Response sent to Andrew Sullivan on “Keep Calm, Carry On… And Wait“
Dear Andrew,
Do I think there is NOTHING good about Trump 2.0, otherwise known as Everything I Don’t Like is DEI? Well actually I am pleasantly surprised that his foreign policy team consists of realists on Ukraine like Marco Rubio and Keith Kellogg, who put the burden of resolution on Vladimir Putin, as opposed to Anthony Blinken, who was trying to preserve a status quo that no longer exists, or a John Mearsheimer, who would tell us all that Putin is just misunderstood.
But otherwise, we go back to your question, “regime change or another shit-show?” And after only two weeks, the answer is clearly: BOTH. We have these people creating deliberate chaos with orders and policy changes that are illegal, cannot be carried out, or cannot be carried out because they’re illegal. You would think that conservatives would know what “Chesterton’s Fence” is.
What we’re seeing are two inter-related points. One, Trump is clearly a senile tapioca brain who is front and center to amuse the proles and distract the media while the actual think tank like Elon Musk, Stephen Miller and Russell Vought does the real work. You can see this in his marathon Oval Office signing sessions where the staffer has to tell him what the order he’s signing is for, and Trump looks at it and always says, “Ooh, that’s a big one.”
From a right-libertarian standpoint, if all this just meant cutting taxes, cutting wasteful spending, cutting counterproductive regulations, and killing wokeness, that would be one thing. But that gets to point two – clearly people like Vought, Musk and Miller have no clue how government works either, despite being more intelligent and qualified than Trump. But the point isn’t to do things on procedure. The point is to break the system. And they’re doing it because they think they can.
Because everyone in the institution, from Mitch McConnell to Merrick Garland to John Roberts went out of their way to tell Trump that he could do anything he wanted and no one would stop him, and last election the public agreed with that, and thanks to the downballot vote, Democrats have less ability to oppose him than ever. But then, if they knew how to counter Trump, they wouldn’t have lost the election.
But now we’re seeing Musk muscling in to get his people infested in the civil service and his information systems running the record keeping, and various things are being taken out of government websites, like, the text of the Constitution. Any dissent is being killed, despite the fact that the last nine years have demonstrated that you can dissent against Donald Trump all you want, and nothing can stop him.
The only thing that did stop him was public contempt at his disastrous handling of COVID, and that was only because it was an election year. And I predict that Trump WILL cause a catastrophe on par with COVID, if not worse. Because the factors that led to it have been reinforced and the safeguards have been removed.
So when you say, “Keep Calm, Carry On… And Wait”, I ask- wait for what? Things ARE going to get worse, much quicker than anybody expects. The catastrophe is going to happen before the midterms, and at this rate, before June. And when, NOT if, it happens, we as a country will not be ready. Because again the election will not be a factor, Democrats cannot stop him and Republicans never would stop him. And if Trump dies of his various co-morbidities, his handpicked successor is JD Vance, who is a sincere religious fanatic, as opposed to Trump, who is clearly just a religious fanatic for the money. But in regard to Vance, good of you to point out that every conservative convert to Catholicism suddenly acts like they have more doctrinal authority than the Pope.
But hey, at least we don’t have to worry about the pronoun police anymore. That’s the important thing, right?
Sincerely,
JAMES