Donald Trump appears to have been the first Republican in 20 years to win the popular vote.
Scouring the internet, the only Democrat figure who seems to be smiling is President Joe Biden. For the others it seems to be a time of mourning. A look at the results, their implications, and the machinations of the federal bureaucracy is in order.
The very best wrapup is by Victor Davis Hanson.
Harris-Walz were not the only losers: There were the media which gave him 95% negative coverage and the pollsters:
The polls — with the exception once again of AltasIntel, Trafalgar, and Rasmussen — were off, and way off in the Senate races. The pollsters’ reputation is again in full reverse and now back to their nadir of 2020 and 2016. Many shamelessly warped their data in the last two weeks to gin up Kamala Harris momentum, fundraising, and voter turnout. And to no avail.
There were plenty of indications long ago in key states of a Donald Trump thunderstorm: defections of minorities, anger among both the Jewish and Muslim voters, alienated union members, massive increases in Republican registrations, and non-Election Day balloting. And all were deliberately ignored by the corrupt media and pollsters.
The worst of cable news was MSNBC, which Comcast is trying to unload. I don’t see any takers.
The issues Harris-Walz chose to run on were wildly unpopular, says Hanson:
Open borders, hyperinflation, abortion deification, the transgendered mania, the crime wave, and the “green” obsessions all did their bit to repel voters. The “racist” Trump won more minority support than any Dole, McCain, or Romney figure of the past.
Their lawfare efforts proved unavailing, and this week Jack Smith moved to end those cases against him. New York Judge Juan Merchan is reportedly considering dropping the meritless “hush money” case against Trump.
Trump won, of course, but he wasn’t the only winner. (And he hasn’t eschewed trolling the losers. Noting that the greatly outfunded Harris blew through her $1 billion war chest and still has a $20 million campaign debt, he offered to help her out with the surplus remaining in his campaign chest. Interestingly, it turns out she gave Oprah $1 million dollars to interview her. Heck, Joe Rogan wasn’t going to charge her anything. He has about 50 million viewers, and yet Harris in effect turned him down by demanding concessions that were unreasonable. She also spent millions on staging the celebrity endorsers she cajoled into appearing at her late rallies to drum up apparent support — apparent because it was obvious that people were drawn to free concerts, not Harris.) There were those who joined him in this fight — Hanson names Elon Musk, RFK Jr., Joe Rogan, and Tulsi Gabbard. (Friday, it turned out even Bill Gates is interested in joining up, not that I think Trump should welcome the offer.)
The Left is now blaming a lot of people and things for this loss, including Biden for not getting out earlier and, alternatively, for allowing himself to be a victim of the Pelosi coup. Like Hanson, though, I think they need to blame themselves for having sought
“to drive down the American people’s throat the most radical and absurd agenda of the last two centuries that ruined the economy, exploded our border, made moonscapes of our big cities, destroyed women’s sports, set the world abroad afire, weaponized the courts and the bureaucracies, and sought to tear the country in two.”
Around the world, even before he’s sworn into office, the Trump win is having significant impact. Liz Wheeler lists the first consequential results:
Trump is President-elect for two days:
- Stock market hits record high
- Migrant caravan at our border dissolves
- Hamas calls for end to war
- Bitcoin hits record high
- Putin ready to end Ukraine war
- Qatar kicks out Hamas leaders
- EU will buy U.S. gas not Russian gas
- Putin will sell oil in U.S. dollars
- Zelenskyy phones Trump & Elon
- NYC Mayor ends vouchers for illegals
- Mexico to stop migrants at U.S. border
- China wants to work peacefully with us
- Big U.S. company to move out of China
“I repeat: Trump has been President-elect for two days.”
Others have reported that even the Taliban wants to talk to the newly-reelected Wall Street Journal noted.
“Tuesday’s election was notable for its national turn to the political right, and believe it or not that was true even in states governed by the left. Voters in California, Oregon and elsewhere used direct democracy to reject several bad ideas while adopting sensible reforms”
Californians rejected Prop 5, which would have eroded the state’s property tax cap; by a massive margin they voted to stiffen penalties for theft and drug crimes. (Thus, they rolled back a Soros-backed measure that eliminated penalties for drug crimes and theft of less than $950. One wag said voters wanted thieves locked up, not toothpaste.) In Los Angeles, the leftist District Attorney George Gascon lost his reelection bid and voters rejected a bid to raise the minimum wage. Doubtless the minimum wage effort failed because having seen that Governor Newsom’s $20-an-hour minimum wage for fast-food restaurants resulted, as was perfectly predictable to rational people, in job losses and price increases. Even Berkeley, California voters swerved right, rejecting a tax on natural gas consumption. Oregon, which was bleeding businesses, also rejected a corporate minimum tax.
One of the pillars of Trump’s agenda is the deportation of illegal immigrants. Critics say despite the present cost of illegal immigration (about $88 billion per year), deportations would be too costly. People who pay attention observe that there are 1.3 million illegals who have already been adjudicated as having received full due process and deporting them at the beginning would be relatively quick and easy. There are other options to increase this number:
They also want to revoke deportation protections from millions of immigrants who have either been granted a form of humanitarian protection known as temporary protected status — which covers hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Venezuelans — or entered the country on a quasi-legal status called humanitarian parole. That population includes millions who have entered via government appointments at the southern border, as well as tens of thousands of Afghans evacuated after the fall of Kabul and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians allowed into the U.S. following the Russian invasion.
[snip] Rather than forcibly deporting all migrants, Trump’s advisers hope they can induce some to leave voluntarily, according to people familiar with the matter. They have discussed offering immigrants in the country illegally — or those who entered on parole through Biden administration programs — a chance to leave the country without penalties, so they can return on a visa if they are eligible. Under normal circumstances, when someone is deported, they are barred from returning on a visa for 10 years.
Republican lawmakers, buoyed by their election gains, are planning to use a process called reconciliation to advance legislation that funds Trump’s immigration proposals alongside his energy and tax priorities. Under the arcane rules of reconciliation, legislation can be approved with a simple majority vote, rather than the 60 votes usually required to advance most bills in the Senate, as long as the changes made are primarily budgetary rather than policy shifts.
Republicans have already taken back control of the Senate, and they are poised to keep control of the House. With majorities in both chambers, they could move the reconciliation measure without support from Democrats.
Of course, they also ought to consider doing what New York City mayor Eric Adams just did — cutting out the welfare benefits which have made this country a magnet for impoverished border invaders. And please, cut out the subsidies to those NGOs which have grown rich on facilitating this invasion and dumping the impoverished on communities ill-equipped to meet their needs.
While I began this essay by praising Hanson’s wonderful analysis, I also think Harvard constitutional law professor Adrian Vermeule describes a less obvious factor which I think will continue to diminish the present Democratic party for ages:
For some reason I keep thinking about the saga of the Little Sisters of the Poor, beginning back at the end of the second Obama administration. It had, in miniature, the key elements of liberal political psychology that afflicted the Biden administration and the Harris campaign: the compulsive aggression and imprudence of liberal government, which ends up defeating itself through the inability to exercise even a modicum of political self-restraint, combined with the total inability of the aggressors to understand why anyone could doubt their rectitude.
To put it another way: the leftist Democrats have regularly practiced “sacramental liberalism [which] produces compulsory aggression followed by popular backlash.”
Simply put, Democrats, we want to be left alone. You mandated EVs which we don’t want and left manufacturers with unsold vehicles and workers out of jobs — goodbye, Michigan. You try to cut out fracking and ignore the many workers employed in it — goodbye, Pennsylvania. Nothing has escaped your overreach, not gas stoves, raw milk, plastic bags, or straws. You infringed on our rights to free speech to refuse untested vaccines and move about unmasked. You are removing children from their families in order to mutilate them, punishing people for misgendering while ignoring campus antisemitism, mandating men in women’s sports and private spaces, confusing our children with pornographic school books. It’s compulsive tyranny made worse by the faulty bases for these actions.
On a lighter note, the America’s newspaper of record, the satirical Babylon Bee, reports that Nancy Pelosi has already begun drafting articles of impeachment against Trump.
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