The President Donald Trump era appears to be circling the drain. What an utterly unglued five years this has been in American political and popular society. Trump’s enemies, at least in the press, seem to think that his apparent impending departure from public office will mark his removal from the public scene, or at least from public influence. I do not think they could be more wrong (as usual). Setting aside the increasingly far-fetched possibility that Trump may yet pull out a victory via legal challenges to Democrat Party election shenanigans, the fact of his being out of elected office will, I think, do rather little to limit his ability to drive the public narrative.
It does mean he is no longer responsible for U.S. foreign policy, with all the ensuing significant dangers to world peace and stability implied in a Joe Biden regime. But domestically, with all the vast popular support he retains, the transition back to civilian life would seem to point to Trump soon being able to take the gloves off, being no more restrained by the requirements of his office to at least attempt to appear “presidential”. Not only is he not going to lose his megaphone, I deeply suspect he will be in the market to buy one of his own.
That being said, he does seem to be expending more and more of his political capital the longer he drags out his refusal to concede. It’s almost beginning to look like this was all nothing more than a final giant trolling of Trump’s political enemies, who overnight flipped their script and decided that calling election results into question by peddling conspiracy theories is thoroughly untoward behavior, even a “threat to democracy”. Good to know, good to know.
Perhaps the strangest part of the unraveling of the Trump presidential era has been the recent descent of the new-technology media companies, in particular, into an outright dystopia-worthy suppression of facts, opinions, or commentary that challenge the prevailing narrative of the ensconced clerisy. That’s not to say that their ambitions have evolved at all, it’s just that they’re not even trying to hide their manipulative propagandizing anymore.
In a way, it’s good that it’s so out in the open now. People who have been in active denial that the mainstream media is politically biased to the point of corruption don’t really have a leg to stand on anymore. People who have been susceptible enough to the leftist political narrative to be truly oblivious to the leftward slant of all the media they consume are now facing patronizing right-think instruction memos concerning the elections, Covid-19, and Lord knows what else, every time they open up Facepalm™. They have little possibility of clinging to any illusions concerning who determines what “correct” opinion is now. At some point, they’re going to grow tired of being hectored like that, and might be willing to start looking for less annoying options. That would be a great thing.
Overall, I think the Trump presidency has been good for the country – and for the world. In November of 2016, I certainly did not think I would be saying that four years later, but I was wrong about Trump. He’s still neither a gentleman nor a scholar, of course, but his policy instincts turned out to be surprisingly good, and his ability to remain productive while taking relentless flack was astonishing.
More importantly, he managed to expose an awful lot of rot in America’s institutions. Prompting the mainstream media to debase themselves until they resembled nothing so much as a sniveling pack of dishonest hyenas was perhaps his greatest accomplishment.
But the truth is that he somehow brought out the worst in just about everybody. This might not typically be considered a commendable characteristic, but I believe he has done the nation a great service by exposing the rot that has been undermining it for decades. No one can deny anymore that the country has serious and maybe even fatal deformities in almost all our public institutions. As they say, the first step in addressing a problem is to admit you have one. Who can make the case for the health of any of this country’s major institutions at this point?
The upshot of that? What if we’ve been living through the calm before the storm!