There is plenty of time ahead for the peanut gallery to discuss the ins and outs of the daily goings-on with the new Trump administration. There will be good and bad, and everyone is free to call out which is what and can do so for fully four years.
For now, we pause to consider the historic nature of what is taking place in our times and be grateful that we are all around to watch it unfold. And we should consider the lessons it offers for our own lives.
There is the obvious data point that President Donald Trump is only the second nonconsecutive second-term president after Grover Cleveland. That’s interesting but hardly scratches the surface of the significance of this presidency.
Anyone who prophesied two years ago that Trump would be taking the oath of office would have likely been considered a lunatic. The whole of corporate media was railing against his legacy. The historians were writing him off. Google was gaming its search results to shame anyone who still defended him. Big tech and nearly the whole of academia were united in loathing. The sneering on late-night television was the only consistent theme.
Meanwhile, the big guns were coming for him personally with indictment after indictment. There is warfare and there is lawfare but the desire to destroy is the same. There was talk of confiscating Trump Tower and even jail. The revenge fantasies were out of control, while his attorneys’ fees were sky-high, millions upon millions of dollars.
There was no power center in the United States or really the world that was not overflowing with loathing and brutal attacks, including every attempted extortion and smear.
It is impossible to not give Trump personal credit for seeing his way through a series of threats and attacks that would have broken even the strongest character. Somehow he managed to get through it all with his physical and mental well-being not only saved but even strengthened.
How did he sleep? How did he keep his spirits high? How did he see the light at the end of this long, dark tunnel? It’s unfathomable.
I don’t care what your politics are: If you cannot see this example of steadfastness and courage as inspiring, there is something wrong. Is there anything wrong in your life to compare? It’s doubtful. He made it through and so can you. If nothing else is true, his personal example of courage in the face of grave danger is exemplary.
He had plenty of competitors for the Republican nomination, and they were right to challenge him, not based on a lack of respect but simply because of their own confidence that they could do the job. But at this stage of history, Trump was already legendary and approaching a status of personal grandeur that no one could match. Thus did he get the nomination and his competitors defer.
Panic among mainstream opinion makers ensued once again. The unthinkable happened: the first assassination attempt. It’s impossible to look at the circumstances surrounding that quarter-inch miss and not feel a sense of awe.
It’s difficult to explain without taking recourse to divine intervention. Equally remarkable was Trump’s response, not to cower and collapse but stand and assure the people for whom he felt responsibility that he was alive. And he used that precious and catastrophic moment to rally the people with immortal words, fist in the air.
Will that moment go down in history? It became obvious in the days following that the powers that be did not want it to do so. Within a week or so, it was hard to find information about this at all, as the major national media simply stopped talking about it. That left it to the masses of regular people who simply could not suppress their astonishment at what transpired.
Alternative media swung into action as did the meme makers and the merchants with shirts, cups, and posters. There was to be no burying this event.
Our times are absolutely desperate for examples of masculine heroism. The culture has been nearly purged of such, from movies to television to music. What Trump did was countercultural in every sense of the term: It went against the grain and disturbed the powers that be. This event became a mighty symbol of cultural renewal, a template for an entire generation to understand the sacrifices that are often necessary for success.
Behind the scenes, the Trump loyalists were hard at work, mostly in private by design, and with one focus: Get him to a second term. How in the world could they have confidence that this was possible? It comes down to one word—math. They knew what the whole of mainstream culture denied, namely that the results of the 2020 election were not mathematically possible.
Trump actually won more popular votes than he did four years earlier. The difference was the implausible appearance of 15 million to 20 million votes for his opponent that could not have reflected the choices and behaviors of real people. To right this wrong—or at least expose it—they attempted to use the courts, but the challenges were rejected on grounds of standing, as if voters themselves have no right at all to challenge what, for appearances, looked like voter fraud.
Team Trump knew that the numbers did not add up, and so they plotted a return. It broke down to three steps.
No. 1: They would work with states that were willing to tighten voter registration laws and crack down on mail-in balloting that everyone on the planet knows is more susceptible to fraud. They would recruit monitors. They would empower a grassroots movement to be vigilant against illicit balloting. And they would encourage early voting among the base. They knew that blue states would not cooperate, but they counted on a cultural movement to shame attempts to game the system.
No. 2: They would fire up the most disenfranchised group in the United States about whom no one seems to care, namely men younger than the age of 35. This is a group that had long lost any hope in elections and has been wholly overlooked by cultural elites. To reach them, Trump went on many podcasts, including Joe Rogan’s and many others. He knew he already had their support, but he needed something else: for them to register and actually vote. That’s a big ask, but it worked.
No. 3: The need to create a mass cultural movement that was larger and more powerful than the mass media. It needed hats, songs, rallies, and meetings. To this end, he flew all over the country to hold rallies at which he did what he does best, extemporaneous stand-ups talking about the events of the day, filled with humor, fun, and fury. These became massive events, with people lining up for a mile outside the venue, waiting in all weather for 12 hours and longer.
By the end of the campaign, there was not a single indoor venue in America that could hold all the people who lined up to see Trump speak in any town or city in this country. That is an amazing accomplishment, never before seen in our history. The result was precisely what was planned, a mass movement that competed with or even outpaced the smearbund working to defeat him.
Again, this was the plan all along, although it was never announced. It was like clockwork. The people least surprised on Election Night were all associated with Team Trump. They had mapped it out for years. As part of their planning, they deployed a method that has never before been seen in U.S. politics: absolute security of all information. No one associated with this group spoke to the press for four years.
It’s been the same for the transition. It has been privately financed to keep the prying eyes of the administrative state away from understanding and thus subverting what it is they have been planning. This is why nearly every pick for the Cabinet and agency heads has been a shock but for those whom the team released early as a deliberate trial balloon.
One must stand in admiration of all this, not just the administrative sophistication of the campaign and transition team but also the courage it required to follow through on all these plans despite the terrible odds. This alone is for the ages.
Now we are at the moment that is the real test: the time of governing. We are in for some huge surprises, of that I am sure. The national media has been locked out and understandably so. Some of what will unfold in the coming days, weeks, and months I will like and some I will not. I’m sure you will say the same. That’s the way the real world works. We have plenty of time to argue about this or that.
Let’s just take a moment to appreciate that we have this opportunity at all. Against all odds, Trump is president again. Let that be a lesson to all of us. Nothing is written that moral courage cannot overcome. That’s true in politics, and it is true in our own lives.
