Why Trump Really Lost
He was all about himself. And is JD Vance the anti-Trump Trumpian candidate?
TLDR: If you are an entrepreneur from a state or county or precinct that went for Trump this cycle or last and looking for capital please reach out to me, particularly if you have strong technical skills. charlescarlislejohnson@gmail.com.
Welcome to my new readers.
Greetings from the social media gulag, my friends.
The quiet life is quite the life. You can hear yourself think. And thinking is what gives you an edge. To have a sharpened edge it helps to be edgy, or at least to think of all the what ifs.
You should go to the edge and declare it the new center, to paraphrase pop artist Andy Warhol. Only by venturing into the extreme can you understand what’s truly normal. The contrast gives the strength.
Let’s think about this past election. It may well be too soon to tell what to make of it but let’s give it a go anyway.
I should say at the outset that I don’t really believe we had a fair and free election and that the fraud is endemic to our system. I’ve been critical of this fraud for a long time. I’ve been writing about and exposing voter fraud since 2010. It’s becoming more and more obvious that voter fraud is a way in which the machine politicians stay in power indefinitely.
You need look no further than Kamala Harris defeating Steve Cooley. Harris understood the two ways you become powerful – sex and votes. Cooley and I have had a few conversations over the years and it’s interesting to think about what might have been.
It’s not who votes that matters, kids. It’s who counts the votes and how that really matters. Maybe this is always how it really was.
I suspect that this fraud was more or less emergent phenomena: if you believe that Trump is Hitler you’ll do pretty much anything to defeat him. This is Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer whose source of meaning comes from politics.
If you believe that Trump will privatize your job, like say the US Postal Service workers, you’ll cheat and steal to defeat him. Why would you ever think you’d ever be caught?
I enthusiastically supported Donald Trump in 2016 over Hillary Clinton. I was there when he won in New York City. It remains one of the happiest nights of my life but because I was there with my friends. We contrarians remember the times we weren’t supposed to win but we did.
I donated the maximum to Trump in 2020 but I didn’t vote for him. I also didn’t vote in 2016 either except in the Republican primary in California. I had backed Cruz and then Trump during the primary. I wrote sympathetically about Trump in Takimag. I saw what was happening.
Still I bled for the man. I built a research army for him and did what I could to organize the nerds into a veritable coalition. Now that Trump’s left office I can finally admit it. I never bought the shtick. But I sucked it up. I supported him because I hated Hillary Clinton—and that, I thought, was enough.
Only it wasn’t enough. Trump seemed to me to be playing the role of a president rather than actually being one. He seemed to be acting. He took little interest on issues that didn’t affect him. He wanted to be popular more than he wanted to be populist and so he fell for some woke bullshit so he could get some attaboys from the Kochs and the celebrity class. He believed that the black vote could break his way. This was fantasy, a wild, ridiculous Boomer fantasy, the very worst sort of fancies that addles your brain by promoting your fake virtue. One can see it as a sort of marketing and there was nothing Trump did better than marketing.
But if you’re going to be a showman you better have something to show for yourself.
Whereas Trump the Candidate didn’t have “time to be politically correct” Trump the President was nothing but, happily prattling on about Native American unemployment or the black female vote or some such other nonsense. Who cares. Just do your job, boomer.
Trump was a fighter but he was no brawler and he was certainly no knight. He had no code other than his own narcissism. L’état c’est moi he was not. He seemed to inveigh against the media but love their attention.
I’m sympathetic to Presidents being the flip of one another.
This is Trump’s central failing. Whereas Obama obsessed about technology Trump more or less doesn’t care about technology except as a way of scaling himself. His narcissism led him to cultural cul de sacs and dead ends for his supporters.
He was warned repeatedly that the tech companies were going to fuck him—and he did nothing about it.
His personnel choices were a joke. Jeff Sessions did nothing. Nor did Bill Barr. Trump would bitch about them on Twitter but did little. He was enamored of generals like Kelly and Mattis, who served longer on the board of Theranos, than as his Defense Secretary.
VC capital more or less went to Biden—and went big. And now we might finally have tech companies that love America.
My own view is that the Republican Party is very disorganized—almost by design—and that it has no real interest in a real critique of globalization beyond sloganeering. It no longer recruits the best minds our country has to offer. I look forward to America becoming a one-party state. It would be more honest.
Trumpism was a sort of coalition between the Midwesterners, who favor industrial policy, and the Sun Belt, which wants low taxes. The pro-Israel Jewish supporters served as the money while evangelical America, declining in power and increasingly drawn into their cult of personality and Q Anon (whatever that is), served as the shock troops.
Trump had few real successes. Immigration? Nope. No birthright citizenship repeal. Curiously he did nothing but placate the business lobby with more immigration rather than running on less.
(He could have offered tax credits to automate away those illegal alien jobs but that would require imagination, not just marketing.)
I don’t much buy Trump’s Middle East victories. As I see it Israel and the Arab states were already allies but now they are open allies. OK, so what? Why should we care in a world in which oil is increasingly irrelevant?
It turns out that in a world of telecommuting and lockdowns Americans prefer sunshine and low taxes and low housing prices. Duh.
My father’s California – which seemed an open frontier – is long gone. I am a refugee but in a way I feel like I’m coming home. My grandmother was from Wyoming; my grandfather from Oklahoma. My great-grandfather – my namesake – was born in Arkansas. The Forgotten Man? C’est moi, or at least my ancestors, who believed that there is an American meritocracy.
My family’s successes come from that fabled American meritocracy: first my grandfather, who went from Oklahoma poverty to Annapolis to military awards to admiralty to burial in Arlington, then my father, who won scholarships to prep school later to Harvard College.
It’s patently clear that the American meritocracy is no more, at least through the old institutions. There may still be a meritocracy that makes itself known through the market but that, too, seems rigged.
The next Republican president will be an ally of the America First technology companies and perhaps their champion.
Pay attention to JD Vance.
Until then, best wishes to President Joe Biden. May he keep our America together in a difficult time.