Quotulatiousness

November 7, 2024

Donald Trump II: The Trumpening

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I went to bed on Tuesday night with assurances from several sources that the election was still very close and that it might take many more hours to determine the winner — if any — of the 2024 US federal election. Roughly an hour later, it was apparently all over but the crying:

We’re sitting down to write this at 2 a.m., and by now it’s clear: Donald Trump is set to be the 47th president of the United States, and on track to win the electoral college and the popular vote. It is a stunning comeback.

The red wave that wasn’t in 2022 came crashing down tonight. Republicans have retaken control of the Senate. Control of Congress is still in the balance.

Going into tonight, Nate Silver ran 80,000 simulations of what could happen. In 40,012 of them, Kamala Harris won. Every pollster and pundit said the same: It was gonna be a squeaker. Too close to call. We wouldn’t know for days, maybe even weeks!

That’s not how it went down. Not at all.

Trump had won Pennsylvania before the night was out. And by 2:30 in the morning, he was onstage, surrounded by his family and Dana White, delivering his victory speech in West Palm Beach.

Tonight at our election party, the British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore said he hadn’t seen a comeback like this since Charles de Gaulle. But perhaps the only American echo of tonight is Richard Nixon. As Commentary editor John Podhoretz wrote on Twitter: “This is the most staggering political comeback in American history. Period. Nixon has held the comeback trophy for nearly 60 years. No longer.”

Why Trump won so convincingly — and why Kamala lost so fully — are themes we’ll cover over the coming weeks. But for now, enough from us.

In the same Front Page summary:

This race was the Democrats’ to lose. And they blew it. Badly. As of 2 a.m., there wasn’t a single county in the country in which Harris outperformed Joe Biden. What went wrong? Peter Savodnik has some ideas.

“They didn’t lose because they didn’t spend enough money,” writes Peter. “They didn’t lose because they failed to trot out enough celebrity influencers. They lost because they were consumed by their own self-flattery, their own sense of self-importance.”

And above all else, they lost because they lied. “They seemed to think that Americans wouldn’t mind that they had pretended Joe Biden was ‘sharp as a tack’, that they actually orchestrated a behind-the-scenes switcheroo, that the party that portrayed itself as the nation’s answer to fascism nominated its standard-bearer without consulting a single voter.”

Last night, the truth caught up with them.

Kamala Harris failed to retain Joe Biden’s record 81 million Democratic voters, falling back to about the same level of support (67 million) as Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Barack Obama in 2012. Weird.

Freddie deBoer wonders what the Democrats will end up blaming this loss on:

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Jill Stein.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Putin and the Russians.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Bernie Sanders and his supporters.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Joe Rogan.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Glenn Greenwald and The Young Turks.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on the decision to run with Tim Walz.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on the New York Times and its occasional Democrat-skeptical opinion pieces.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Joe Biden for getting out of the race too late.

You can’t pull all the usual Democrat tricks. You have to actually figure out what’s wrong with your party, root and branch. Because you called the guy a fascist, again, and he walked right through that insult to the Oval Office, again. And the eternal question presents itself: what are you going to do about it?

Of course, some Trump supporters can’t help but get a little triumphal:

Donald J Trump has been elevated to the purple by the prince-electors at Aachen, and coronated in Rome by the Pope, so that he is now Imperator of the Holy Roman Empire, and of the Empire of Man, Rex Quondam et Rexque Futurum.

All Glory to God and to his anointed!

The Tribune Assembly of the Commoners in America, who retain a quaint custom of confirming the Electoral determination by local ballot, have also granted His Imperial Majesty the Mandate of the Commons.

[…]

JD Vance will be Executive-for-Life, and Elon the first Transhuman Immortal of the Noosphere. So far, so good.

Purple haired girls will no longer be allowed to twirk and grind in public, as show in the first scene, and modest dress codes will be decreed by the National Census Office. No more tattoos nor face piercings.

Also, involuntary concubinage will ensure a reverse of the demographic decline, the return to the fertility levels needed to colonize Mars.

Related posts:

  1. “Donald Trump is, as a performer, in a class of his own. From the second the show began, he was in command: withering, funny, sharp, powerful.”
  2. The unlikely appeal of Donald Trump
  3. Donald Trump didn’t say this … but it’s easy to imagine that he would

1 Comment

  1. ESR on the Twits:

    Eric S. Raymond @esrtweet
    I hear Kamala Harris has conceded. For just a moment, I’m going to abandon the high-decoupling rationalist stance I normally post from and talk about what I personally wanted from this election and now hope I might get.

    For me, a good outcome in this election meant not Trump winning, but his enemies losing.

    I’m not MAGA, and not a tribal conservative of either the old-school or new-school kind. I’m a libertarian, and have some serious differences with substance with Trump and his partisans.

    Also I have never much liked Trump as a person. He’s vulgar and under-controlled; he talks and postures too much and, I think the charge that he’s a narcissist has some weight. But…he chooses his enemies well.

    I will also admit that I think better of Trump now than I did three months ago. He has demonstrated literal courage under fire, which is an important quality in a man who may need to make life or death decisions about the fate of a nation. I went to see him speak, and I saw a man much calmer and more together than I was expecting.

    But I’m not really posting about Trump today, and the only other thing I’m going to say about him is that his most valuable quality is that he enrages evil people into unmasking themselves.

    I have believed for decades that the central problem of American politics is defeating the Gramscian long march through our institutions. Covert and not-so-covert Marxists have waged a remarkably successful memetic war. it has many manifestations – blatant bias in the mainstream media, welfare statism, DEI, climate alarmism, transgender ideology, open borders – but the goal is always the same. To cripple and destroy the Main Enemy, the United States of America and everyone in it who loves liberty.

    Trump’s victory is the worst defeat of the Gramscians in my lifetime. They went all-in with an unprecedented campaign of lies, vitriol, hate propaganda, lawfare, and election rigging. He beat them anyway, and for that he has my respect.

    What I want from the immediate aftermath of the election is to rejoice in their agonized screaming. What I want from Trump and Republican control of both houses is follow-through:

    1. Impose election security measures so we can’t be frauded again.

    2. Abolition of every federal firearms law and regulation, including the disbandment of the ATF. We must restore the proper Constitutional order in which the government is frightened of the people, not the reverse.

    3. Massive cuts in the reach and power of the administrative state. No unelected bureaucrat should ever have the power to effectively make law.

    4. A concerted and conscious attempt to drive the Communists and Communist tools out from everywhere that they have burrowed into our institutions, perhaps starting with the complete defunding of any educational institution that harbors academic Marxists.

    Yes, I know, many of these people don’t know they’re Communist tools. I’m past caring. I’ve been ready to throw them out of helicopters with my own hands since about 2014, hoping against hope that something would happen to make that kind of violence unnecessary.

    Now, maybe, we have a path to defeating them peacefully. I’m not sure Trump fully understands this necessity himself, but there are people close to him – notably Elon Musk and Ron Paul – who I’m pretty sure do.

    The first thing we need to do is be able to name the enemy. Conservatives have been cowards about this ever since the Army-McCarthy hearings a few years before I was born. They became afraid to speak about or explicitly oppose Communist infiltration, and we have been paying an increasing price for that cowardice through my entire lifetime.

    Conservatives? MAGA people? If you really want to make America great again, make defeat of the Gramscians your cause. Name the enemy. Expose them. Defeat them. They have crippled, divided, and corrupted us for far too long. It’s time to take our country back.

    Comment by Nicholas — November 7, 2024 @ 16:16

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