Trump 2.0

By Steve Woodward

Headlines plucked from the cultural cesspool:

Headline: Although the chairman of its board of directors resides in Tampa, the NAACP is warning black citizens and other “people of color” to avoid visiting Florida. (Does beet red due to uncontrolled laughter make me a person of color? Asking for a friend.)

Headline: Washington state is allocating $83,000 to host a Diversity, Inclusion and Equity education conference in June that includes a keynote speech entitled, “Drag Story Hour and Fireside Chat”. This is the same state that passed a law to declare parenting a threat to children.

Headline: Pundit Peggy Noonan, once renowned as a Reagan speechwriter, today warns that Republicans must turn on Donald Trump by taking a cue from the FBI’s response in 2017 to “Russian collusion”. 

Writes Noonan, “(Trump) was so impossible to imagine as president, such an obviously bad man and thus a threat to our country — that otherwise temperate and responsible people found themselves willing to believe anything about him, and, in the case of the FBI, willing to pursue any probe even when the evidence was thin or nonexistent.”

Against this backdrop of cultural lunacy and hysteria, the staid William Galston, in his weekly Wall Street Journal column, warns Republicans that we will go to our political grave unless we cave. On everything. We must echo Noonan and apologize for our Trump votes in 2016.

We already are racist, transphobic and too tolerant of the insufferable Orange Man. Now, we normal, law abiding conservatives have another, broader problem. We are too strident on abortion, same-sex marriage, trans weirdness, and border security. 

Galston and his mainstream media ilk do not acknowledge — or understand — that Americans living in flyover country, and even those in rural counties on the coasts, are not ever going to compromise on principle. Just look at what our complacency has wrought in recent decades. We were too compliant, if anything. We were also asleep. What became of education while we slumbered under the illusion that teaching history was a fairly straightforward exercise, unincumbered by revisionism.

Galston, from his elite perch, intones that Americans are “yearning for cultural moderation.”

That is quite an assumption, as it assumes vast swaths of Americans are weary of adhering to the Constitution, and to Biblical principles that undergird Christianity. Only a columnist who resides in a paneled office surrounded by scholarly pablum would advance such an elitist narrative. 

“U.S. voters,” he concludes without referencing any polling, “are looking for candidates willing to defend what most see as moral common sense and recognize that complex cultural issues can’t be reduced to a binary choice.”

In fact, this presumption that we must adopt moral common sense strikes many Americans as accepting moral erosion, a precipitous decline into a Godless abyss.

This call for a coming around, accepting that a Judeo-Christian mindset is out of favor, also resonates within the pages of The Atlantic, a periodical that is very well written and often compelling. But, of course, it is underpinned by the agenda of Marxist demagogues on the editorial executive floors.

“The Republicans are in the grip of a cult of personality, so there’s little hope for a normal GOP primary and almost none for a traditional presidential election,” The Atlantic writes. “Meanwhile, Republican candidates refuse to take a direct run at Donald Trump and speak the truth — loudly — to his voters; instead, they talk about all of the good that Trump has done but then plead with voters to understand that Trump is unelectable.“

This is a view from elitist world. Trump only is unelectable inside the cocktail parties in New York and Washington where the attendees are unaware of escalating crime in the streets of major cities, unyieldingly high prices for food and utilities, and a humanitarian crisis along the southern border. Worse, the elites are unaware of ascending school boards and village councils in small and midsize towns where the voters welcome a Trump resurgence because it began years ago and is entrenched today — at the grassroots. 

Wall Street Journal editor emeritus Gerard Baker, in his weekly column, Free Expression, devoted most of a May 23, 2023, review of the Trump’s “unelectability” to points which support that claim — Trump can’t win; he’s damaged goods. But Baker acknowledges this much about Trump’s primary opponents: “It takes more than a little chutzpah for someone who hasn’t registered a single vote in a presidential primary contest to dismiss someone who has already been elected (in 2016) as ‘unelectable’.”

The never Trumpers warn that we are delusional in believing that a second Trump term, led by a man into his late 70s, will recapture the triumphs of his first term. But what if we get Trump 2.0 in 2025? If it reverses the train wreck that is our economy, our foreign policy and our open southern border, and refutes so-called “cultural moderation”, the country wins, the people win, and our enemies once again will shrink into the shadows. 

And then there is this convenient truth: Kamala Harris no longer will be vice president.