Will everyone please take a chill pill!
I’m currently sailing blissfully among the fjords of Norway, chilling with lots of Akvavit and looking for Michael Palin’s famed “Norwegian blue” parrot, and thus because the debate last night took place at 3 am local time, I didn’t take it in. I wasn’t surprised to see accounts that Trump performed poorly, that the moderators were biased, that Kamala was effective enough to meet diminished expectations. I don’t however, see the case for doom and gloom, for a variety of reasons.
A month ago I posted the following Tweet/X, which was widely misinterpreted:
Many readers thought I was comparing Trump favorably to Ronald Reagan, and that I was predicting a Trump landslide. I intended neither, but can see how people got this mis-impression. Another lesson learned from the limitations and defects of the Twitter short format.
I guess I expected more readers would recall the context of why National Review wrote that sentence in September 1980. Today all we seem to remember is that Reagan crushed Carter in the late debate, and broke the race open into a thumping landslide. But throughout late August and into September, Reagan was making mistake after mistake (so went the conventional wisdom, which then rattled Republican leaders into near panic).
His gaffes included saying “Vietnam, in truth, was a noble cause,” which caused embolisms at the New York Times and everywhere else—except among the tens of millions of Americans who agreed with him, even if they disliked the war. Reagan said “fascism was the basis of the New Deal,” and refused to back down while the media hounded him about it. He expressed doubts about evolution—not exactly a top tier public policy issue. He defended “states rights” in Mississippi near the site of the killing of civil rights activists in the 1960s. The polls were uncomfortably close well into the weekend before the election. (The last public polls over the weekend did not detect Reagan’s late surge, though the private polls of the two campaigns did.)
Although Reagan’s campaign brought on some old establishment hands (Stuart Spencer in particular) to “steady” Reagan, National Review recognized what later crystalized in to the slogan, “Let Reagan be Reagan.” He is who he is. It got him to where he was. Note NR said “win or lose.”
I keep seeing article after article on a daily basis, from sensible people saying sensible things, about what Trump “must do” to win the election. Most of these articles offer good advice, and are likely right. But after all this time shouldn’t we realize that Trump will pay no attention to any of this advice. Trump is an instinctual politician. He is going to win—or lose—as what he is. There’s no “New Trump” hiding somewhere in captivity. All of these articles are wasted ink and pixels. And the “what-he-is” of Trump has gotten him pretty far, and exerted a world-wide effect for the better.
I continue to think he is going to win, because I have a near mystical belief that he’s a world-historical figure of destiny. No, it’s not rational in any conventional sense, though perhaps I can spin a neo-Hegelian case. (But that wouldn’t be prudent.) I can give you rational reasons why he should be favored to win, too, but why crib from Nate Silver’s work. The point is, he may not be sufficiently articulate, but he has become the surprising and unexpected champion of everyone around the globe who has had it with our conventional ruling elite of nearly all historic political parties. The old order is dying, and a new one is struggling to be born, against fierce opposition and long odds. And while I am fully aware of Trump’s many defects, our ruling class, our corrupt institutions, universities, government bureaus, and mass media, deserve to lose to him. I don’t care if he spends the next four years at Mar-a-Lago and hands over the executive branch to J.D. Vance. (Actually that’s not a bad idea.)
So let Trump be Trump. It’s what he’s best at. And he will win or lose as Donald Trump, and not some other kind of candidate everyone keeps trying to persuade him to be.
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