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Republicans have a problem with success, largely because we grew so unfamiliar with it in recent decades. Our recent run of success only began about 10 years ago when Donald Trump first took the helm, and it’s been up and down since then. But lately it’s been almost completely up. Except for the occasional tangent into self-defeating Epstein onanism, we have experienced pretty much nothing but wins for the last year or so as Trump watched the human eggplant running against him wander off stage, then the drunken trollop who replaced Grandpa Badfinger get broken and humiliated at the ballot box. Since his inauguration, it’s just been win, win, win. He’s neutered the Iranians, neutered inflation, neutered the Deep State, and would have neutered the Democrats if they had any external genitalia to remove.
So far, there’s only one promise Trump hasn’t kept. He promised we would get tired of all the winning. But we are not tired of all the winning.
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So, how should we handle all the winning? After all, we’re not used to it. I’m one of those Republicans who came of age in the 1980s, which were just as awesome as the legends tell, but that was the last time we were scoring big on a regular basis. We had Ronald Reagan, a colossus standing astride American politics during our country’s most glorious decade. Lots of sissies, femboys, and other dorks channeling the bow-tied incel brand of George Will-style conservative wag their girlish fingers at us about how Ronald Reagan would never have supported all the things Trump is doing if he were still around. That’s nonsense. Reagan would be all in, and Trump wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the Gipper – something Donald Trump, who knew Ronald Reagan, would freely confirm. Without President Reagan, there would be no President Trump. Trump is doing things Reagan only dreamed of, including completing the transformation of the Reagan Democrats from a key component of the New Deal coalition into the heart and soul of the current Republican Party.
But after Reagan, it was all Bushies, starting with HW fumbling his presidency by betraying us after inviting us to read his lips about no new taxes. Then came W botching what should’ve been some brutal punitive expeditions against Third World semihumans by deciding to stick around and trying to civilize people whose culture and politics consisted of seventh-century barbarism. And then there was one last flaccid push by Jeb!, who managed to blow $1 billion trying to get the band back together for one more failed concert tour – if not for DJT, today the GOP would have second billing to a puppet show.
What are the secrets of handling winning? A key one is understanding that winning is inevitably followed by losing. It’s not going to be all wins forever. The struggle between good and leftists is an eternal one. Our momentum is going to slow, internal rivalries will take their toll, and the natural friction within the movement will weaken us. Great leaders will be followed by mediocre ones. And the enemy gets a vote. The Democrats will adjust. They will change in an effort to overcome their myriad deficiencies. Things are eventually going to change for the worse – but, with luck, that’s not going to be for a while.
Yet, the clock is ticking. We’ve got to do what we have to do now, not later. We have to strike while the iron is hot and take advantage of the momentum we’ve created. Trump 2.0 is doing that. Every day, we’re bombarded by news of a broad offensive attacking many strong points of the left. This strategy goes against a lot of conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom says that you carefully guard your political capital like Scrooge McDuck and spend it on only the most important tasks. There’s a place for that, but there’s also a place for going all out, putting the pedal to the metal. That’s what Trump’s doing. Every one of his departments has initiatives designed to gut the liberal leviathan. Over here, the EPA is undoing the ridiculous climate hoax regulations. Over there, the Justice Department is investigating Letitia James and Adam Schiff for mortgage fraud. Pete Hegseth is wringing DEI out of the DOD, while Marco Rubio is hanging Democrat money launderers at USAID and elsewhere out to dry.
Donald Trump, exercising discipline we didn’t know he had, is focused and furious in his work. This guy has helped settle six different conflicts since he came into office. That’s insane; still, he won’t get a participation Nobel like Obama. But it also vindicates his strategy of trying to do everything all at once. It’s a strategy that recognizes that time is both our most valuable asset and also what will eventually be our undoing. We’re at just over six months now, and we’ve got 3 1/2 years left. We’ve got to make them count.
Another important thing to do when you’re winning is not to feel you have to find some reason to lose. Like with the aforementioned Epstein stuff, among Republicans, there always seems to be this little nagging voice telling them to undermine their own success. Was the Epstein stuff handled in a manner that you could characterize as optimal? No. But if your standard is perfection, you have established that you are not interested in success because you’re never going to achieve perfection. We’re going to make mistakes. It’s remarkable how few we’ve made so far. It’s remarkable how competent, loyal, and focused the administration’s key personnel have been. I don’t think we’ve ever seen anything like it. They don’t leak. They don’t backbite – publicly. They’re all on the team, rowing forward together. We have to encourage that for as long as we can, because it’s not going to last. As conservatives, we recognize humanity’s fallen nature. People are going to backbite. They’re going to get ambitious, particularly as people start looking for what they’re going to do in the next administration. It’s going to be harder to keep everybody on the same team, but President Trump needs to demand it, and we in the base need to demand it, too.
Yes, as base Republicans, we play a key role, even if we’re not inside the administration, by demanding that the administration and all its functionaries function functionally. We have had a lot of success as a base whenever somebody has floated a dumb trial balloon, like selective amnesty for farm-working and hotel-cleaning illegal aliens. Remember that? Remember how we treated it like Curtis LeMay treated Tokyo?
We need to have a zero-tolerance policy for nonsense. We need to have a zero-tolerance policy for hesitation. We need to have a zero-tolerance policy for doing anything but taking our sword and driving it into their guts up to the hilt.
The way you handle winning is to keep winning as long as you can. Take the win and move on to the next one. No stopping, no resting on our laurels. We want our win fix like the junkies Trump’s cleaned out of D.C. want smack. Accept nothing less.
No, we’re not going to get tired of all the winning. As Hillary Clinton once told an audience of eager morons who lapped up her crap, we don't feel no ways tired. We can sleep when we’re dead or out of power; until then, charge!
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