Apres Deluge...
...Now What?
Donald Trump didn’t win Tuesday – he won comfortably.
Kamala Harris didn’t lose Tuesday – she lost badly.
So now what?
A few key points:
First, when he was elected in 2016, Trump – bless his heart – thought that just because he was president people would have to do what he told them to.
Wrong, and that led to four years of leaks and lies and stymied plans and policies.
This time, that is not the case.
The country showed decisively Tuesday that it has had enough of the elite DEI garbage, the gaslighting, the censorship, the always looking over your shoulder when you say something that might be construed as improper or express an opinion that will raise the ire of the internet and/or the human resources department.
America woke up to woke and it is ready to crumble. And, this time, Trump is prepared.
Word from the Trump transition team (I don’t know if he even had one last time) is that they have been vetting and backgrounding and considering thousands of people to fill the jobs at his disposal.
And not just the cabinet – this time, they are ready for even the next level of appointee jobs and the level below that.
This means that while, until January 20 at least, the nation will see a great many people doing everything they can to institutionalize themselves and proudly launching Resistance 2.0, But after that it will be Trump’s people pushing the buttons.
That being said, the bureaucracy will fight tooth and nail and, of course, be supported by California Democrats who are already claiming the mantle of the new resistance.
While the media will keep trying to push that fascist rope trope up the hill, as Barack Obama famously said, “elections have consequences.”
In other words, be prepared for about two months of “how dare he appoint people who support his agenda!?!?” headlines, but do not worry too too much about it.
This may seem obscure, insidey baseball type stuff, but one of Trump’s first act will be to re-create the federal civil service designation of “Schedule F.”
The very appropriately named (think about it) concept would strip civil service “I can never be fired” protections from a wide swath of the permanent deep state bureaucracy.
This will be portrayed as an attack on democracy (pretty sure it worked Tuesday, by the way, so please stop saying that) in large part because the folks that will be subject to the new rule have mortgages to pay in the pricey Virginia and Maryland suburbs that surround DC.
In a nutshell, right now pretty much every non-political appointee that works for the feds is protected by the civil service rules, even those higher-ups who make policy have access to confidential information, etc. The people, to u tin bluntly, really run the show.
Basically, they run the country and think they should run the country because they are the experts and how dare anyone contradict them. We’ve been here forever and we will still be here when you are gone, so we can and will ignore you.
This layer of bureaucracy would be shifted into a “schedule F” civil service designation which means that if they do not do their job, if they slow walk or outright oppose the policies created by the people WHO WERE PUT IN CHARGE OF THE COUNTRY BY THE VOTERS they could actually be fired. For cause.
The very idea has DC trembling and will be an incredibly important weapon in Trump’s arsenal.
In other words, this time he might be able to drain the swamp, or at least make it very uncomfortable for the government gators who live there.
There will be an end to government-imposed DEI programs, the massive health bureaucracy will be reformed (oh, a thought – he should re-hire Tiny Fauci just to fire him – that would be fun,) and the surveillance state will be dismantled.
Ironically, even before the internet etc., J. Edgar Hoover – he of dress-wearing, mafia bribe-taking FBI fame – kept such copious dirt files on electeds that he could never be fired. With Trump, it doesn’t matter what the deep state has on him – we’ve pretty much all seen it all and still elected him.
Essentially, he’s impervious to those types of ploys.
As to California itself, unless the EPA immediately issues the waiver to the state Air Resources Board to allow it regulate railroads out of existence and to demand that non-existent Star Trek-level technology be installed on any and everything that moves, that will not be happening.
CARB is not at all happy today; all of their victims, though, are ecstatic.
In his first term, Trump blocked federal money (and even tried to get some back) from going to the ludicrous high speed rail project. If the state thinks it could possibly still get any federal money to help it finish even the literally pointless Madera to Shafter section, it needs to think again.
As to the Democrats, all one can say is oof.
In California, of course, there will be no internal party soul searching or thinking that maybe just maybe the idea of building trans-only bike lanes between Planned Parenthood and the local middle school is going a bit too far.
What will continue is California suing Trump. In his first terms, the state sued Trump more than 100 times – a new record – and Attorney General Rob Bonta – desperate to improve his chances at becoming the next governor – has already announced that that trend will continue.
“We’ve been spending months, in some cases over a year,” Bonta told the LA Times election night., “planning on potential attacks and our responses to them across all the different issues and areas — from attacking our environment to attacking reproductive freedom, our common sense gun laws, our LGBTQ+ community, our civil rights, different constitutional rights.”
Nationally, though, the party is in deep. Will it be able to jettison the lefty loons that have pushed it so far that it lost an election to Donald Trump, the most controversial American politician since, oh, I don’t know, Huey Long maybe, of all people? Actually, lost twice and only won once because of the pandemic response and widespread election law changes and eliminations and ignorings.
Time will tell, but expect that fight to be nasty and bitter and very very funny, at least if some of the post-election commentary on MSNBC very early this morning is an indication.
A commentator – didn’t catch her name, doesn’t matter – was kvetching about “women’s health issues” – i.e. abortion, because apparently that’s the only aspect of a woman’s health that matters – and branded the “pro-life” movement with a phrase so radiantly bizarre that it belies belief.
She really actually literally branded people opposed to abortion as being part of “the forced birth movement.”
So, we’ll see how the Democrats handle that.