For all the talk of having a front row to history, this is what it really looks like in action. I used to believe there was no crazier son of a bitch to occupy the Oval Office than Teddy Roosevelt, no greater unstoppable force, but the Bull Moose might have just been taken down a peg. He would be proud and amazed, either way.
As you can probably tell, having written over 800 of these posts in my spare time, I rarely find myself at a loss for words. Most of the time, they flow right out of me from somewhere I can’t really explain, for better or worse, so fast and furious my fingers can’t keep up, but once and future President Donald Trump’s victory on Tuesday has left me groping for the proper means to describe it. How can one capture the reality of such a singular event in the history of the known universe? Many are looking back to Grover Cleveland as the only President to win two non-consecutive terms, victorious in 1884 and again 1892. The comparison is valid for obvious reasons, making President Trump only the second US politician to accomplish such a feat, but it fails to capture the extent of what only he has overcome. Cleveland, while subject to scurrilous claims he was a rapist, was never impeached, never sued in civil court, never charged with civil or actual crimes, and was never declared politically dead even by members of his own party. Indeed, it was the Democrat Party itself that turned back to Cleveland in 1892 believing he was a superior option with his proven ability to unite the Eastern and Western voting blocs. Early in the primary process, which was conducted in that era by delegations of party leaders at the state level before a national convention, David B. Hill, a Senator, was the preferred candidate of the establishment, machine politicians of the day generally concentrated in the larger states like New York. As such, he won the New York delegation on February 22, 1892, and embarked on a tour to gather additional support in the South leading up to the convention itself. The tour, however, almost immediately backfired, widely criticized as “imprudent and ill-started” with no real movement behind it. Democrats outside the Empire State began to look for an alternative, Grover Cleveland. New Hampshire was the first statewide delegation to endorse him on May 11, essentially recruiting him into the fray as the anti-Hill candidate. While Cleveland faced some opposition from the political machine in the run up to the convention, he entered as the front-runner and ultimately secured 617 votes on the first tally, crushing his Hill’s meager 114.
President Trump, in comparison, was not recruited by anyone in a position of power in the Republican Party or otherwise. Instead, he was, rightly or wrongly, declared disgraced beyond redemption following the riots at the Capitol on January 6 before he even left office at the end of his first term. At the time, even erstwhile allies like then-Senate Majority Leader and fellow Republican Mitch McConnell personally blamed him for the riot, saying on the Senate floor, “The mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the president and other powerful people.” Another Republican, Trump’s own former Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, insisted he’d “fallen too far.” President Trump himself was summarily impeached for the second time with five Republicans in the Senate voting to remove him from office. Nor did the then former President’s prospects improve from there. Less than two years later, he was widely accused of costing Republicans important gains in the midterm elections, whereupon even conservatives claimed it was time to be rid of him forever. Perhaps even worse, he was subsequently charged with close to 100 crimes in multiple venues and civil suits, and as of today, was convicted of 34 counts of felony fraud in New York City. For obvious reasons, this does not seem on the surface like the makings of a winning presidential candidate. The conventional wisdom on both the left and the right held that even a single one of these developments would be disqualifying, much less so many at once. Most believed he wasn’t capable of winning the Republican primary under these circumstances, forget a general election. As CNN described his announcement to enter the race, “He announced his third White House bid days after Republicans underwhelmed in the 2022 midterm elections, a performance that prominent GOP figures laid squarely at his feet — for the candidates he supported, for lingering resentments over the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol and for his unwillingness to recede from public life in the aftermath of defeat Surrounded at Mar-a-Lago by the close allies and aides that had yet to abandon him during his post-presidency exile, Trump assigned blame elsewhere, including the justice system that had raided his Palm Beach estate three months prior. He offered a dark assessment of the country after he left office and forecasted that before long voters would turn against those in charge.”
Progressives, meanwhile, were convinced President Trump would be the easiest potential Republican candidate to defeat, remaining largely in denial about his chances of winning up until and even after he prevailed. Hayes Brown, writing for MSNBC, declared “Donald Trump should not be this close to the presidency again” on Monday. He is worth quoting at length as an example of what many believed, “It is a state of play that would have seemed unfathomable in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s chaotic exit. I have not forgotten the slow, horrifying realization that Trump was not going to leave office willingly. I have watched as his various sins and transgressions have been laid bare before the public. And I have watched as he clawed his way back to the center of American politics again, poised to be an even greater threat than before. Making the Trump resurgence even more dismaying have been the glimmers of hope interspersed throughout. Six months after the attack, the House Jan. 6 select committee began its work investigating Trump’s efforts to subvert democracy. Its public hearings in the summer and fall of 2022 described in stunning detail the scope of his and his allies’ efforts to keep him in office, leading up to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The case against Trump, laid out in prime time, could have been a moment where the country accepted that Trump was unfit to return to power. When the GOP underperformed in the midterms that year, despite Trump’s play as kingmaker, it could have been a sign he had lost his political edge. Instead, he defiantly announced his candidacy just days later. And nothing — including a slew of legal cases against him — has slowed him down as he steamrolled a field of potential replacements at the top of the ticket.” One might quibble with Mr. Brown’s choice of words as unfairly prejudicial, but otherwise, he accurately captures the sentiment and the doubt, some of which was shared even in Republican circles. Moreover, President Trump was also seen as uniquely unfit to return to the presidency for a host of other reasons. Beyond being labeled a power-hungry, corrupt, untrustworthy, backstabbing malignant narcissist, there is no modern candidate or candidate of any kind who was so readily and repeatedly referred to as a fascist supporter of Adolf Hitler, even by some of his former colleagues. They insisted he would be a dictator, using the office to take revenge on his enemies. They added that he was mentally unstable, cognitively in decline, and was otherwise a racist and misogynist to the core, abhorrent to a rapidly diversifying American electorate and therefore, fundamentally unelectable.
As we now know, the conventional wisdom proved spectacularly wrong. Not only was he electable in the narrowest sense, he improved upon his 2020 performance across the board, making gains in key constituencies that have redefined the Republican coalition in ways not seen in generations. Some of the numbers are truly staggering, literally unheard of, the sort of thing that some would claim was impossible before the votes were counted. Four years ago, he lost the Latino vote by 23 points. On Tuesday, he won them by eight. He made tremendous gains among the black community, doubling his level of support in key states like North Carolina and Wisconsin. He increased his share of young voters and women voters, reducing Vice President Kamala Harris to 55% from President Joe Biden’s 60%, and 54% down from 57% respectively according to CBS News. The numbers among men, particularly young men of all racial backgrounds, were even more striking: He won men under thirty outright, 56% to 38%. Incredibly, he even increased his margin among conservative voters, up four points, and white evangelicals up five. The result was a significant improvement in his share of the vote across the entire country, even the deepest blue states. There are dozens of counties that hadn’t gone Republican in decades that cast their vote for Trump, many of which are minority majority such as Miami-Dade. In at least one case a county in Texas hadn’t voted for a Republican since William McKinley in 1896, but they too voted for Donald Trump this cycle. Beyond the immediate electoral win, this represents a radical new foundation for the future of the Republican Party. Democrats like to claim they are champions of diversity, but it was Donald Trump that succeeded in crafting a coalition that united the concerns of voters across all races and backgrounds regardless of region. He recognized, correctly, that the working class, whether urban or rural, was suffering under rapid inflation, declining opportunities, and economic stagnation, all exacerbated by a massive influx of illegal aliens, stressing their neighborhoods to the breaking point. He combined that with the sense that the country had become culturally unmoored from reality, embracing a toxic combination of anti-Americanism under the guise of Critical Race Theory and a bizarre belief that men and women can arbitrarily change genders on a whim. He encapsulated all of these disparate threads in the notion that the mainstream media and the establishment were intentionally hiding these developments, and could no longer be trusted, accusing them of abandoning common sense and basic fairness. Taken together, he engineered a complete and total political realignment not seen in decades, at least. It represents an entirely new path forward for Republicans previously believed to be completely incapable of earning the votes of a young, diverse nation, and potentially Democrats who will certainly need to determine why these voters are abandoning them in the millions if they hope to remain competitive.
This brings me back to my original loss for words. How do you properly encapsulate anything quite this stunning and unprecedented? President Trump has accomplished the impossible, defeating two candidates in a single cycle, prevailing against forces no one ever has, quite literally taking on the entire establishment, on his own at times, and he did so in a way most thought impossible to begin with, spending significantly less money than his opponent and revolutionizing the get out the vote effort with crowd sourcing. Putting this another way, everything humanly possible and then some was thrown at the President, amplified by social media and the 24 hour news cycle into a non-stop stream of existential dread at his reemergence, and yet rather than being defeated, he has emerged more powerful than ever. The result is an absolutely signature achievement, one which solidifies President Trump as a truly unique historical figure with no direct comparison. Cleveland was elected to two non-consecutive terms. Teddy Roosevelt survived an assassination attempt while campaigning, and continued on the trail (the same day in fact), but unstoppable force that he was, he ultimately failed in his 1912 third party bid. Other politicians have bounced back from scandals, endured accusations, and legal entanglements. Roosevelt himself was forced to take the stand after leaving office in a civil suit. None, however, has done what President Trump has done, much less do it in his own unique way. For all the talk of having a front row to history, this is what it really looks like in action and, love him or hate him, we should all acknowledge that we’re witnessing a once in a century, if not longer, political phenomenon. I used to believe there was no crazier son of a bitch to occupy the Oval Office than Teddy Roosevelt, no greater unstoppable force, but the Bull Moose might have just been taken down a peg. He would be proud and amazed, either way.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 