Have you noticed how Donald Trump is getting about ten wins for every one setback? Or maybe you haven’t noticed it. A lot of people haven’t. A lot of people are panicking because there is always something in the news implying that Trump is losing. There’s always a focus on some setback, obstacle, fake poll, or pseudo-scandal; every single day, there’s one of those in the news. But this isn’t bad. This is good. It shows how the Trump Administration is leveraging the inability of the regime media and the Democrats to message outside of the old Alinsky model. There are dozens of things going on every day. The bad guys can only deal with one at any given time, and inevitably, they deal with the shiniest, least important, and easiest to defend outrage. While they’re chasing the squirrel, a dozen honey badgers are running rampant through Washington, D.C.
The Alinsky agitation model, suited for a 20th-century media landscape, is entirely unsuited for 2025. It requires a unified establishment that polarizes around a single issue via a total focus by every Democrat and all the regime media lackeys. The idea is to catch the public’s attention with some big, bad narrative to the exclusion of everything else. That requires leftist coordination, which they eagerly submit to. They literally have memos going out with the outrage of the day. That’s why they always say exactly the same thing. They are all reading off the same script.
The outrage must be something that can be explained – almost always falsely – in about one sentence. It’s an elevator pitch. The negative aspect must be very obvious. It can’t require a lot of thought because it’s not directed at people who think deeply. The idea is to get everybody talking about it so that the victim is unable to do anything else but deal with it, and by the time he finishes dealing with that one, there’s another one. Instead of going on the offense, the victim is on perpetual defense. He’s always losing.
But Trump doesn’t play by those rules. Trump frustrates them by defying their expectations. He defends once, then moves on and stays on the offense. He dismisses these bogus claims offhand, even as his people do a dozen other important things. The left has no bandwidth to resist all those. They are set up to fight one battle at a time, and he’s attacking on multiple axes. They thought this tactic would frustrate Trump. He’s turned it into a tool to frustrate their attempts to stop him.
Let’s look at some of these recent imbroglios. A couple of weeks ago, it was a Qatari 747 that Trump was supposedly pocketing as a bribe, and, of course, it didn’t turn out to be anything like that. The story came out about how Trump was getting a gold-plated jet as a personal gift from some sultans in the Middle East. The left dutifully jumped on it. The story went from 0 to 100 in about an hour, with Democrat politicians and regime media outlets spewing the same nonsense, evidence of the coordination behind the fake news. They thought they had him. On the surface, a bunch of desert sheiks giving him a half-billion-dollar jet would seem pretty bad. You didn’t need to explain why. People just understood. It was the perfect bogus scandal.
But, of course, it was baloney. That didn’t matter when the regime media could gate-keep out the truth long enough for the lie to get fixed in the collective consciousness. However, by 2025, we won’t have just three networks and two major newspapers. On X, people like, well, me, instantly warned that this story would turn out to be total bullSchiff. And that’s what happened in a matter of minutes. No one was signing the jet over to Donald Trump. The Department of Defense was going to get it because Boeing is massively incompetent. Trump didn’t give an inch; he immediately responded that he’d have to be an idiot not to take a free half-billion-dollar airplane on behalf of the country. The critics, sadly, including the usual conservative suspects who are never happier than when they’re wagging their girlish little fingers at Donald Trump’s antics, were forced to shift the goalpost. With the bribery hook gone, they had to fuss impotently about how it didn’t look good for reasons.
In the meantime, they were not talking about all sorts of other initiatives, things like cutting off money to Harvard and other garbage campus commie conformity factories, firing more government workers, and ditching more regulations. Instead of Trump being unable to do anything but respond to them, they can’t do anything but try to prop up their dying, bogus narratives. Mention the Qatari jet now, and people just roll their eyes: “Whatever. What else you got?”
Then, over the last weekend, the big thing was a Supreme Court holding. We’re all supposed to be totally demoralized by it. Nah. It was bad, but nowhere near as bad as people think for reasons that don’t really matter here. They tried to paint it as “Dictator Trump got repudiated by the Supreme Court!” That’s supposed to make people angry at Trump, but it doesn’t. The Supreme Court telling the American people that we can’t deport even the worst of the 20 million Third World peasants that the Democrats let invade over our border doesn’t make Trump look bad. It makes the Supreme Court look bad. And it makes the people crowing about it look bad. While this holding was dumb, there were some other holdings where Trump won in other courts. He is slowly winning these cases, and he may very well win this one – after all, this was only an interlocutory proceeding, not a final decision on the merits.
There’s also the big, beautiful bill, which is the subject of fighting between fiscal conservatives and Republican moderates. The Democrats and the regime media are hoping and praying to their pagan weather gods that Trump’s flagship legislation will founder on the rocks of party disunity. But that’s not going to happen. The party has already come together to advance it this far against all odds. Everybody, from Chip Roy to Mike Lawler, has a huge interest in getting something passed. Plus, Trump wants it and knows how to get what he wants. There’s going to be a compromise. Nobody will be happy about it, which simply makes it a compromise. Once again, Trump will rise above the story du jour in victory.
Their model also fails when Trump swoops in and steals their issues. It was Trump who took on Big Pharma with his price regulations. The “principled” conservative crowd cried about it, but the Democrats stewed. They thought that was their issue. The Democrats used to be, allegedly, the party of peace. We’ll just leave out who started Vietnam, since that’s awkward. Today, Trump’s all aboard the peace train. He’s trying to talk Ukraine and Russia into peace, and he’s trying to achieve peace in the Middle East. His trip to the Gulf was massively successful and included the release of the last American held by Hamas. But, while the Democrats and regime media were stressing about other things, Israel sent the last of the scuzzy Sinwar brothers to his virgins, who I hope look like the striking Starbucks baristas. He was hiding in a hospital, dirtbag that he was, and the regime media didn’t have space to weep over the Palestinians suffering the consequences of their own decisions.
The Trump juggernaut juggers on. Trump is rolling back regulations. Trump is hunting terrorists. Trump is defunding leftist institutions. Pretty soon, he will have his picks for the federal courts start moving. He’s getting things done, fulfilling the dreams conservatives have had for 40 years. Yeah, he occasionally has a setback, but this guy is batting .900. There’s more to come, and his opponents are in disarray. They will be focused on some nonsense that he will dismiss with a wave of his hand while he will be getting awesome things done, things we conservatives have been fantasizing over for decades. Advantage, us.
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