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November 8, 2024 - 10:00am
Donald Trump will return to Washington with the wind at his back: an electoral rout and at least one chamber of Congress. In the early hours of Wednesday morning, one jubilant former senior official in his administration told me that “2016 was a hilarious unexpected rebuke to the swamp”. But 2024, the same ex-official went on, is “America saying ‘Fuck you guys, we’re sending the felon back to finish the job.’”
Trump, long spurned by Washington elites, assembled his own merry band of high-profile supporters over the course of his third run, coasting into election day with two fresh and enthusiastic endorsements from Joe Rogan and Megyn Kelly. From stand-up comedians to podcasters to athletes, Trump’s celebrity support ultimately reflected the broad coalition that turned out for him on Tuesday. As one headline in The Federalist this week put it: “The social stigma of being a Trump supporter is gone.”
What will the President-elect do with this power? Unsurprisingly, he claimed an “unprecedented and powerful mandate” during his acceptance speech, promising that “this will truly be the golden age of America.” Meanwhile, pseudonymous Ruthless co-host Comfortably Smug — a GOP consultant offline — was posting on X: “Can you believe we tricked the Libs into believing Project 2025 wasn’t real???”
Project 2025 was, of course, always real — although Trump’s involvement never amounted to the charges laid out by the media narrative. Still, the genesis of the effort lay in 2017, when Trump came to D.C. and tried to make big changes with a limited pool from which to hire loyal soldiers, entrenched liberalism in the federal bureaucracy, and no plausible policy agenda. Groups such as the Heritage Foundation regrouped after his loss in 2020 and tried to address those problems, whether he ran for office again or not.
Will it work? As we chatted, the aforementioned senior official in Trump’s first administration sketched out some plans: the President-elect should call on Congress to stay in session for the first 100 days of his administration, holding off on recess or holidays “until they pass his main promises through reconciliation”.
The source listed those promises as tax cuts, a border bill known as HR2, a voting bill called the SAVE Act, and opening up energy resources. “Don’t lose momentum, pass as much as can be done in January for him to sign on Inauguration Day and stay in with no breaks until it’s finished,” they said. Ominously for Democrats, the source said the presidential transition was “now in full force”.
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SubscribeOne challenge will be how to deal with a democrat party that has not been so hatefully manipulated since the days prior to the Civil War.
Some combination of “let them stew in their own juices” and “give them enough rope” should do the trick.
If this week is any indication, we can expect more hysteria from the left which is already anticipating the pogroms.
Will Trump be talked out of his plans for tariffs? It appears unlikely they would achieve any of the benefits he claims and would probably end up boosting US inflation, the very thing his voters say they hated, at worst retaliatory action from China and the EU could end in a trade war and world wide economic slump.
Margaret Thatcher’s first 100 days would make a good Trump 2 template. I can’t guess what would have made of him….or what he might make of her memory but there are parallels. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich at the start of the 2016 Trump presidency said: “Margaret Thatcher, much more than Ronald Reagan, is the real model for the Trump presidency”. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/mrs-thatcher-and-the-good-life Parallels? Well neither would – in the face of unprecedented media hostility – back down. And people notice this. The great majority of politicians think it politic to dance a kind of tango with the media but, in terms of inspiring fierce loyalty, uncompromising wins.
She died before the Western liberal establishment had begun to convulse itself over such things as whether our culture was ‘transphobic’ and whether young people needed to be protected from harm ‘triggered’ by its great works of literature. She missed out on having her say about much of the cultural transformation effected in the 21st century West by its university-educated progressive clerisy. But what she would have had to say had she been in her prime in 2024 would be a good guide for Trump 2.
She always called a spade a spade, loud and clear and damn the consequences. She never fell into the rhetorical rabbit hole of trying to frame arguments against ‘identity politics’ using its own tendentious terminology. Asked to discuss issues relating to the LGTB+ community she would probably have told the interviewer to stop talking such nonsense. She would have said it insistently and would not have shut up however impolitic the subsequent verbal joust became. Asked to comment on ‘systemic racism’, she would have wagged her finger and asserted that the West was the least racist society that had ever been and how crazy to have lurched – in a couple of generations – from racism against coloured people to racism against white people.
The ideal scenario?
Trump (representing the West) engages with Russia and China to form a united front against the common foe – Islamic fundamentalism. Wishful thinking maybe – but it is what Obama and Cameron should have done 15 years ago. Instead, they vilified and alienated Russia and dumped us all into the current era of terror-related turmoil.
“History teaches that a President’s power to implement an agenda is at its apex during the Administration’s opening days. To execute requires a well-conceived, coordinated, unified plan and a trained and committed cadre of personnel to implement it.
The long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass. The federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before.” [Project 2025, ppxiii-xiv]
“Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation.”
[Ronald Reagan, Inaugural Address, January 5, 1967, https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/january5-1967-inaugural-address-public-ceremony%5D.
The ending of the social stigma attached to being a Trump supporter will make it easier for Trump to attract competent people to work in his administration. He must not, however, try to do too much too quickly. He will only deliver a fraction of his agenda in four years so he has to pace himself and work to ensure that JD Vance or Tulsi Gabbard succeed him for two terms.