The American people have made a disastrous choice. And they have done so decisively, and with their eyes wide open.
Donald J. Trump will be our next president, elected with a majority of the popular vote, likely winning both more votes and more states than he did in his two previous elections. After everything—after his chaotic presidency, after January 6th, after the last year in which the mask was increasingly off, and no attempt was made to hide the extremism of the agenda or the ugliness of the appeal—the American people liked what they saw. At a minimum, they were willing to accept what they saw.
And Trump was running against a competent candidate who ran a good campaign to the center and bested him in a debate, with a strong economy. Yet Trump prevailed, pulling off one of the most remarkable comebacks in American political history. Trump boasted last night, “We’ve achieved the most incredible political thing,” and he’s not altogether wrong.
Certainly, even before he once again assumes the reins of power, Trump has cemented his status as the most consequential American politician of this century.
And when he assumes the reins of power, he’ll start off as a powerful and emboldened president. He’ll have extraordinary momentum from his victory. He’ll be able to claim a mandate for an agenda that the public has approved. He’ll have willing apparatchiks and politicians at his disposal, under the guidance of JD Vance and Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson and Stephen Miller, eager to help him advance that agenda. He’ll have a compliant Republican majority in the Senate. And it looks as if Republicans may narrowly hold the House.
It’s hard to imagine a worse outcome.
If you think, as I do, that Trump’s agenda could do great damage to the country and to the world, if you think of deportations of immigrants at home and the betrayal of brave Ukrainians abroad and you shudder, if you think that turning our health policy over to Robert Kennedy Jr. will cause real harm, you’re right to feel real foreboding for the future.
And of course there is no guarantee that the American people will turn against Trump and his agenda. They knew fully well who it was they were choosing this time. Their support may well be more stubborn than one would like. It certainly has been over the last four years.
Sounds like this website he’s currently writing for is also pretty opposed to Trump.
Just a quick question. It may have been you, or others, that I have seen writing “kagis” and I can’t seem to find a good definition. What does that mean?
Kagi provides a subscription-based service; the user pays a subscription fee, rather than the search engine generating a return via data-mining and profiling users, which is something that I’d wanted for some time; at some point in the past year or so someone pointed me to it. It also provides some other features, but what I really care about is the no-log aspect.
If Google would sell some kind of analogous subscription for YouTube (rather than just ad-free service with their “YouTube Premium” stuff) I’d happily get “YouTube Private” as well, as I think that that’s probably the other major source of online data-mining that I very regularly use and don’t have a great way of dealing with today. But as things stand, that’s not something that they have on offer.
Bill Kristol really dislikes Trump.
kagis
This looks like a recent article. He’s not exactly pulling punches.
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/what-will-trumps-win-mean
Sounds like this website he’s currently writing for is also pretty opposed to Trump.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bulwark_(website)
Just a quick question. It may have been you, or others, that I have seen writing “kagis” and I can’t seem to find a good definition. What does that mean?
Last time I asked it’s like saying you “googled” something on some alt search engine
Just searching Kagi, like googling on Google.
Kagi provides a subscription-based service; the user pays a subscription fee, rather than the search engine generating a return via data-mining and profiling users, which is something that I’d wanted for some time; at some point in the past year or so someone pointed me to it. It also provides some other features, but what I really care about is the no-log aspect.
If Google would sell some kind of analogous subscription for YouTube (rather than just ad-free service with their “YouTube Premium” stuff) I’d happily get “YouTube Private” as well, as I think that that’s probably the other major source of online data-mining that I very regularly use and don’t have a great way of dealing with today. But as things stand, that’s not something that they have on offer.