My friend writes: As you know my prediction of the election’s outcome the weekend before the election came to pass. I also predicted protests and riots and possible insurrection. We don’t yet have insurrection and hopefully we won’t.
Here are just some not so random observations about the election.
The drive to replace the electoral college and replace it with a popular vote. This would require a constitutional amendment and it is unthinkable that the smaller states would give away their relative power. If the electoral college were eliminated, all election dollars would be spent in California, New York, Florida and Texas, (which contain 1/3 of all United States citizens), and then Illinois, New Jersey, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia. It would certainly make it a lot more exciting in California since it has twice the population of New York and Florida and around 12,000,000 persons than Texas.
The reason the election wasn’t challenged. A margin of 100,000 votes separated Trump from Clinton and Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Ordinarily, this might be close enough to encourage the loser to challenge the results, especially in light of Clinton’s lead in the popular vote total.
After looking at post-mortems, including what each candidate thought would be the outcome of the election, it is appears that Hillary’s own internal polls showed her losing those states and perhaps more, and Trump’s internal polls showed them gaining in and winning those states and perhaps more. These were at odds with the public polls. I do not know how much voter fraud there was, but the Clinton campaign may have been unwilling to challenge because a challenge might show widespread voter fraud perpetrated by the Democrats. Considering the enmity between the Trump and Clinton camps, as well as Clinton’s and Obama’s running her campaign as if a loss to Trump would be the apocalypse, it suggests that if they could engage in voter fraud they would. If I am correct then Trump actually won with a larger share than publicly accepted and this may explain the reasons that both Clinton and Obama have been so conciliatory toward Trump. Fringe sites such as Infor wars run by Alex Jones, claim as many as 3,000,000 non-citizens voted in the election and that they voted overwhelmingly for Clinton.
The protests. Many on the conservative side believe these are not spontaneous but organized by Soros affiliated organizations or radical leftist (such as ANSWER) organizations. To support of this contention they show that buses brought in protesters to Austin Texas and Chicago Illinois and that Craigs list in Philadelphia posted a listing offering to pay protesters. Perhaps this so, but from viewing the reaction to the election from family members and facebook friends, I think the protests are genuinely spontaneous. I don’t think the protesters are thinking about the things that they should: (1) are they protesting Trump’s policies or are they protesting because they believe he is some sort of fascist or Nazi. If they believe the latter, then they need to educate themselves about what Trump has actually said. Since Schumer, Warren and Sanders all have indicated they are willing to work with Trump on issues near and dear to them, this would tend to show that elected leaders who took one position during the campaign, now want to cut deals with him, deals they wouldn’t cut if they actually believed he was another Hitler or an outright white nationalist. (2) what do they seek to accomplish through the protests? Are they to encourage moving toward a popular vote and end to the electoral college? Is it to pressure the electoral college electors? Is it to get Trump to change policies? Is it to warn Trump that if he tries to implement policies he campaigned on there will be even greater protests? Is it to pressure Democrats to become obstructionists in dealing with Trump, the way they believe Republicans treated Obama? Is it to overturn the election? Is it to try to delegitimize Trump’s election? I think all of things play a part in the protests, but I don’t think the protestors realize that if they are accomplishing anything it is to make Trump’s victory more popular. The polls show that Trump’s negatives have been almost entirely eradicated since the election. Some of this is due to the natural respect persons have for the president and the willingness to give the president-elect a chance, others because Trump himself has acted more presidential and less petty and thin skinned than during the campaign, but I think part is a reaction to the protestors.
The level of vitriol directed at Trump, Bannon and soon towards Sessions. Attempts to smear Trump as a racist and anti-semite haven’t worked. The attempt to label Bannon in the same way hasn’t worked. What is the reason the protestors and Democrats are doing this? Although they are quick to label Trump a conservative in many ways, particularly with regard to foreign military interventions, the transpacific partnership and international trade deals, on reinstating Glass-Stiegel, and the infrastructure he is way outside the Republican mainstream and outflanks the Democrats on the left.
The Democrats always thought they had the economic populist vote. The Democratic strategists see that should Trump succeed, he may realign the Republican party and secure its power for the next couple of decades. This does contain a major caveat; Trump must dodge any economic meltdown in the next four years which would probably catapult Elizabeth Warren into the White House in 2020. But for the time being they look at Bannon and his economic plans, his attacks on crony capitalism, his contempt for the financialization of the economy and the commodification of human beings to be simply consumers is clear, no doubt helped along by his Catholicism and his fear that American has lost its Judeo-Christian moral underpinning, as a real threat. Bannon also clearly sees that the Democrats have boxed themselves in with their embrace of environmental and social justice issues. The Democrats cannot reach out to the Trump voters without toning both of those down. In the case of environmentalists, if the Democrats move to attract Trump voters, they may go to the Green party or split off from the Democrats to form a new rump party. In the case of those concerned about social justice, the Democrats are beholden to the African American vote. They simply cannot win in states like Florida, North Carolina, Virginia and the industrial Midwest without maintaining large and monolithic black turnout. However, if the Democrats embrace white working class voters and jettison their strong association with affirmative action, blacks may well stay home. If Trump can deliver real economic growth in urban areas and reduce crimes in those area, he may be able to break the Democratic stranglehold on the black vote.
Make no mistake, the left and particularly anyone trained in traditional Marxism, believe that economic factors from the inequality of wealth to the distinction between the ordinary citizen and the owners of the financial institutions and industrial factories would be the basis for revolution. The Democrats are in bed with the financial industry, yet many of the rank and file Democratic voters (again including my relatives and friends) still believed that Obama and Clinton are not beholden to those interests. Unlike Sanders, Obama governed and Clinton campaigned as if catering to the financial industry, promoting social justice and environmental issues, made up for any neglect of working class and poor voters of all races. And again although Sanders was a Democratic Socialist, he understood that through him as the vehicle, the aims of revolutionary Marxism could be accomplished at the ballot box and without bullets. To see Bannon, publisher of Breitbart and thought of by unsophisticated leftists as a reactionary, and Trump, perceived as a gauche buffoonish billionaire, actually lead the first effective populist takeover since Andrew Jackson, is the deepest possible shock they could absorb. But of course this isn’t the first time this has happened. But even if other’s don’t see, the implication is clear. If Trump can deliver, it is the end of the Democratic Party, and all the consultants and lobbyists dependent on it.
I believe this is the real reason the left has become unhinged. Fear that Trump will sideline them and make them irrelevant.
How Trump will govern. It is still too soon to tell. His selection of Mike Pompeo for the CIA is probably a good thing. The CIA has become increasingly politicized, and Pompeo will most likely depoliticize it. However, he might repoliticize it. We will tell whether this is true, by seeing who he keeps and who he fires and who he hires. It is worth noting he has close ties to the Koch Brothers who opposed Trump. This is not necessarily bad since the Kochs want a reduced defense budget and an end to foreign wars, but it also means that if the CIA disapproves of Trump, the agency might seek to undermine his presidency and perhaps even plot a coup against Trump. I don’t know how much of a Trump loyalist Pompeo was.
Jeff Sessions for AG. This signals two things (1) Trump is serious about some form of deportation and (2) Trump is not willing to have the Justice Department continue prosecuting many of the civil rights cases that the Obama administration chose to. This also includes investigating police departments and having them enter into consent decrees.
Mike Flynn probably means a harder line toward Muslim countries and a willingness to label them terrorism sponsors. We will see whether this approach proves more beneficial than the way the Obama administration chose to deal with Islamic terror. Flynn, although no fan of Russia, will have no problem following Trump’s lead for better relations with the Russians.
James Mattis as defense secretary may or may not be a good thing. Perhaps the worst thing he did after retiring was joining the board of Theranos and as it became clear the whole single drop of blood test was a fraud, lobbied the Pentagon to use Theranos.
Unlike most recent defense secretaries, he is an experienced combat officer. He has been involved in innovative changes in the way that troops carry out orders and respond to changed conditions. He will probably oppose politically correct military if being politically correct impacts the combat readiness (which it does.) He will probably endorse policies similar to those espoused by William Lind and reduce forces overall and focus on the remaining forces to maximize their combat readiness.
The rest of the appointees are rumors. However, if Trump appoints a neo-conservative to Secretary of State that will be a very bad sign, unless Trumps intention is to have the secretary of state be a figurehead while he runs foreign policy out of the White House.
If he selects Laura Ingraham as his press secretary that is a good move. It helps to show that Trump’s is a woman friendly administration. Ingraham was a great defender of and promoter of Trump. She is articulate, very smart and knows both traditional and new media. Some press secretaries have a hand in shaping administration policies and I think if Ingraham is the press secretary she would not accept the job unless she believed she would have a major role in that regard.
