I will decide the next presidential election.
I’ve realized this just recently so I thought I should let you know
Though this image is supposed to be me experiencing sudden enlightenment, I recently got new glasses making the resemblance less accurate.
Strangely I will do this even though I do not live in a battleground state.
We’ve lived in Minnesota for 20 years where my presidential vote has always been meaningless.
We’re contemplating moving to Texas, where my presidential vote would be just as meaningless.
Yet whomever gets my vote will win this election.
I am a Reagan Republican, have been forever. I am what we used to call a “fusionist” conservative, accepting a trifecta of views: anticommunist hawk, free market on economics, socially conservative with a metaphysical view of human nature. In the 1980s I fit in perfectly as an editor at National Review where the term fusionism was coined by Frank Meyer.
I voted for Trump in 2016, not entirely happily. But two points were in his favor. I identified, as I have since childhood, with “the deplorables.” And Trump was the first Republican candidate in my lifetime who used ridicule against his opponents, made it work, and made me laugh doing it. The last real master of that art had been Franklin Roosevelt. I thought “it had worked so well for Roosevelt, maybe that’s a weapon we need in our arsenal.”
And of course there was Hillary. As I wrote at the time it was our thug against theirs and I felt no obligation to help theirs.
I voted for Trump again in 2020 because, to my surprise, he turned out to be the second-best President in my lifetime. I ranked him after Reagan because the challenges Reagan faced were of orders of magnitude greater in difficulty and importance. I had grown up assuming that I would die in a war with the Soviets, if not on a battlefield then in my bed after they dropped the big one. Reagan put a stop to all that; how could I not revere him?
On top of that Reagan inspired a new and vastly improved understanding of economics, banishing the money obsessions of both left and right not by argument but, amazingly, by empirical demonstration. Looking at 40 years of data since the Reagan tax cuts, no one should be able to say “aggregate demand” or “money supply” with a straight face.
Still, if not quite Reagan, Trump had been remarkably effective after two decades of the GOP showing its unfitness to govern. The Trump tax cuts, soon to expire, drove unemployment down to 50-year lows. Like the Reagan tax cuts Trump’s materially enhanced the after-tax rewards for investment, which more than any other factor determine the strength of the dollar.
His foreign policy performance was brilliant. His employment of personal diplomacy, usually such a mistake in a President was stunningly successful. Perhaps he was just lucky in his choice of son-in-law, but no American president has even attempted what Trump succeeded at in the Middle East. And it was achieved largely through demonstrations of personal strength, starting with moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. There could be no more perfect demonstration that we had a President who meant what he said and did what he promised. And that made all the difference.
I wish I knew what Trump had to do with Putin holding back on Ukraine, or if Biden’s accession was important to Putin’s decision to invade. I know not whether Trump, reelected, would have backed off Hamas from October 7. Both are credible possibilities.
Finally, I don’t believe January 6 was an insurrection. I believe Trump is less a threat to democracy than are the people behind the Russian collusion scam. I do not share the personal style original never-Trumpers. I am not prissy, or prudish, or finicky, or moderate, or at all inclined to fashionable opinion.
So, here’s the thing. If I don’t vote for Trump in November he will lose and probably lose big. If Trump can’t get somebody like me to vote for him over a corrupt, senile, one-and-half-feet-in-the-grave old hack who has given over his administration to socialists, greenie nut jobs, and antisemites and will likely die in office to be succeeded by Kamala Harris, then Trump hasn’t got a prayer. Whatever they might be thinking now, if finally the 20% or the 40% (as Niki Haley claims) turn away in disgust he will be gone for good.
If, when people like me walk into the voting booth, the uppermost thought in their minds is “he could be gone for good”, he’ll be gone for good.
And whatever else one might think about 2024 that would be good.
You're all coming around ;-) ...How could you not? Ben Shapiro, for example, just co-hosted a fundraiser for Trump. It's probably the most important election of our lifetimes