What Happened at the Polls Last Week?
This was not 2016 when Donald Trump lost the popular vote but prevailed in the electoral college with 306 votes to Hilary Clinton’s 232. Last week, Trump garnered 74,677,434 votes to Harris’ 71,147,994 votes and won the Electoral College with 312 electoral votes to Harris’ 226. No previous Republican presidential candidate has ever won this many popular votes. All this in the face of a relentless media campaign painting Trump as a fascist, an insurrectionist, and a danger to American democracy. So, what are we to make of the results?
The Public’s Reaction to ‘Lawfare’
Trump has been the target of various federal and state legal actions since he left the White House. New York Attorney General Letitia James successfully obtained a civil verdict against Trump for allegedly inflating the value of properties to get more favorable loan terms with banks. No loan went into default, and no bank found itself holding the bag. No bank went to law enforcement complaining of fraud. This was a zero-loss case that no white-collar prosecutor would have bothered pursuing in the ordinary course. But Trump must pay $355 million plus interest. The case is on appeal.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office rendered Trump a convicted felon based on a N.Y. recordkeeping law because of the characterization of hush money payments to Stormy Daniels. The Daniels payment was old news, and Bragg spent an enormous sum of money to prosecute Trump for political purposes. The Federal Election Commission (FEC) looked into the payments to Daniels but voted 4-1 to close the investigation. The case was also pursued by the Southern District of New York, but federal prosecutors declined to file charges. Bragg simply wanted to make good on a campaign promise to “get Trump” and did so. The verdict is on appeal.
Special Counsel Jack Smith is prosecuting Trump federally for taking classified documents with him in 2020 when he left the White House. As I have noted in previous posts, Trump brought much of this on himself. Rather than instructing his lawyers to go through all the boxes and turn over all classified documents, Trump (using his valet) relocated some of the boxes. This was not done for nefarious purposes but to give the middle finger to authorities. The public has rejected this document’s prosecution, and Biden should pardon Trump and end the case before Trump takes office.
On the state level, Georgia’s Fani Willis and on the federal level, Jack Smith, have charges related to the 2020 election and Trump’s efforts to challenge the results. As mentioned above, the public has deliberated on these matters and returned Trump to the White House. These prosecutions should be ended (even Willis’ home state voted to return Trump to the White House).
The bottom line on these legal matters is that the people’s verdict is in. Trump’s popularity is no doubt due to citizen revulsion at efforts to use the legal system to harm a political enemy. It is one thing to pursue a political opponent in the media and quite another to resort to the courts. Syracuse’s Gregory L. Germain sums up the matter as follows: “The Democratic Party and its politically motivated government prosecutors also need to reconsider their actions. If the election shows anything, it shows that the public does not like politically motivated prosecutions and impeachments. The argument that Trump was a convicted felon backfired, as the public saw him as a victim of biased and politically motivated prosecutions brought in Democratic strongholds.”
January 6th is not the American Guy Fawkes Day
November 5th is Guy Fawkes Day in Great Britain when the country remembers the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Fawkes and various Catholic co-conspirators tried to blow up Parliament and kill James I. They were discovered, imprisoned, and put to death. Since the events of January 6, 2021, there has been significant public debate on how it should be viewed and remembered. Some commentators have likened it to historical acts of insurrection. Donald Trump is supposed to be the American Guy Fawkes. No doubt, January 6th was an ugly event, as all riots are. But it was a riot, not an insurrection. It was a one-off event and not evidence of some right-wing conspiracy to destroy the American government. Democrats need to put January 6th in the review mirror and focus on other matters (maybe on why they could not defeat a candidate like Trump, who is replete with faults).
A Shift in the Democratic Party’s Base
Some analysts attribute the Democratic Party’s recent performance to shifts in its coalition towards its more radical periphery. My friend Nick Capaldi, a professor emeritus at Loyola University New Orleans, hits the nail on the head in an email sent to me earlier in the week:
The Democrat Party is now run by cultural Marxists. The latter follow the views of [Antonio] Gramsci. Gramsci argued that the working class will never foment the revolution. Instead, Marxists should engage in a long march through the institutions, the most important of which is the UNIVERSITY (higher education). When forced to choose between the vanguard and the proletariat, the left (following Gramsci) chose the vanguard.
Among this segment, there are only oppressed and oppressors (and anyone who is Caucasian falls into the latter category, whether they are a corporate executive or a janitor). As a coalition of minorities, Democrats have embraced illiberal policies and illiberal cultural values and the habitual demonization of America’s Founding Fathers. In the process, they have traded the working class for the products of American universities run by the likes of Claudine Gay, who had to resign as Harvard’s president over her inability to say that demands for the genocide of Jews (oppressors according to this theory) violated Harvard’s conduct policy.
Hence, exit polls showed that college graduates favored Harris over Trump, 55 to 42 percent, whereas voters without a college degree voted 56 to 42 percent in favor of Trump. Democrats have lost the working class and depend on the brainwashed class. This poses long-term trouble for the Democrats because college admissions are expected to decline significantly in the coming years as more young people enter the workforce without college diplomas. Democrats have marched through the institutions, but more and more citizens are rejecting those radical institutions.
The Mainstream Media Gets Kicked in the Teeth
The mainstream media, as well as traditional political figures and institutions (like Liz Cheney, the neocons, card-carrying Democrats, Urban Radicals, AOC’s camp), were decisively rejected. Although they hold power in the institutions of government, big business, and academia, their messaging failed. And they made it clear: a vote for Trump was a pact with the Devil and the end of America as we know it. But the majority of Americans did not believe them. They recognize that there is a coalition and it is not neutral. This is not the 1970s when Walter Cronkite’s reports were taken as gospel. The people know that supposedly neutral institutions are really partisan institutions. CNN and The New York Times are not industry leaders in journalism but mouthpieces for propaganda. Universities do not teach the great books but oppose the foundations of Western civilization. Multinational corporations have no loyalty to countries or peoples but are happy to endorse policies (DEI, for example) that please those in government and the media. The overwhelming support for Trump is a recognition that these institutions have failed us. In essence, 74,677,434 Americans said that the emperor had no clothes.
Is Everything Roses?
Absolutely not. Trump’s former Attorney General Bill Barr has noted that “If you believe in [Trump’s] policies, what he’s advertising is his policies, he’s the last person who could actually execute them and achieve them.” Americans tired of inflation, uncontrolled illegal immigration, and an imperialist foreign policy have genuine fears that Trump and the Republicans will not deliver. However, in a Harris administration, there would have been zero chance of good outcomes on such matters. Yes, Trump might get distracted by the irrelevant, but at least there is a chance—especially since it appears he has learned lessons about staffing his administration Whereas in his first administration, he leaned on neocon war hawks John Bolton and Nikki Haley to implement an American First foreign policy, this time around Trump is offering positions to Tulsi Gabbard and Mike Walz There is also much hope with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy slated to lead a new “Department of Government Efficiency.”
Undoubtedly, Trump will make some decisions with which I vehemently disagree. I am well aware that Donald Trump is not the equivalent of Ron Paul. But he is certainly the lesser of two evils (and not just by a whisker). It will be an interesting four years.
The post What Happened at the Polls Last Week? appeared first on The Beacon.
