Why do so many Americans, probably a majority of the 74 million who voted for him, view Donald Trump and Trumpservatism as their only hope? It’s a long story that the Republican establishment needs to be told again. And CPAC is the place to do it.
President Trump Incorporated is not really even a movement anymore. You can’t even call it a base of voters. Trump is a party now, with pragmatic and ideological planks that come under the designation “America First.” It is going to be very difficult, a decades-long task, to erase that cognitive political mantra from the collective consciousness of his supporters. Most Trumpservatives will pass to the great beyond fighting for Trump-era policies and principles. Thanks to the overreaching Democratic Socialists who’ve wrested power, new awakenings are occurring every day.
The Democrats’ biggest fear is that Trump will be elected again.
Any attempt to factor this out by the Never-Trump, RINO, Lincoln Project wing of the GOP is doomed. Even Mitt Romney admits that. The days of acquiescent Republican sub-parity and placement at the feeding trough are over.
If Republican leaders who bowed to The Donald’s ascendance in 2016 think that Trump-Mania has cooled off, they’ve got another thing coming. Everything that has happened since the businessman and TV star marched forth on his initial head-hunting expedition only confirms to his supporters that he is the only hope. And now there is a stalwart contingent of America First-aligned candidates, all the way down to the proverbial dog-catcher, for whom they will cast their ballots.
When people believe they only have one hope, they tend to become adamant about preserving it.
In the run-up to 2016, the Left persisted, right up until the eleventh hour, in treating Trump’s candidacy as a joke. They tried every gambit, the most pernicious of which was to cast Trump as a con man, to separate with disparagement Trump from his potential voter. There was a resonance for many in this ridicule because the former president had no political record run on. It was all taken by his supporters on gut instinct and faith.
After the election, the leftist Democrats brought out the biggest imaginable guns to take him out, and continue to this very day actions aimed at precluding his ever running for president again. This relentless attack mode only inculcates in the minds of Trump loyalists the idea that he was, is, the only hope. Though the issue of alleged election fraud has been sandbagged by the staggeringly-biased Biden/Harris media, it is imminently arguable now that certain states broke their own laws and defied the Constitution to manufacture an outcome in quest of the ultimate coup de grace. (Unfortunately, unless our election process is reformed, hope may be in vain.)
In 2020, Trump did have a record to run on, and for 74 million it was just what the doctor ordered. Never again can the Democrat machine paint him as an opportunistic, self-aggrandizing showman. He delivered, big league.
With every stroke of his pen, every radical appointment and bizarre, America-last policy dictate, Mr. Joe Biden is hastening the Democrats’ day of reckoning. It is uncanny, really, how clueless and coopted his proposed agenda seems to be. One analysis holds that the cadre of extremists in his administration is prepared to lose in 2022, but only after having instituted crushing socialistic policies that cannot be easily overturned.
Therein lies the rub. President Donald Trump and his allies are likely the only politicians who can effectively clean up the mess even two years of Democrat power will leave behind, let alone four. If you put that mess in the hands of, say, a Ben Sasse, or John Thune, or Jeb Bush—or even a Mitch McConnel, be prepared to live in it for the foreseeable future; they will fritter around the edges and the damage will be a leftist fait accompli.
Thomas Jefferson said, “A government that is big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take everything you have.” Thomas Paine said, “The duty of a true Patriot is to protect his country from the government.”
Taken together, those quotes sum up nicely where America finds itself today. For millions upon millions of citizens, Donald Trump, for all his supposed foibles, is the only man who can stop the former, and achieve the latter.
During the roiled summer of 2020, when antifa and BLM were laying siege to Blue City centers, Vice President Kamala Harris said about the violent agitators, “They’re not going to let up — and they should not. And we should not.”
She later claimed she was talking about the protests, not the riots, but had already tipped her hand by tweeting support for a Minnesota fund to bail out the worst of that city’s indiscriminate destroyers.
On January 6, 2021, President Trump enjoined those gathered to protest what they believed was a fraudulent election–a protest that regrettably devolved into a fatal debacle–to “peacefully and patriotically make their voices heard.”
The difference in the intent of the two enjoinments illustrates the difference faced by a voting public now considering who will carry the governmental torch into the future. Harris was intentionally tweeting support for the cause of ameliorating the punishments due those who had wreaked havoc in the streets. Trump was calling for a peaceful demonstration in objection to a perceived injustice that robbed the country of what many millions believe is possibly its last, best hope.
And that is why so many of our countrymen and women believe that Trump and his allies are the only hope for America. We don’t exactly know what the coming reset looks like, what it will promise, but it is coming.
Hello, CPAC! Thanks for listening.
Mark Ellis is Associate Editor at the Northwest Connection, Portland, Oregon’s only conservative web/print publication. He is the author of the political thriller A Death on the Horizon
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