Even If Trump Wins, There's a Long Road Ahead

Buckle up!

Donald Trump likes to tell us he can solve America’s demonstrable problems lickety-split.

There are many things he can do quickly, in days if not hours, by executive order. These include shutting the open border, to a great extent anyway, reinstating, even increasing, sanctions on Iran to cut the money flow enabling the mullahs and allowing domestic oil producers to drill, baby, drill.  This would restrain Russian adventurism.

We can name several other improvements that could be done relatively easily, like ticketing the Department of Education for extinction and changing the comically “woke” leadership in our military. We can also get rid of the iffy voting machines and go back to paper ballots with one Election Day.

It’s clear that Elon Musk, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard will have important roles.  (Is Tulsi the first woman president?)

Others will return who have served well in the past with names like Kudlow and Grenell. The list is not short.

But looming over all this is another reality.

Kamala Harris, no matter what, will have received tens of millions of votes, perhaps won the popular vote.

These people all supported someone who is unable to answer the most predictable softball questions in anything resembling coherent English.   

The CBS ultra-loyalists at “60 Minutes” had to unscramble, against all journalistic ethics, her illiterate maunderings in the cutting room and even then they made little sense.  (CBS is yet to publish the actual transcript, although many have rightly called for it.)

On CNN she had to be coached through their Oct 23 Town Hall that all, even the most usually slavish of their reporters, struggled not to deem a fiasco.

The only time she appears able to be intelligible is when she reads short, pre-written material like her recent attack on Donald Trump as Hitler, hardly an intellectual achievement and demonstrably absurd, let alone monumentally antisemitic. One wonders if she even understands something that obvious.

One also wonders if she knows (or cares) what a “fascist” is,  a term she regularly uses to characterize Donald Trump, including at the CNN Town Hall, when Trump regularly espouses deregulation and fascists, in the tradition of Mussolini, do the reverse, demanding state control of nearly everything.

And yet millions and millions support her.  Some of this is Trump Derangement Syndrome, some of it is being a Democrat by inheritance (everyone in my family always was) or habit (not all that different from smoking), some of it is from fear of losing a government job.

But some are drunk on tired ideology.  We find this all over our schools, media and entertainment.

These people will make it Hell for their fellow Americans between Nov 5 and the inauguration on Jan 20. It could even lead to violence.

That interregnum won’t be the end of it either.  This ideological infection is too entrenched.  It has been going on a long time, since the days of Woodrow Wilson with a warp speed bump from the election of Barack Obama.

It didn’t all begin with “woke.”  That’s only a recent manifestation of a titanic struggle for what used to be called our minds and hearts.

Deprogramming all this will take time and must perforce be piecemeal.  We need patience, a lot of it.

Among other things we are going to have to recover is the English language.  This is more important than it seems. It’s not just pronouns.  Much of what was once standard vocabulary has been politicized to manipulate the public.

Science, once considered impermeable, is at the center of this.  We have been lied to about “global warming” and Covid for reasons that are driven by both politics and greed.

As for the border, the word “migrant” is constantly slurred (especially by Harris) so that it’s hard to tell whether legal or illegal immigration is meant.  This is quite deliberate and meant to resist reform, actually to block it entirely.

Most importantly, the word “citizen” has become meaningless.  What defines a citizen if you need an ID card to get on a plane but don’t need one to vote?  Or if you can just walk across the border and wait around a bit to become one while others have to undergo an arduous (perhaps too arduous) legal process similar to most of our ancestors and those who built this country?

And there’s our educational system.  We might as well call it an indoctrination system (with exceptions, obviously).  This is the root problem of all and won’t be solved simply by closing the Department of Education in Washington.  That’s only a start but it would be illusory to think it would amount to much without significant effort by many of us on the ground from kindergarten through graduate school.

But arguably more than anything, it will be worth it.   

So pray for Trump to win—I am— and vote for him, of course, if you haven’t already, but don’t think for a minute, if he does win, that’s the end.  It’s only the beginning.

PERSONAL NOTE:

With luck, I may even be reappointed to the Board of Directors of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty under former USAGM CEO Michael Pack—a position I held for all of four days at the tail end of the previous Trump administration when the Biden Administration came in canned all of us.  It was unpaid, but I suppose it looked good on my resumé.