certainly by Democrats, and the Democrats would certainly do nothing of the sort now. Recent elections have been the first corrupted, and only by GOP voter suppression which targets exclusively legitimate voters by insisting on impossible terms and is insane anyway because no one anywhere ever attempts to vote illegally and no false votes ever occur. This is incredible.
There is ample room for nuance in details, I even agree, but add to that that Democrats have challenged the presidential elections of:
2000, by legal methods but long after the result was in fact clear, and even attempted to introduce institutional actors with no previous say into the process by having the Florida court overrule the legislature [and then objecting that Republicans introduced a new and illegitimate element by having the USSC overrule the Florida court and restore the legislature’s prerogative; This undermines any modern narrative in which the traditional institutional players should be allowed to play out normally;
2000 also by resorting to condemnation of the other institutional process, the electoral college, and rhetorically denying the legitimacy of Bush for his whole term, if not always at the same volume; Plus I concede this quickly became a trope mainly for the more progressive left, not major Democratic pols.
2004, it took a while.
2016. Hoo boy. Hillary’s formal concession, eventually, seemed trite compared with the 4 years of effort to deny the election had been legitimate. All this hasn’t been memory holed everywhere.
Or the tl;dr- It’s one thing to say the Democrats won the election. I agree. It’s another so keep saying they won it cleaner than any American election ever before, that any reference to things done by them in the past are insults because they would never do such things, that they have never said or done anything to suggests illegitimate voters should vote, or that they are entitled to claim to have never challenged the legitimacy of an elected president.
Direct hit, Carl. Ten ring twice.
I completely agree, it is definitely me who looks bad here and not the smug and complacent old persons who think supporting demagoguery and political violence is a smart idea.
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“In the four years since, Fox viewers had become even more accustomed to flattery and less willing to hear news that challenged their expectations. Instead of understanding his narrow win in 2016 as the upset it was, they were told forecasters were going to be wrong again. Me serving up green beans to viewers who had been spoon-fed ice cream sundaes for years came as a terrible shock to their systems.”
Our daughters live in Portland, OR. Political violence against Trump and any kind of order began immediately after Election Day in 2016. The 2020 “mostly peaceful” riots, arson, and looting were a national example that political violence won’t be punished if committed by the left. The physical and reputation also damage to Portland hasn’t been corrected.
“But look at what the left has done!” is not the smartest reply to the points I raised above.
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“In the four years since, Fox viewers had become even more accustomed to flattery and less willing to hear news that challenged their expectations. Instead of understanding his narrow win in 2016 as the upset it was, they were told forecasters were going to be wrong again. Me serving up green beans to viewers who had been spoon-fed ice cream sundaes for years came as a terrible shock to their systems.”
DDOK appears to have made an honest effort to state his opinion, including a challenge to those who differ with him
What is the current rationale for: *SCOTUS rejecting the multi-State allegations of invalid vote certification? Did the Court analyze the data supporting the allegations?
* Were signature vs. ballot vote ID for only still living citizens confirmed? By whom? (GA, PA, ..) * Were voting rules changed by other than sole legislature authority? If so, were those votes invalidated?8
Additionally, for public perusal, where may be found the presentations of Powell, Navarro, and the multi-State challenģers, as well as the State and Court rejection notices for consideration.
Damn Murphy, you getting heat from that Koolaid dude. Stop triggering the youth – he’ll block you on Facebook. You’re getting inebriated by the exuberance of your verbosity. Keep it up! Ps if you want America to go really downhill-hurry up and annex us. Shackle yourself to a corpse
Yawn.
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“In the four years since, Fox viewers had become even more accustomed to flattery and less willing to hear news that challenged their expectations. Instead of understanding his narrow win in 2016 as the upset it was, they were told forecasters were going to be wrong again. Me serving up green beans to viewers who had been spoon-fed ice cream sundaes for years came as a terrible shock to their systems.”
Holiday greetings, Fergus. You are a credit to your tartan. Someone gave me a jug of malt for my birthday, so I’ve been putting a noggin in my nogs and thinking about how blessed you are to have two out of three in the Uk. Fret not sir, you were a Chunnel away from eurotrash were it not for Brexit.
Slainte.