I predict that Trump will win, but I expect it will be too close for comfort. There may be losses in places like Michigan and Wisconsin, where polls are tight and the election rules permit various shenanigans. Even if Trump wins, there will almost certainly be a lot of post-election machinations, legal battles, and worse.
While a landside result for Trump would likely demoralize his opponents, I expect the Democrats will have an energetic and hostile response to a Trump victory if it’s a close loss. This hostility will be magnified if they hold on to the Senate or retake all of Congress.
Hostile would include physical violence, such as we witnessed in the attacks on the attendees of Trump’s inauguration and worse. Setting the stage for a constitutional crisis, lunatic congressman Jamie Raskin (D-MD) has even promised to invalidate a Trump victory and has called for security measures adequate to deal with the Civil War level of violence he expects in response.
That said, I do not expect the support for violence and extra-legal responses to receive as much support as in 2020. In other words, it appears some sanity is creeping back into the ruling class.
Democrats Have Already Shown a Scorched Earth Response
The background history is rather simple: Trump’s 2016 victory over Hillary was a surprise, and the elites only kicked into resistance mode after he was elected, tacitly approving violence in the streets, hamstringing him with investigations, encouraging noncompliance by the bureaucracy, and embracing draconian responses to the COVID pandemic to sabotage a strong economy.
In spite of all this, Trump set conditions for economic growth before and after the COVID lockdowns, and he was cruising to reelection in 2020 until the entire system united to stop him. This unified response included Pfizer delaying the news about an effective vaccine, billionaires pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into controlling the election process, months of BLM race riots fomenting chaos and delegitimizing his leadership, rank insubordination by senior military leaders, and a sustained media campaign to present the aging Joe Biden as a vigorous and effective leader.
It seems that some people on the Democrat side have gotten the message that such a scorched earth, win-at-all-costs strategy can be counterproductive. The Democratic Party’s senior leaders’ refusal to allow normal primary dynamics to play out is one reason the party has ended up with three mediocre candidates in a row.
Biden won the general election in 2020 only through strenuous back-channel efforts that have been euphemistically labeled “election fortification.” No one meets very many Biden fans in real life, yet somehow he got millions more votes than Obama and Hillary Clinton.
He has deteriorated so badly in office that he had to be replaced midgame after winning the nomination, and Harris has proven to be equally mediocre. With a bad and uninspiring candidate at the forefront, the media and party officials must work overtime to deal with daily crises, including accidentally telling the truth and revealing one’s actual beliefs.
Zero Sum Identity Politics Is Turning Off White and Male Voters
It is possible the Democratic Party is open to change in other ways. For example, I think that we are now past “peak woke.” The hate and doxxing campaigns, calls for censorship, egregious discrimination against whites and Asians, and institutional support for these un-American practices now face a widespread backlash.
This cultural moment is far from over, and it may not ever disappear completely. But, now that some of these tactics have been deployed against Israel’s critics on the left, there is more dissensus among Democrats about vigorous persecution of hate speech, misinformation, and the like.
It also seems the Democrats realize that their version of identity politics has certain inherent limitations. By neglecting the concept of the common good and selling policies simply because they are advantageous to women or minorities, they have simultaneously turned off whites and men, who are not admitted into the leftist victim pantheon. Unfortunately for them, votes by white men count the same as those of their preferred groups.
Not knowing many straight white men, Democratic attempts at outreach have been ham-fisted and ineffective. This includes selecting the odd Tim Walz for the VP slot, the poorly named “White Dudes for Harris” affinity group, and this TV ad, which is shockingly cringe and off-putting. Democratic strategists James Carville and John Judis have both criticized the Democrats’ tone-deafness and extremism in recent years.
In these small gestures of retreat, I suspect enlightened self-interest is the chief motive. In most cycles of violence and retaliation, both sides get more extreme over time. Democrats know that after everything they have done to Trump, they risk the same being done to themselves in retaliation. Having breached innumerable customs and laws, they have lost standing to complain about these activities when committed by their opponents.
The duller among them don’t understand this and credulously warn that Trump might prosecute his political enemies and fire his partisan opposition if he wins . . . as if exactly that has not already happened to him and his associates.
Those with a slightly longer view understand that this Hobbesian struggle will not end well for anybody, and it would make sense to find an off-ramp. There was a glimmer of hope when almost everyone said something conciliatory in the immediate wake of the first, nearly-successful assassination attempt against Trump.
Unfortunately, the Democrats’ rhetoric soon returned to crazytown.
A Successful Precedent of Moderation
There is some precedent for the Democrats corralling their crazies. When Bill Clinton led his party to power as a New Democrat in 1992, substantive policy changes were at the heart of his candidacy, particularly in the primary.
The Democrats had been out of office twelve years when he won in 1992. Clinton was no Mondale or Dukakis, each of whom was a self-described liberal who would be thoroughly beaten in national elections. Rather, Clinton was for the death penalty, critical of the welfare system, embraced free trade, and supported a muscular foreign policy.
Similarly, Obama ran and won as a moderate in 2008, promising to heal racial divisions, end “stupid” wars (a salient issue because of the Iraq War), and provide relief to Americans suffering from the housing crisis. He was, of course, an anti-American Marxist, but he won by pretending to be otherwise. The media worked overtime to conceal his biography, and his turn to the left during his second term would have much to do with Donald Trump’s rise to power.
The world is always changing, and, in the age of mass immigration, our country is changing quickly. Tens of millions of people from every corner of the planet have arrived since the liberalization of immigration laws in 1965. This demographic revolution shifted into high gear after the Democrats’ losses in the 1980s.
Large immigrant populations and an increasingly ideological public school system have done much to turn new voters into loyal partisans for the Democrats. Because of demographic changes and the country’s leftward drift, a 49-state win like Reagan’s in 1984 and Nixon’s in 1972 is essentially impossible today.
Democrats have only gotten more explicitly leftist after the Obama years. In 2016, they thought they could take the mask off and that the newly imported voters would turn the country into a one-party state like California. But nothing is static in politics. Many of the new Americans who were supposed to form the emerging Democratic majority have instead shown a surprising degree of affinity for Trump. It turns out, just like native-born Americans, that many are wary of high crime, inflation, and an arrogant ruling class, preferring instead Trump’s toughness and plain talk.
The continuing flirtation with radicalism will likely cost Democrats another election. It would be good for their party and their country if they jettisoned their current course and emphasized the rights of workers, a clean environment, civil liberties, and the cause of peace. I suspect they will only do this, however, if they lose “bigly.”
A close loss will encourage the Democrats’ worst tendencies: endless lawfare, conspiracy thinking, and fantasies of retribution against Trump and his supporters.
***
Christopher Roach is an adjunct fellow of the Center for American Greatness and an attorney in private practice based in Florida. He is a double graduate of the University of Chicago and has previously been published by The Federalist, Takimag, Chronicles, the Washington Legal Foundation, the Marine Corps Gazette, and the Orlando Sentinel. The views presented are solely his own.
Clinton did more to destroy the middle class in America than any previous president, proving once again that easy immigration, foreign wars and free trade were all baked into America’s destruction. The political parties, which exist only for the elites now, long ago abandoned the American people. Free trade was nothing more than a euphemism for the wholesale slaughter of the American worker and any domestic manufacturing capability which was always the main path to the middle class. What ensued determined the cycle of endless wars which have resulted in trillions dumped overseas instead of the so-called “investments in America”. Cue the crumbling bridges and pot-holed highways. America has lost its innovative edge, mostly because of its poor choices at the polls, admission of so many unassimilable foreigners, and total failure to stop the Marxists’ long march through the institutions.
Let’s not forget those largely ignorant, poor immigrants being allowed the vote after absurdly short residency without even the appearance of assimilating. FYI, ballots are now printed in seventeen languages? How many? “Immigration” covers a host of sins: TPS, OPT, H1B, “refugee” and the rest of the Replacement policies of this and previous governments. And what of the Federal Reserve and its policies? Could anyone alive in 1900 have possibly imagined the fate of the republic circa 2024?
The most important reason to vote for Trump is to put an end to the concept that somehow “America” belongs to the world and the American people have no right to exclude anyone. Trump says he will “fix it”. I do not doubt that he means it, and will do everything he can to stop the invasion. However, that project is so ambitious it will take the support of the whole American people, Congress and the Courts. How likely is that? What is the plan to succeed?
The future is hazy, but the U.S. will never be as great as it was. The changes forced upon Americans are devastating, and the hostility and enthusiastic violence by the government against any dissent to it and its policies at all so swift and unjust, the outcome destroys the Enlightenment idea of self-governance upon which this country was founded. A government which not only ignores the laws, but commits violence against its own people in order to insulate itself from the people does not deserve to exist. Excepting Trump, America possesses absolutely no “American” leadership. That lack of native leadership combined with deference to elites who are entirely foreign in their mindset, hate-filled, subsidized, nefarious, and decadent begs for their annihilation.
The basis for our current imbroglio is easy to understand if you were educated as a Constitutional conservative and almost impossible to understand if you were indoctrinated as a socialist. Additionally there are the power brokers who use compassion as the weapon of choice so they can sit above the motley fray of society’s discontent, and act like benefactors, but, in fact, are far removed from the general population in terms of wealth, status, geography, and experience nurtured empathy, yet choreograph our political experiences and drama, only to enrich themselves. All of this requires them to create a government that is far removed from the concept of one designed to be small, unintrusive and limited in scope and power. There was a reason behind such a design. The Framers feared centralizing power, to prevent what America has now become… controlled by radical anti-Americans.
In order for the UN, compromised and sabotaged by most of our enemies, and those misfit power brokers, described above, to obtain needed plenary control they first had to put into place levers of power, make them immutable and abundant, and then rig the voting systems so that their minions are installed who cannot ever be uninstalled. We talk about lifetime judge appointments? The bureaucratic offices and who those that hold them are no different. Those offices either need to be destroyed, since they should not have been created in the first place, or their powers modified and severely restricted as the SCOTUS has recently done.
We have all the makings of a Banana Republic and we did it to ourselves. We bastardized the Constitution so badly that the Framers would rather be governed by the Articles of Confederation than this amended and evolved version of our Constitution that permits government to act in ways and manners which completely defeats the entire purpose of original intent. Who, among its designers, could ever imagine creating a document that allows those in power to confiscate money and assets from those out of power to give to those who support those who are currently in power? And if they don’t have enough recipients to benefit they just import them. That’s what this election is about! Once leaders have strategized to put people on the dole then such recipients will vote for their needs to survive. And I’m not just speaking about the great welfare state created by the 1964 Civil Right’s Act. I’m speaking about Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, corporate subsidies, public service union beneficiaries and much more hidden in the recesses of the bureaucratic fourth branch of government known as the Deep State. America has become a fascist nation and I mean, in that sense, the true meaning of fascism which is any government making laws, rules, statutes and regulations to benefit those who support those in power and harm those who don’t. If you don’t understand this just look at the federal budget and take away that which represents entitlements and then explain why so little remains. What is left is the amount designed to support what the government was really only designed to do.
Years ago I, along with the Craighead brothers who were PhD wildlife biologists, debated the folly of closing the dumpsters in Yellowstone Park which generations of bears had become dependent upon for survival. We knew what they were doing was unnatural but also realized that in doing so the bears would starve and their losses would be staggering. It was done, anyway, against all sane advice, and 40% of the bears subsequently starved and died. With that understanding in mind it is impossible to do something similar to the Federal budget, without great negative consequences, but what could be done is to ship entitlement priorities back to the states, incrementally, just as was done with the Dobbs decision. Ultimately that will remove the fruit which the nefarious and mendacious power brokers feed upon to control society and enrich themselves. One more bit of advice. Determine who your friends really are when entering into treaties. All of what a limited central government aspires to do to protect individual liberty can be undone by treaties, with the most needy and irresponsible, just as it can be undone by needy states looking to acquire help and support from a Federal behemoth bureaucratic quagmire about to sink from prodigious debt created by doing what it was never designed to do in the first place.
Free trade via Clinton was designed to bolster Clinton’s election support from China and Russia. It was not free “free trade” anymore than the current concept of “free trade” is. Trump understands that trade agreements need to be negotiated. Listen to the economic moron Harris who justifies open borders based upon a need to fix our immigration system. Does that idiot think the same when it comes to trade and why tariffs often work? Tariffs, understood by most of us, are no different than a border wall. We don’t really need more of what we already have, or can make domestically, anymore than we need more dependents who vote for Marxist ideologues and entitlements that undermine Founding Principles based on a Constitution that has no power to demand money from citizens to do acts of benevolence. That is what the states, local governments and private citizens and entities can do. Everywhere I look I see the fingerprints of government. We need government to do what we can’t do individually that is necessary. However we have to continually fight to keep government from indulging everywhere where we can manage on our own no matter how good an idea first appears to be. To do so we need to be educated. Indoctrination is what created Critical Race Theory and DEI. How is that working out when it comes to individual liberty which is the basis upon which America’s Constitution was designed?
Will the Democrat Party reform itself? Well, I liken the Party to a New England ship’s captain chasing a rainbow whale.
The Democratic Party is no longer a people’s party. Tell me how it differs from any socialist agenda including the one that gave Germany the acronym for the National Socialist Party? Do not underestimate what they have in mind. If it were not for the atrocities Hitler’s fascism would be spoken of fondly and not have needed to disguise itself as it does today. But as one writer aptly described Nazis Germany: “I remember the Nazis and they weren’t Republicans, or “right wing”, or “patriots” or “militias”. They were Socialist monsters”.