TBT^2: Trumparion Rising

It’s hard to believe that President Trump was re-elected roughly a year ago, and that he has been back in office almost nine months.  Trump didn’t waste anytime upon taking office, putting ICE to work right away on deporting illegal aliens and deploying the National Guard to crack down on crime-ridden cities.  He flooded Washington with executive orders, which, while potentially fleeting, have made it difficult for activist judges to keep up with the flurry of changes.  He (sort of) started a trade war with most of the war, which, if not exactly consistent, shook up international markets and put the world on notice that the free ride at America’s expense is over.

I’m largely satisfied with Trump’s progress so far.  My major concerns are that he has been too inconsistent on tariffs; too slow on swamp drainage (although the massive layoffs during the government shutdown, as well as the DOGE-payouts, were huge); and too cozy with certain lobbies.  As to the first, I figure he is using tariffs more as a foreign policy cudgel and/or carrot than as a consistent policy towards repatriating American manufacturing.  To the second, I think we’re facing a “root-and-branch” situation that requires a radical, near-total replacement of official Washington.  For the third, even there Trump is showing signs of shaking off his dogged devotion to his donors of dubious dual loyalties.

Those quibbles aside, things are demonstrably better than they were one year ago.  The Democrats are something of a national laughingstock.  Major corporations are shifting into alignment with elements of Trumpism.  The rampant Leftism of the culture has become more muted.  I have no illusions that these changes are permanent, but they suggest that the powers-that-be are cowed.

All of that said, I’m eager to see what happens next—and to prepare for Vance’s presidency.

With that, here is 7 November 2024’s “TBT: Trumparion Rising“:

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TBT: VP Vance: A Worthy Successor

It’s hard to believe that a year ago, we were gearing up for a presidential election.  Now Trump is back in office—woooooot!—and he has a worthy successor in the wings.

It’s going to be tough sledding in the years ahead, but it’s reassuring to know that we have a legitimate successor ready to roll in 2028.  Vance’s incredible speech to the various heads of Europe’s governments earlier this year was a call to government accountability—and for Europe to wake up.  It was not an attack on Europe, per se, but a powerful plea for its leaders to do something to improve the lives of their people.

I’m excited to see more from Vance in the years to come.

With that, here is 17 July 2024’s “VP Vance: A Worthy Successor“:

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TBT: Trumparion Rising

Holy crap—America is back, baby!  The garbage took out the trash—and re-elected Donald Trump to another (non-consecutive) four-year term.

What a ride.  All through Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, I felt like I was living in a dream—a replay of 2016, but even better.

2016 had a raw sense of excitement and uncertainty about it.  Everyone in MAGA World was having fun because we really didn’t think Trump would pull it off against the globalist oligarchs and the Clinton Machine (some people did see his potential even then—God Bless them!—and knew that The Teflon Don would slay the Wicked Witch of Davos).

2024 also had that raw excitement, but it was seasoned with experience.  We knew Trump.  And we knew Biden/Harris.  The choice was clear, and easy.  Trump is bringing with him national renewal and, I pray, revival.

The men carried home this election, I think.  No disrespect to the ladies for their role, but this was the most masculine election in modern American history.  Men finally said, “enough!,” got off the couch, and voted.  Seeing as the other side totally hates us, it was a no-brainer.  Any man that voted for Kamala Harris is gay, a eunuch, or a cuckold—period.  Eh, maybe some well-meaning, befuddled Boomer “Cons” voted that way to defend “conservative” “principles,” but they’re metaphorically castrated, if not physically so.  Good riddance to David French and his simpering, effete ilk.

I’ve been hearing a lot of commentators refer to Trump as a “world-historic” figure.  I’d never thought of it so explicitly, but it’s true:  he is The Man for This Hour.  I sincerely believe he has been ordained by God to lead an American renewal.  There’s no other explanation for how he survived that assassination attempt.

God Bless America!

With that, here is 22 November 2022’s “Trumparion Rising“:

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Homework: The Gracchi

Yours portly is slightly strapped for time after a raucous Labor Day weekend, so I’m assigning my readers some homework.

I’ve been kicking around the idea of a post comparing Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to the Gracchi Brothers of the Roman Republic.  The Gracchi were members of the elite who realized that the common people were struggling mightily under the republic’s economic system, which blatantly favored wealthy Roman Senators and other patricians at the expense of the people.  The Gracchi proposed land reforms and modest redistribution, which would have eased tensions between patricians and plebeians, giving the plebeians a chance at living modest, fulfilling lives.

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VP Vance: A Worthy Successor

After the usual will-they-won’t-they of the vice presidential selection drama, President Trump delivered yet again, picking Ohio Senator and Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance as his running mate.

The Vance pick is symbolic on a number of levels.  As a US Senator, he has focused on improving the lives of the forgotten men and women that President Trump champions.  He has rejected the siren song of the Establishment Uniparty.  He is very clearly the conservative populist in the Senate.

I receive an e-mail newsletter from The New York Times each morning at my work e-mail.  I am not fan of The New York Times, but I likely signed up for it because I needed to access some article for my students.  Regardless, the Tuesday, 16 July edition of The Morning newsletter makes a claim with which I agree:  in picking Vance, Trump was, essentially, picking his successor.

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Trump’s Pages of Accomplishments

Looking at national polls and predictions, it’s easy to get discouraged about President Trump’s reelection prospects.  Even with Joe Biden losing his mind, and the pick of a radical, authoritarian Kamala Harris as his running mate, “Sleepy Joe” is managing to stay up by hunkering down.

On our side there’s grumbling that Trump hasn’t done enough—on immigration, on law and order—and those aren’t entirely warrantless grumbles.  Republicans squandered—perhaps intentionally—an opportunity to fund the construction of the border wall while they controlled both chambers of Congress.  John McCain pompously and vindictively voted to keep the odious Affordable Care Act in place, a clear parting shot at Trump.  Trump did not seem to offer a robust response to the CHAZ/CHOP fiasco, but is now belatedly defending federal property in Portland, Oregon.

Those critiques aside, it’s worth remembering what Trump has accomplished—and he wants you to be reminded.  That’s why he gave Breitbart a six-page document of his achievements.  They are substantial—and make him one of the greatest presidents of the last fifty years.

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Lazy Sunday LXXII: Forgotten Posts, Volume I

I’ve been blogging daily for over a year-and-a-half now, with a smattering of posts going back to 2009 (on the old Blogger version of the site, which I call TPP 1.0).  While I think I have some decent posts—my buddy fridrix of Corporate History International once told me my material was in the top ten percent in terms of quality on the Internet—I’ve written a lot of garbage, too, including placeholder posts for times I can’t really get something fresh posted.

Of course, I’ve written essays that I think are excellent—or, at the very least, very important—that get virtually no hits.  Then I’ll write throwaway posts, like “Tom Steyer’s Belt,” that blow up the view counter.  That one at least made sense—I was one of the first sources to write about his goofy belt, and his ads were so ubiquitous in late 2019, people searching for his belt got my blog.

What’s interesting to me is that forget some of the things I’ve written.  It’s another reason we shouldn’t be so fast to crucify television personalities who posted something incendiary on their blog fifteen years ago.  Views change, although I think sometimes folks in the hot seat exaggerate how much they’ve “evolved” on an issue.  Then again, we’re responsible for what we put out there.

That’s all a long way of saying that I’m doing some deep dives for an indeterminate number of Sundays into some forgotten posts.  These are posts that don’t immediately spring to my mind when I’m referencing my own work.  These posts may or may not have had high or low hit counts; they are just posts that don’t linger strongly in my memory.  They’re the red-headed stepchildren of my churning mind.

To find these posts, I just looked back at months in 2018 and 2019 to see what didn’t leap out to me as familiar.  You’ll notice that February 2019 is heavily-represented here, as that was early in the process of what became my goal of one year of daily posts.

With that, here are some forgotten posts of yesteryear:

  • Reality Breeds Conservatism” – This post isn’t totally forgotten, but it’s one of those keystone essays that, for whatever reason, I don’t link to frequently (unlike “Progressivism and Political Violence,” which I have probably linked to more than another other post).  I also wrote this post before diving into Russell Kirk’s ideas about conservatism, which themselves reflect Edmund Burke’s notions of “ordered liberty” and the organic nature of a healthy society.  It’s a decent, if lengthy post from 2018 (TPP 2.0 era), and it explores the influence of risk upon one’s political affiliations and leanings.
  • Twilight Zone Reviews on Orion’s Cold Fire” – My blogger buddy photog undertook a project in 2019 to watch and review every Twilight Zone episode.  He’d obtained the full box set, I believe, and set about his task, initially with daily reviews, which he then scaled back to a few times a week.  He’s now writing reviews of Shakespeare in Film, which I will confess I have not followed as closely, but is in the same spirit as his TWZ project.
  • The Good Populism” – This post was one in which I mused about running the first iteration of History of Conservative Thought.  The essay explores a post from classicist Victor Davis Hanson entitled “The Good Populism.”  I enthused at the time about how I would “definitely include” this essay in the course.  Oops!  The best-laid plans of mice and men oft go astray, eh?  But it is a great essay, as VDH delivers keen analysis once again.  In an age in which populism has newfound purchase on the American political imagination, it’s worth understanding that not all populism is the wicked machinations of demagogues swaying the rubes.
  • More Good News: Tom Rice on the State of the Economy” – I completely forgot about this short post, which features a YouTube video of my US Represenative, Tom Rice, discussing the good economy.  That was in The Before Times, in the Long Long Ago, before The Age of The Virus, when things just kept getting better and better.  Just can the headlines at Zero Hedge and you’ll see pretty quickly that we’re headed for multiple financial cliffs if we don’t cease with all this shutdown nonsense.  Yikes!

Well, that’s it for this Sunday.  I’m looking forward into further deep dives over the coming weeks.

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

The Tuck for President

The 2020 election is looming, and while Trump is struggling at the moment, I am praying that he can pull out another victory and another four-year term.  The stakes are high:  a Trump victory, at minimum, allows us to forestall a progressive Armageddon for another four years; it also undermines both the Never Trumpers (who can no longer write off Trump’s 2016 victory as a “fluke”) and the ultra-progressives.  I don’t think the modern Democrat Party has much of a moderate wing left, but that small, dying minority might be able to convince the Party that going full-on progressive is a bad move.

A Trump defeat, however, would be catastrophic.  Z Man wrote Tuesday that a “Democratic sweep” would essentially mean the end of elections in America—at least, the end of meaningful national ones:

More important, there is no electoral option either. The Democrat party is actively cheering on this lunacy. Joe Biden is running an extortion campaign, where a vote for him means an end to the violence and Covid lock downs. How realistic is that when his party is cheering for the mayhem, promising to take it to a new level after they win the final election. It is not hyperbole to say that a Democrat sweep in November means the end of elections. What would be the point?

Trump’s defeat would also embolden the Jonah Goldberg/David French neocons of Conservatism, Inc., who are essentially abstract ideologues offering token resistance to the Left.  There’s a reason the joke “The Conservative Case for [Progressive Goal Here]” exists, because National Review tends to put up tortured, weak resistance to the progressive fad of the moment, before finally caving and accepting the latest lunacy as a “bedrock conservative principle.”  What conservative site goes around pitching “magic mushrooms” as conservative—and has done so repeatedly?  The conservative publication of record possesses the quality and depth of a college newspaper.

Regardless, Trump’s defeat would mean not just Biden’s marionette presidency, in which ultra-progressive handlers pull the strings; it would also mean a return to boring, ineffectual, tired, defeated neoconservatism.  National conservatism, social conservatism, traditionalism, populism—these movements and others, which have enjoyed a renewal since 2015, would wither on the vine—or see themselves pruned from “respectable” Beltway “conservatism.”  That would only hasten the victory of progressivism in the absence of any real opposition.

But there is hope.  2020 looms large, but 2024 is is not that far away.  On the Right, there is a good bit of speculation about who will fill Trump’s shoes.  VDare offers one compelling optionTucker Carlson.

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Populism Wins

A major lesson of the 2016 election was that the neoliberal consensus of the prior thirty years was not the panacea its advocates claimed.  Trump’s candidacy was premised on the notion that the national government should work for the interests of the nation’s people, not on behalf of globalist concerns and aloof cosmopolitan elites.  Government could be reformed to strengthen the nation, rather than operating as the piggy bank for and protector of internationalists.

It’s interesting to reflect how entrenched the assumptions of neoliberalism were prior to 2015-2016.  When Trump began his historic campaign, virtually no one on the Right was talking about tariffs, other than Pat Buchanan (and a long essay on the necessity of a trade war with China that Oren Cass wrote for National Review in 2014).  The outsourcing of jobs overseas was assumed to be a short-term sacrifice that would result in more efficiency (ergo, lower prices on consumer goods) and more skilled jobs here.  We were a “nation of immigrants,” so we’d better throw the doors wide open.

With Trump’s election, a long-dormant populist wing reemerged, consisting both of conservative Republicans and disgruntled Democrats.  Tariffs became an important foreign and domestic policy tool.  A trade war with China soon began, and the United States renegotiated the NAFTA agreement with Mexico and Canada.  Manufacturing jobs began returning to the United States, and immigration laws began to be enforced (so long as those Hawaiian judges didn’t get in the way).  The economy, rather than contracting as the free trade hardliners warned, grew exponentially, and even now is recovering at a remarkable clip after The Age of The Virus temporarily sidelined it.

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#MAGAWeek2020: The Tuck

This week is , my celebration of the men, women, and ideas that MADE AMERICA GREAT!  Running through this Friday, 10 July 2020, this year’s posts will be SubscribeStar exclusives.  If you want to read the full posts, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for as little as $1 a month.  You’ll also get access to exclusive content every Saturday.

Read my two-part biography of Theodore Roosevelt (with your $1 a month subscription!) here and here.

I dedicated the first two days of #MAGAWeek2020 discussing America’s manliest president, Theodore Roosevelt (Part I, Part II).  TR’s influence on the nation and the office of the presidency reverberate to the present, both for good and ill, but his impact is substantial.  One of his most vocal modern apologists—and a man with immense public influence—is the Uncuckable One:  Tucker Carlson.

There are a number of influential figures on the Right that surely have contributed to the greatness of the United States—Milo, Gavin McInnes, Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, etc.—through their reporting and commentary.  All have done real yeoman’s work, at great personal and professional risk, to advance conservatism, specifically America First nationalism.  Tucker Carlson, however, is able to reach an audience—and present America First ideas to that audience—so large, his influence scuttles congressional bills.

Even more importantly, it seems GEOTUS Donaldus Magnus himself listens to The Tuck.  More significant still, Carlson never backs down and never apologizes for his positions, instead defending his views with sharpness and tact—and a charmingly boyish laugh.

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