Sean Walsh The Conservative Woman November 9, 2024
‘I don’t know that any major news organisation has declared him to be the winner yet.’ Thus whined the wretched Jake Tapper as Trump dispensed with the usual protocols and claimed the win, outrageously, at a time convenient to him. Tapper is of the soon-to-be-extinct ‘major news organisation’ CNN, a Potemkin news broadcaster and longstanding servant of the Democrat election machine. A machine which now looks likely to be decommissioned.
It was almost touching to see that even at the end of the night, with all hope gone and all complacency vaporised by sub-optimal vote returns, the self-regard of the legacy media remained intact. It was a beautiful moment as the fake-news stalwart suddenly showed himself like an entitled toff, not quite knowing what’s happening as the upstart oik flips him the finger.
Tapper sort of had a point, which is what made it so funny. Technically, Trump’s victory announcement was not in keeping with the normal timetable of these things. He was, at this point, just shy of the electoral college magic number of 270 votes. But what did anyone expect? This is a guy who heard rumours of pet sacrifice in Ohio and outrageously and brilliantly dropped this urban gossip into the immigration debate, generating ingenious memes designed to skewer him, but which in the end only confirmed his TikTok iconic status.
You thought he was likely to be constrained by the traditional result-night etiquette? Seriously?
Of course not. This was a characteristic Trumpian power move, a message that the hegemony of the liberal political class is collapsing, that its propagandist media outriders are no longer relevant, and that the deep-state cabals are now on notice.
What Tapper and his pampered, overindulged cohorts were miss is that Trump’s disregard for the establishment timetable of ‘how things run’ on election night is a signal of a more consequential intention. They’re his rules now, and the bowtied, milquetoast, conservative RINO usual suspects, along with the Bush-Cheney axis of irrelevance, had better suck it up.
Why do Trump’s detractors always get him so wrong? One reason is that his imperfections of character conceal a more complicated moral psychology. Yes, he exaggerates, obfuscates and even lies. But he seems to have a deeper core of authenticity which grounds basic decencies, including uncomplicated love of country and a genuine affection for the ‘tool and tattoo’ working classes, rural and urban, who are silent but essential contributors to the American story.
His personal history has given those detractors useful political ammunition. All of which is now spent. To adapt George Bush Sr, the reality of 2024 US family life is less like The Waltons than it is like The Simpsons. Trump’s reputation as a philanderer is deserved. So what? At least he has one in common with the serially adulterous stalwarts of the DC elite class.
But the values in any family show in the character of the children. Trump has five kids. When he speaks of them – as he does often – he talks of their individual uniqueness, in ways only a doting father can.
His opponent, in contrast, is a fake. And a faker is always less attractive than a liar. The faker will never be invited to join in the game of ‘I’m lying, but you know I’m lying, and I know you know I’m lying, and…’
Fakery is the worst form of dishonesty, which is why we despise the hypocrite. The successful liar at least needs to have a certain respect for the truth. Fakery is a more harmful disorder, because the faker ends up unable to even trust himself.
Trump is a renegade politician who can connect with a blue-collar worker without betraying his billionaire roots. The long-form interview, the ascendant journalistic forum, is a gift to him because it puts his authenticity on display. He can go on Joe Rogan and schtick for three hours without effort or fear of exposure because he is comfortable with who he is, and doesn’t care if you aren’t.
These are habits of honesty which more than compensate for the trivial matter of whether he tried to cover up an affair with a soft-porn actress. I mean, isn’t that the sort of thing you would want to keep quiet? Would you not be suspicious of somebody who didn’t?
Authenticity, it goes without saying, cannot be faked. Which is why a Kamala Harris presidency was always unlikely. Her career seems to have been one of upward failure, a sequence of expedient compromises to get ahead. She gives the impression of treating any interaction as a job interview and seems to see her life history not as a story to be told but as a CV to be waved around. Trump in McDonalds was ridiculous but authentic; Harris’s Jamaican patois was just ridiculously fake.
Trump’s campaign was successful because it was authentically joyful. Genuinely creative people see rules as opportunities for making mischief. He has done to the orthodoxies of electoral strategy pretty much what the early Bob Dylan, another genius, did to the traditions of folk music: ripped up the rules of the genre to revivify it.
For the American left and its media pilot fish these ought to be worrying times. The candid self-assessment necessary for renewal will require that they throw away the identitarian comfort blanket. Yet already they seem incapable of analysing their defeat without using the same language that caused it. They are like a person who has lived his whole life in a photographic negative and is suddenly asked to imagine the colour red.
Try asking a Jake Tapper or one of the coven of The View to explain the left’s electoral belly flop without leaning into the language of critical race theory. You might as well ask a ten-year old to eat a jam doughnut without licking his lips.
The Vice-President has pledged a smooth transition into what she presumably still sees as the fascism of a Trump second term. Is that correct? Or has the woeful Biden regime confiscated the swastikas by a final Executive Order? It’s hard to keep up.
This was a predictable post-defeat manoeuvre, a pretend pledge of reconciliation, cloaked in the language of patriotism. The left Establishment is fearful of justified retribution. But that won’t happen. Trump will be magnanimous in victory for one excellent reason: it’ll really mess with their heads.
The nominal President is incapacitated, and the executive functions of the US state, assuming there are any, are currently invisible. There is a vacuum of accountability at the top of the US government. This is not a sustainable situation.
At this point of the US interregnum, it is customary for Washington types to remind us that America has only one President at a time.
This is true and that President is Donald Trump. His election night impertinence shows us he gets this. We should congratulate him on the greatest comeback in political history. But what’s the point? He’ll be doing that himself. And he’s authentic enough not to hide it.
Editor’s note. Donald Trump, the President elect, has released ten point plan to dismantle the Deep State which you can watch here. https://x.com/charliekirk11/status/1854717077837562314?s=61
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Nelle's journey 