by G. Murphy Donovan
“Change is not progress.” – H.L. Mencken
With the Republican Party primary debates, the 2024 US presidential election is now underway. Right out of the gate, like 2020 and 2022, American moderates and conservatives are living up to the low expectations they set for themselves. Let’s start at the top, with Donald J. Trump, the putative front runner for Republicans.
Put aside for a moment the overkill indictments produced by several partisan municipal, state, and federal agencies. Clearly, the deep state, right and left, is not going to leave Donald Trump’s fate up to the electorate in 2024. There’s not much Trump can do about the legal blitz except play expensive defense and hope for less political bias in appellate, or even Supreme Court reviews.
Beyond legal peril, team Trump is screwing the pooch in other venues. Trumpsters in particular and Republicans in general have abandoned sympathetic, or reasonably fair, social platforms like Twitter.
Subsequently, team Biden jumped into that Twitter vacuum with a blizzard of daily postings from White House, Congressional, and DNC accounts. “Bidenomics” propaganda is now a daily mantra on Twitter and other platforms.
Republican responses are scarce to invisible so far on a platform that caters to the media and 450 million users worldwide. Personal pique and ego are now handicaps in cyber space where information battles are won and lost. Unchallenged repetition is the mother of belief.
The American Democrat Party is funding a full court, on-line propaganda press.
Trump’s unilateral Twitter surrender is also compounded by personal pique. Trump skipped the first Republican primary debate for a Tucker Carlson sit down. All well and good, if you believe that poking FOX, the RNC, and potential allies in the eye on the same night are good tactics.
Political campaigns are won with a consistent strategy, not revenge politics.
Trump gains nothing by imitating Brandon’s “no debate” dodge. Most folks are looking for something to vote for, not someone to vote against. Revenge may be a comfort, but it’s not really a strategy.
Although nominally a Republican, Trump is clearly uncomfortable with the nomenclatura of both major political parties. Elected Republican leaders in Congress and the Republican National Committee are clearly lukewarm about another Trump run at the White House. Trump is handicapped too by a flaccid troika at the helm in the Senate, the House, and RNC. McConnell, McCarthy, and McDaniel, the three Macs, are at best symptoms of the mediocrity, listlessness, and venality that characterize the tenured “business as usual” class inside the Beltway.
Democrats control the federal government in the District of Columbia and in urban centers because they literally control the unelected apparatchiks that run day-to-day operations of government, national and metropolitan, where it matters; especially police, prosecutors, and jurists. Even at the Pentagon, the military and national security communities are reliable Democrat sinecures.
Military services now fund sex changes for new recruits and veteran troops. You can join the military today and get a college degree, a penis, or a vagina – all funded with your taxes. Proof enough?
The deep state, the DEI state, and the woke state, such as they are, run the show countrywide. Wax eloquently about freedom and democracy if you must, but every day political reality of 2023 America is a Davos model, a “progressive” political and cultural monoculture.
The great irony of American politics today is that it really doesn’t matter who runs for elected federal office. When the rhetorical smoke clears, the globalist American left will still be in charge where it matters, and in a position to sabotage any elected official, especially presidential reformers. Adding insult to inequity, regime change has been retooled for domestic use by the US Intelligence Community.
It works. Just ask Donald Trump.
Ironically, Joseph Robinette Biden is arguably the worst father, worst grandfather, and most corrupt president in American or any country’s history. Yet, as a Democrat, he abides with impunity.
With all his vanity and posturing, Biden is a Bethany Beach buffoon with no shame and even less integrity. Influence peddlers, gender benders, and coke snifters at the White House, are now just part of the Washington and Biden era political pastiche.
Influence pedaling and corruption are both endemic and untouchable. The Bidens are above the law because the deep state, the permanent state is controlled by the one party beyond the law. Our partisan apparatchiks are the law.
Alas, you will hear the “few bad apples” defense; a rational used, ironically, by apologists from both political parties. The argument concedes that there may be a few bad actors at the top, but then quickly claims that the “rank and file” at the FBI, Justice, the DOD, or the Intelligence Community are all solid, hard working impartial patriots.
The “bad apple” excuse is just that, an excuse. The rot in Washington is systemic, top to bottom, in both parties; indeed, it’s the very reason both parties can agree that Trump is a menace. Trump threatens the apples, the barrel, indeed the whole American apple cart.
“Bye, bye Miss American Pie,” indeed.
The truth about federal and municipal government today is that its function is to make spare parts for itself. Getting elected, like a teaching job at a public school, means permanent tenure. The name of the game inside Washington and out in urban America is the game – business as usual.
But let’s be honest, there is a silver lining behind all that cynical reality. Americans love to be entertained; amused, fat, happy, often obese, stoned, drunk, licentious, and morally superior – all at the same time, individually and collectively. Elections then, like all excess and pornography, serve as a kind of social theater.
When we can’t get what we want, we have learned to be content with what we can get. If nothing else, the American electoral charade is always amusing and sometimes satisfying, a kind of community circle jerk.
A presidential election may not be the real deal or democratic anymore, but the pageant and theater are probably as good as it gets these days.
——————————
Murphy Donovan writes about the politics of national security. Appearing daily now on Twitter at Murphy Donovan (@GMurphyDonovan1) /X
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16 Responses
Why does it seem a theme on this magazine site that authors are without hope? Mr Dalrymple seems to be the leading cynic, of course, though this author and Mr. Armondo are a close second. I suppose there are others.
I’m in a bit of a quandary as to what these authors think is the value of writing such maudlin, negative, flagellating, bileful, hopeless, cynical material? If the country is lost (the UK in Mr. Dalrymple’s case) what is the value in thrashing the rhetorical dead horse or more accurately, beating the readers senseless with bitterness, cynicism, hopelessness, and complaints?
I do not understand this loss of hope, this surrender to hopelessness, this underwhelming message of “abandon hope all ye who click on this link and read this article.” Perhaps the authors might explain to me and the other readers what benefit to them (the readers) there is in reading this sort of bitter material? Is the message that we the readers are to follow along and give up hope and flop about the streets like some San Francisco drug zombie?
Consider the negative tone from these authors and contrast it with the consistently positive tone from Trump – a man under more pressure than any American politician ever. He is hopeful and upbeat while the authors at this magazine site are hopeless and evangelizing surrender to the inevitable victory of corruption and fraud and lies?
I, for one, find no entertainment nor educational value in reading such hopeless things. Surrounded by doom and gloom in the world outside of the internet do the authors suppose that readers rush to the internet to get more of the same – that there is some pleasure in it for them?
I will follow the Trump model and retain a positive attitude and hopefulness.
The bad people want the good people to be demoralized. They are busy at it daily. Is it to anyone’s benefit when decent people – such as these authors clearly are – are themselves apparently demoralized and go about spreading their loss of hope to other decent people? What is the purpose of it???
No.
Trump 2024!
You argue a lot of truths, but you raise the bar for cynicism.
I agree – Trump gives us hope.
This is the sort of agitprop one publishes when the goal is to suppress voter turnout among likely GOP voters.
Remember, the sky is grayish just before nightfall and just before sunrise. Signs of imminent sunrise:
** legal challenges to Freedom of Speech restrictions
** SOTUS opinion re invalidation of AA in school admissions ( and certainty of this judgement spreading throughout our economy/society)
** legal challenges to sub-adult sexual/gender medical mutilations, lack of informed consent due to incomplete brain development below age 25 and absence of long term studies of net and individual benefits, non-science based protocols, lack ofuse of application of less dangerous alternatives,
** continuing and increasing resistance to illegal migrant invasion
** continuing exposure of DOJ, FBI, CIA, MSM collusion to traitorously subvert elections
** exposure of our national medical system hierarchy – government and civilian industrial – sabotaging honest, accurate researchers, resulting in $billions to profiteers and excessive harm to diseased men, women, and children.
** exposure of high level political pimps, perverts, and should-be pariahs betraying their constituents
** rising attention to religious collisions, racial conflicts, violencists ( AntiFA [anti First Amendment], Boneheads, Numbskulls, drug dealers, …)
** exposure of military funds, equipment skimmers, diverters, war promoters enhancing profiteering at the expense of supplying troops protecting us all.
government and civilian
Well, if I am in the same box with Dalrymple, I’m in good company. He is an essayist extraordinary. And I agree with most of the comments. Many things are true at the same time. Yet, if I can continue the candor, I don’t believe that most optimists realize the success and depth of the rot. I live in DC, so I see it every day, in spades. Trump’s great contribution to date is that he is the sunshine that flushed the cockroaches. At the moment he is also a martyr, on the cusp of canonization. Poetic justice may be in the wind too. We shall see.
Within the present scheme of nature (of which we all are a part) it takes rot to fertilize growth. Until further notice, dying to live is the name of the game. The rotting husk frees a germ of new life…
Indeed, Rex. One generation is fodder for the next. The worm and the seed are constant companions.
“Beyond legal peril, team Trump is screwing the pooch in other venues. Trumpsters in particular and Republicans in general have abandoned sympathetic, or reasonably fair, social platforms like Twitter.”
What? You are one lazy writer. When you lie like that or are just bull$shitting then intelligent people stop reading reading the rest of the article.
Sorry, Republicans have not abandoned Twitter, they are now more interested in it since Elon Musk took over and stopped the Deep State censorship. Want proof?
https://pro.morningconsult.com/instant-intel/twitter-trust-elon-musk
JG, I usually don’t respond to anonymous trolls especially when they are sniping out from under Annie’s skirt. Indeed, invective and name calling is never an argument with adults. And you are a repeat offender. So grow up, be civil, or get lost.
“I only believe in civil discourse”, sniffed the supporter unto death of the by far most un-civil American political figure in living memory, a figure who built his popularity on invective and name-calling.
Hypocrisy at its finest.
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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.”
Trump’s most effective opponents are people and organizations who, long before he entered politics, made their bones calling everyone and his cousin a fascist, nazi, racist etc. no matter what their actual politics. Even W Bush, now practically canonize, was the emblematic Nazi of his decade to these people.
Their claims that they ran a civil political discourse until he showed up are naked, albeit magnificent, lies.
That Trump extended farther into the public sphere a mild version of the sort of snark and rudeness about political rivals that used to be present for many decades in every war room, bar room, newsroom and living room of the world is a trifling offense by comparison.
Your reasoning is dishonest. Take a walk.
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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.”
Dear Doesn’t Drink Orange Koolaid,
Your comments are beginning to cut close to simple ad hominems. Reasonable arguments are okay, insulting other readers is not.
Hi Rebecca. Oh, I think my comments are all right. Yeah, I guess I could have elaborated a bit in response to Graham. I probably could have told him that his argument that because there have always been loud people in society, that societal discourse has therefore always been sharp and divisive, and that we should expect the same standard of conduct from the Leader of the Free World as from a group of know-nothings sitting around a bar, is moronic and a dishonest attempt to portray The Demagogue’s impact as teeny-tiny.
As for my comment to Donovan, I thought I was pretty nice to him, too. I didn’t call him a single name, and if he’s grumbling at my calling out the inconsistency of his views then you should tell him that those who knowingly support divisiveness and incivility don’t have the right to demand civility from others. He should screw his head on right, grow a pair and tell his demigod to get lost, that would earn my respect.
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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.”
Hey Doesn’t Drink Orange Kool Aid,
Thanks for the clarification and for keeping a civil tone. We appreciate it.
God bless, Rebecca