Four More Years

Perhaps we needed a shock jock like Trump to lampoon, distort, and mock insistent liberal pieties with rhetoric so outrageous, so obscene, it would wrench the country back to the center.

So Bret Easton Ellis was right after all (see yesterday’s Fresh Hell). America went all in for post-Empire at the polls and embraced bigger than before, the full-on Charlie Sheen of Trump’s disinhibited diatribes. There was no Proud Boy violence or battalion of lawyers bused in to litigate contested results. The so-called rigged system that Trump has spent four years spewing about worked like a charm in his favor and made him the 47^th president of the United States. 

What happened to the surge of women and young people who were going to put Kamala over the top? Turns out that, for the third time, a majority (52%) of white women cast their vote for Trump. Why did we pay any attention to that suddenly acclaimed Cassandra,  Ann Selzer, a pollster we never heard of but now were told by cable pundits was always right and who suddenly had Kamala winning the Trump-red state of Iowa? A pox on all of them.

The Manhattan mood after Kamala’s loss feels very different from the distraught gut punch after Hillary’s defeat in 2016. Perhaps because, unlike with Hillary, whom we had known for so long through her triumphs and travails, our belief in Kamala was always paper thin and hope-for-the-best. And unlike the drama of Hillary’s shocking pivotal reverse in Florida for example, last night’s results were an exhausting game of nibbled margins, and messy half-calls until all of a sudden hope for Kamala, who’d waged such a graceful campaign, had ebbed away.

This debacle is a Democrat own goal ( in soccer parlance). The party’s arrogance has been consistently mystifying. For two years, the polls have told us the electorate was unhappy about the country’s direction, was disaffected about the state of the economy, furious about the border’s immigrant surge, and concerned about the president's advanced age. And yet the Biden team kept telling us the economy was booming, that the ironically named Inflation Reduction Act was a triumph. Questions about the border were met with the White House adopting  the late  Queen Elizabeth’s “ostrich strategy.” Head, meet sand.

As for Biden himself, his deluded team adhered to the fairy tale that he was in fine form until that fateful day in June when a cryonic corpse shuffled up to the debate podium. His insistence on running again until the last moment will make his post-presidency a dark and chilly place. A donor-funded Biden library to celebrate his legacy will be the size of an RV parked outside his Delaware mansion. 

 But more than any of this, Trump’s victory is a big fat raspberry to democratic orthodoxies, woke dogma, and identity politics. He is right to divine that America is sick to death of all of it. Perhaps we needed a shock jock like him to lampoon, distort, and mock insistent liberal pieties with rhetoric so outrageous, so obscene, it would wrench the country back to the center. 

 Love him or hate him through this rollercoaster campaign, Trump was, as always, endlessly watchable. He owns the new template to captivate an American electorate hopelessly debased by the values of entertainment. Old-school candidates will never win again.

Desperate Measures 

 On his way out the door, should President Biden pardon both Trump and Hunter to end the cycle of prosecutorial vitriol? And then, in an inspired post-Empire gesture, Hunter Biden should run for the Democratic nomination. He has it all – an insane back story, a redemptive comeback, a name everyone recognizes, and in a sleazy, disreputable way he’s hot – remember that unforgettable porny picture of him smoking in the bath?

Let’s also agree to dump co-appearances of Democrats with the sainted former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney. Her father got us into the disastrous Iraq war and was a champion of waterboarding and, however admirable her post-Jan 6 stand,  she’s a long-time abortion rights opponent. Does anyone think her creamy presence beside Kamala won her one single vote?

 It’s a new day, Democrats, and Donald Trump has forever rewritten the rules.