Part 2: The Cowboy Who Cannot Win

The election on November 3rd is seismically important not just for America, but for much of the rest of the world also. Many Americans think that, because the European media mainly follow the same line on Trump as their own mendacious media sector, most people on the other side of the Atlantic are essentially proxies for woke Dems, speaking in diverse tongues. It’s not true: many people on the parent continent wait with bated breath for the outcome of the November 3rd election. Perhaps proportionately less of these will be hoping for a positive outcome for the incumbent than is the case in the Land of the Free, but it may be a closer call than the commentators would have you believe. Much of Trump’s support is silent. People may not be saying it in public — you know why — but they are thinking it, and they are whispering it from behind their hands once they become convinced they are not speaking to a dirty snitch, with which Europe, like America, is currently crawling.

We have a stake in this that many of us are acutely conscious of at a deep level, though not necessarily framing precisely as thoughts. We are ‘sneaking regarders’ of President Trump, in a time when such sentiment is verboten. This reticence is understandable: in recent years, a lot of strange things have been happening osmotically to our tongues and thinking gear. In some ways, this has had to do with Trump: those who would destroy our lives and our freedoms recognise DJT as their enemy and do not take kindly to sneaking regarders.

I believe those who fear Trump are right to be apprehensive. They are certainly correct in as far as what is called the ‘populist’ revolution that has been sweeping both continents for the past few years is concerned. ‘Populist’ is in this context a spell word, designed to smear: it translates in the media generated culture as ‘fascist’. Trump is the figurehead of what is caricatured by the world’s corrupt press as a right-wing populist insurgency, when in truth it is simply, and self-evidently, the reawakening of common sense in the world after many years of slumber.

Donald Trump’s re-election is the sine qua non of that revolution’s continuance. If he is returned in November, the revolution, which has been on hold due to the Covid scam — something I suspect will in due course turn out to be intimately connected to the US presidency — will renew itself with a surge. If Biden becomes president, everything — Covid included — will be over. It will be bye-bye Lega and Vox, bye-bye Georgia Maloni, bye-bye AFD and Swedish Democrats, bye-bye Bolsanaro too. They will have lost one of the chief sources of their recent burst of energy.

It’s as simple as this: Trump stands with the working people of the West against the woke moochers and parasites of a parallel but unviable world that is essentially intent upon denying the blue-collar builders of the world their share in the dividend likely to follow from the introduction of A.I. Trump has placed himself at the head of the people who make and mend, clean and paint, dig and plant the world. He may be an unlikely person to assume that role, but — with some reservations — he can be said to have acquitted himself pretty well.

In any event, the world has no choice: either America chooses Trump and he is allowed to continue his revolution — to deal, in particular, with some of the critical issues he has left untouched — or the parasites take over and crush the face of the working population under the heels of their Chelsea boots.

Firstly, let us count the ways of his success.

First and foremost, Trump has effectively exposed the corruption of the mainstream media. If there is one thing his presidency has done without question it is reveal that the supposed American Fourth Estate is simply a praetorian guard for corrupt ideologies and undemocratic forces working at the centre of the American system, operating at the expense of the people who pay for the entire circus. This corrupt permanent political establishment is what has sought to guarantee the survival of the same corrupt media in return for this 24/7 protection service. Trump exposed media mendacity and crookedness simply by being there and acting as a target for their venom. He has staged a five year drama of revelation at the heart of the Washington swamp that has resonated around the world and caused other peoples to look to the corruption of their own media sectors. This, above all, is why Trump excites so much antagonism, not just from the vested interests he’s exposed but also from the slow learners who just don’t seem able to see what’s in front of their noses or extract its meanings.

He’s acquitted himself well on the Supreme Court and made a strong public chance on abortion by being the first president to attend the March for Life in Washington. He certainly could have done more to face down the lefties, SJWs and BLM psychos, but, all things considered, he’s emerged from his first term as arguably the best president in living memory. You don’t need to prove this: the fact that you can even argue it is stunning all of itself.

With the saddest face you’ve ever seen, Trump laments that he built the greatest economy America has ever seen, and the astonishing thing was that, in a certain light, this was pretty much true. He reshored many industries lost during the Clinton Bush and Obama years. He got lucky with the numbers — largely by means of a stock market supernova, kicking the rusty can further down the road — then got very unlucky with Covid and the lockdown meltdown. He might better have endured those calamities had he grasped the BLM nettle with something resembling resolve. But he sat on his hands and let things rip for several weeks in late May and June. If he had gone into Minneapolis on night #2 in late May, the sceptics say, we would not be looking at a much different America. It’s certainly the case that, were a clampdown to go wrong, the crooked legacy media would have turned it into Trump’s Tiananmen Square moment, thereby endangering his marginal vote.And, indeed, what with one thing and another through the summer the president seemed to be losing the Rust Belt, without which he had no chance of winning in November. Things have settled down now, and other than by a massive feat of vote larceny, Biden has zero chance of winning.

Watching Trump deal with Covid all year has been especially frustrating. He seems not to get it that the ‘pandemic’ is a total scam. Actually, this is true of quite a few Americans whom normally I'd follow to the ends of the earth. Victor Davis Hanson, for example, seems to take the pandemic totally seriously, as does the otherwise fantastic Steve Turley. Of course there are many American doctors and scientists who have emerged to question the official narrative in various ways, but despite this the Biggest Lie Ever (BLE) has remained more or less intact. I believe this is in large part due to the odd and ambiguous responses of President Trump, who mostly gives the impression of buying into the official narrative but occasionally gives the precisely opposite impression.

From the outset he sent out mixed messages on China — in early March 2020 still kissing Xi’s ass, then slagging off ‘Chi-Na’ for having misled the world about the seriousness of the virus, then kissing ass again as though covering his own. He moved to shut down the flights from Wuhan in late January, but the response from the Dems and media hit him hard with their explicit charges of xenophobia, causing him to lose that initiative. A similar fear of spooking Wall Street caused him to delay closing the economy, and yet he lacked the confidence to go against the growing tide of lockdown-enthusiasm. Again, due to re-election priorities he allowed himself to get boxed in.

True, he has, from the beginning, been making negative noises about the WHO, but he never seems to move this logic to the next step. Some critics say that Trump lost ground on the Covid issue because at first he did not trust his instincts, mainly due to lacking his own political philosophical convictions or vision.

Myself, I have three different and constantly shifting theories about Trump and the virus: 1. that he's as much part of the problem as BoJo or Pelosi; 2. that he's been captured by his medical team (Fauci and Birx) and cannot escape until he's won the election; 3. that he has a cunning plan that he all the time appears to be about to spring at any moment. (I'm leaning towards 3. at the moment.) I think the prize of the second term is so vital to him and his cause that he feels he cannot jeopardize things by calling our Fauci, Birx etc., who are trying to use the virus to unseat him on behalf of the DNC. He knows it; they know he knows it; he knows they know he knows it, but he dare not rock the boat while things are as volatile as they are. My hunch — or at least my hope — is that, once November 3rd is past, he will ditch the vaccine talk. Interestingly, at the beginning of September, he brought in the Covid sceptic Dr Scott Atlas, and essentially put him in over the heads of Fauci and Birx. Trump's biggest dilemma may be that, since most people have been scared out of their wits by the propaganda campaign, he can only lose by trying to call it out now.

He might have done better to remain a sceptic and wait for the tide to turn, as it has begun to do elsewhere — though in fairness the messages coming out of the US have largely being more mixed than in Europe, largely due to the ambiguous events in New York in March/April. But he has recovered well and his recent public health drama, in which he himself was reported to have become infected with Covid, has seemed to be a mysterious gamechanger election-wise.

There are many questions being raised about Trump’s first term, and plenty of them are being raised on his own side of the fence. There are three categories of human being before the Trump phenomenon: the devoted, the sceptical and the haters. The first and last need no introduction; the second, which has been a slowly increasingly community, is entirely made up of former conservative devotees (Matt Drudge, who probably made the single most significant individual contribution to Trump’s election is an example) who have become increasingly weary of the Trump hype and bluster, while chunks of his core agenda have seem to go largely unattended.

The conservative case against Trump goes something like this:

He won fair and square in 2016, sweeping the board in the Republican primaries and taking out Clinton in a surgical strike on the Electoral College. He achieved this by seizing upon neglected America, hitching his wagon to a train first set in motion decades earlier by Pat Buchanan, a period now remembered as the Reagan era.

The Never Trumper view is that DJT was an opportunist who sought to use his 2016 candidacy to rebuild his business brand after a few lean years. But he surprised pretty much everyone, including some of his own most diehard supporters by connecting with a constituency which Clinton obligingly gave a name and identity to: the Deplorables. He saw a moment’s opening and pulled on the tug-o-war rope, sending the entire establishment reeling. . Some Never Trumpers have latterly put down their weapons, others have not.

His greatest strength was that he had nothing to lose. By winning he lost that edge. For the past four years he has, for all his successes, left many of his most fanatical supporters frustrated as he failed to deliver on, above all, his promise to reform the broken system. Trump was supposed to lock up Hillary, deport a couple of million illegal immigrants, drain the swamp. The world, for an against him, still waits. Why is the Wall taking so long? Where are the indictments? He did some good stuff: reshoring lots of long departed industries, stabilizing the economy in spite of crucifying debt levels inherited from Obama/Bush/Clinton. But at the heart of his tribe there is more unease than there ought to be. Is Trump what he seems at all?

He promised and feinted but Hillary remained unchained. He grumbled and blustered but Big Tech continued to be the cultural government not just of America but the entire world. Right now he’s paying the price, in the dying days of the campaign, with Twitter and the rest soft-pedalling on the Biden dirt and doing what they can to skew the polls to make it look like Sleepy Joe is in with a chance in hell.

The most optimistic spin on this is that DJT is keeping the best wine for his second term. Back in office with four years and everything to prove, so the theory goes, he will rock the deep state to the core of the earth.

The sceptics say he began to back-pedal from the start on some of his key pledges — for example, the border wall, which took two years to even get off the ground. (To date, about a little over 20 percent of the wall, 400 miles, has been completed? Sceptics also note that, from the off, he brought in as key advisers and aides people who were known globalists and/or neocons. These were people for whom everything is just business, and that’s where Trump’s heart ultimately lies. He got suckered by false intelligence into bombing Syria twice before he found his own mojo, nearly losing one of the central planks of his claim to be different foreign policy-wise to his predecessors. He seems to have gotten away with it, but it has not gone entirely unnoticed that Trump won on questioning these ideas and yet has governed pretty much like those he mostly frequently excoriates.

Many of the middle-ground sceptics emphasise something they claim was clear from the outset: that Trump has no political philosophy. Many of these continue to acknowledge his abilities, cunning, courage or recklessness (unclear, they say), sheer force of personality. But some also note that he lacks personal conviction or core beliefs; that some days he’s a right-leaning libertarian and others a soggy Manhattan left-liberal. Still others say that he is not sufficiently well-read to be leader of the Free World. Others say he’s a moron; still more say he’s a pretty stable genius who’s good at acting like he’s a moron.

Trump's lack of political philosophy and history is something he shares with many practical-minded Americans, indeed with many people educated and otherwise, in the modern world. He has self confidence, can take a punch and is a more than competent counter puncher, but he lacks cohesiveness, which manifest in a habitual lack of preparedness. He exhibits sometimes a sense of maturity, a strange, and not always unattractive trait in a septuagenarian. His dance routines on the recent campaign trail have been going down a storm.

Great presidencies are born in crisis and 2020, the sceptics say, has proved too great for Mr Trump. He is best when he is on the offensive, but 2020 beginning and continuing with Covid was just too much for him. They do not buy the media version: He is not a bad man. He may even be a very good man. But he is certainly not the devil he is presented as. He is but a symptom that the American system is terribly broken, all the more because he takes the form of a backlash to that brokenness.

America, they say, is too complex an entity to be led by someone who believes in winging it forever. He’s grown into the role of president, losing the sense of chaos and uncertainty that accompanied him for the first couple of years, but he still doesn’t prepare, doesn’t always listen to advice, frequently listens to the wrong people, is all tweet and no trousers, especially in the small hours. They say that Trump reacts to everything by throwing his toys out of the pram. He never pursues conciliation or pacification.

There’s some truth in some of it. Criticised by diehard supporters-turned-sceptics like Matt Drudge and Ann Coulter, instead of meeting their criticisms head-on, he used his Twitter account to attack them. At the height of the Covid-19 crisis in April, Trump found time to let fly at Drudge:

‘I gave up on Drudge (a really nice guy) long ago, as have many others. People are dropping off like flies!’

Drudge reacted as though shocked that someone he had helped to get elected could speak of his beloved website in such terms:

‘The past 30 days has been the most eyeballs in Drudge Report’s 26 year-history,’ Drudge responded in an emailed respons to a query from the sworn-Trump enemy CNN. ‘Heartbreaking that it has been under such tragic circumstances.’

When conservative commentator icon Ann Counter mildly upbraided the president for failing to expedite the building of his promised wall along the southern border, his instinct as usual was to retaliate rather than appease:

‘Wacky Nut Job @AnnCoulter, who still hasn’t figured out that, despite all odds and an entire Democrat Party of Far Left Radicals against me (not to mention certain Republicans who are sadly unwilling to fight), I am winning on the Border. Major sections of Wall are being built.. . .’

‘ . . . and renovated with MUCH MORE to follow shortly. Tens of thousands of illegals are being apprehended (captured) at the Border and NOT being allowed into our Country. With another President, millions would be pouring in. I am stopping an invasion as the Wall gets built.’

What if Trump is simply a Twitter gladiator and nothing else? The evidence is by no means scant. If in doubt, he tweets; if absolutely certain, he tweets. Instead of demonstrating the errors of his critics he slags them off on Twitter, while doing nothing to reassure those millions they speak for. He gets suspended by Twitter for threatening to send in the army against rioter and seditionists, and yet does not send in the army. Where many of his predecessor presidents would have held their counsel and acted, Trump tweets and acts the tough guy; while America burns, the President tweets his impotence. There are those who claim he tweets better than he leads. ‘Trump's tweets have replaced Obama's teleprompters,’ writes a one-time supporter. ‘They aren't so different really in many ways. They both think it is done because they say so. Their allies and their enemies overrated both men.’

Trump is the first Twitter president, and what that means is that he is content simply to win wars on Twitter, seeing them as proxies for reality. But the proxy and the real are diverging noticeably, and for a time there the possibility seemed real that America may choose as president a senile old man who couldn’t tweet his way out of a Ukrainian brown envelope, resulting in a return of Clintonism by the back door. Sometime it seems Trump we will not make a play for glory, will not do anything bold for the good of it; he will only tweet boldly.

Victor David Hanson compares Tump’s Twitter behavour to the notorious Nikita Khruschev shoe-banging incident at the UN in New York in 1960, ostensibly at the contribution of a Filipino delegate critical of the USSR. Hanson speculated that the gesture had been calculated to say, essentially, ‘Don’t mess with me, I’m batshit crazy!’ In the same way, he says, Trump operates his Twitter account as a way of teaching his enemies that, if they trying trading toxic tweets with him, they will lose bigly.

Trump has undoubtedly been weak on occasion because he wants too much to win. While constantly seeming to be on the edge, he refuses to take the kind of risks a leader needs to take. He refused to take on Fauci, or Antifa, or BLM, in any serious way.

There is a school of thought that holds that Trump does not understand the role of a federal president, and as a result has allowed himself to be kicked this way and that by the Dems and the media, arguing for the federal government to conduct a bail-out in the morning and then demanding it butt out in the afternoon. This blind=spot has contributed to a sense of failure surrounding his Covid strategy, with various Dem governors having run rings around him. His inability to articulate and apply Federalism has caused him to miss both the common sense solution of protecting the elderly and leaving the country open and claiming the high moral ground of protecting livelihoods and freedoms. He has fallen between the stools. He also delegated way too much to the CDC, Fauci and Birx and allowed to media to box him in, subjecting him to a nightly ambush at the height of the pandemic as a result of his own fear that they would bury him in his absence. He allowed the journaliars and Dems to push him into making Fauci the decision-maker for the country, when he ought to have kept him as just one expert with an advisory input.

Trump’s rodomontade has seemed to increase in inverse proportion to his confidence. Floundering early on in the Covid circus, he talked himself too often into the wrong kind of headlines, but since Mount Rushmore on Independence Day he has calmed down, seems more in control, a shift that has ‘coincided’ with the recovery of his poll numbers. His presidency came of age at Mount Rushmore, when he finally stepped out of the shiny shoes of Candidate Trump and fell into step alongside the greats of the American pantheon, delivering a speech worthy of the venue that stood out like the North Star from every other Trump speech. In a sense it was his debut speech as President.

Sometimes it has appeared as if he failed to understand that he is the elected leader of the Free World. Instead, it has been said, he is torn apart as a result of taking counsel without a method from various groups and individuals, and in the end doesn’t know which way to turn. He claimed at one of the White House briefings that he listens to advice from various quarters and ‘then runs it through this computer’ — pointing to his head — but in reality this seems to be exactly what he fails to do. Often he seems not to trust his own instincts, and whenever he does it often turns out to have been the wrong issue on which to go on a solo run.

Other observers say Trump has gotten hijacked by his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his wife, Trump’s daughter Ivanka, both of whom are essentially woke globalists, if not actually leftist.

America is moving to the hard left. Americans are increasingly a nation of Woke materialists. The Overton Window is insanely to the left and moving daily further in that direction. Already globalist America has exported this brand to the rest of the world. Trump was the last chance of recalling the products form the shelves of European democracies. American conservatives don’t seem to get it; they think it’s just an extremist faction. They forget that the faction controls the universities and the media, which is to say the coming generations. The GOP in general doesn’t seem to get it. The genie is not going back in the bottle, even if Trump wins, because anarcho-tyranny is set to continue either way.

A Trump re-election may well lead to further street violence and even civil war, with the very real possibility of successions down the road. If Biden were to win, it would almost certainly be a crooked result, and this might well lead to a different path to much the same outcome, in which lawlessness will become almost an act of faith for all sides.

There is a school of thought whispering that the Covid business, far from being a China virus is actually a US deep state operation designed to prevent China coming to dominate the world. There is some evidence for this in the reports of Dr Fauci’s initiative back in 2014 in moving experimentation of viruses from the US to Wuhan, after the US government had issued a moratorium on such experiments. The story goes that Trump is just a puppet of this hypothesis, in the loop but also out of it. In general, it has to be said, his behaviour fits with such a scenario — for example his persistent reminders to his audience that we are dealing with a ‘China virus’. He could well be doing this without being particularly aware of what higher purpose it serves. The deeper motive may well be to starve the Chinese out, removing them as a major player for the immediate future.

A more conventional thesis has it that Covid was a scam chiefly directed at getting Trump out. Sure, the New World Order malarkey was in the works of decades, but the 2020 moment presented an emergency in the minds of those who seek to manage in their own interests the worlds move from the concrete to the virtual. We are very close to discovering how well it has succeeded. If Biden wins, Covid will be over by Christmas. If Trump wins, expect a serous relapse — Covid 2.0, with the winter flu burden harnessed to punish those who dared to think that democracy might have a fighting chance.

Trump’s opponent in this election, is not Joe Biden, whose named has all but being changed as though by deed poll to ‘Not Donald Trump’. That’s why it doesn’t matter what Hunter does or did. That’s why it doesn’t matter that nobody is showing up to Biden’s rallies. The choice in this election is Trump or ‘Not Trump’.

If the improbably happens and Biden wins, it will be due to the anti-Trump sentiment and distortions and lies of the left media, in the US and beyond.

If he loses, Trump will have no one to blame but himself. He will have lost because he failed to remember that fortune favours the brave. Faint heart never won f-a.

If he wins, the sceptics say, he will under-deliver even more in his second term than in his first. He will no longer need to placate the MAGA base, and will drive his loyalists madder than before. If he wins, they worry, he will be looking not to serving his base but to clearing the way for Jared.

For some of the disappointed, Trump has already blown his earned mandate. He discovered a ‘secret’ constituency, cultivated it, wooed it, and won. Then he faffed around for four years, letting his enemies make hay. His sojourn in the White House, they point out, has not resulted in any realignment on the right. There has been no new alchemy involving the GOP and the Trump tribe. In reality, the GOP is queuing up behind the Dems to have a crack at winning the woke vote. After four years of Trump, there is no American populism outside of him, and his woke son-in-law is about to inherit the family business.

But there remains an evens chance that, if he wins in November, Trump will spring himself like Houdini from all the traps, self-imposed and otherwise, that have held him back in the eyes of his fan base. Maybe he will get up on the morning after every last votes has been scrutinised and counted and tell the world that Covid was a hoax designed to take him out — and accordingly that, now he is back, he is announcing the end of Covid, a permanent cure! His election will have been the vaccine he was talking about all along! Maybe he will then proceed to set the army on BLM and Antifa, and clean America’s streets of conspicuous vermin.

Certainly, if Trump wins, it will give enormous succour and hope to populist conservative movements elsewhere in the world. If he loses, it puts even more pressure on populists worldwide, already decimated by Covid. Without their figurehead, they will flounder in the sea of media corruption. The nominally Biden government and the US State department will squeeze overseas nations until they relinquish their populist dreams.

And, when all is said and done, whenever that may be, Trump lives with the knowledge that, no matter what his objective achivement, he will not leave a positive legacy. As Victor David Hanson has pointed out repeatedly, when he goes, he will be waved a cheery goodbye even by his most grateful followers, and then all but forgotten, apart from the bad bits. That’s what happens to cowboys who are called in to clean up the town.