Welcome to the doldrums, the period of problems, the phase of foul-ups, the time of the sucking. And it does suck. Everything seems to be going wrong for Republicans right now. We were flying high a few weeks ago, when Donald Trump negotiated the end of the Gaza War, and then it was all downhill. Lost elections, economic uncertainty, Epstein file stupidity, fear that the conservative movement will tear itself apart over people who aren't even conservative, and Marjorie Taylor Greene's face all over our social media feeds. Yeah, it's bad. You're at the top one day, then the next day you're at the bottom.
But we've been around the block before. We've done this a few times. Most of us reading this and watching what's going on have seen this story arc play out in the past. You start out strong, you go hard for a while, and then the problems pop up. That's the way of every human endeavor. Nothing is perfect, and the inevitable imperfections build up until they threaten to stop your progress and must be dealt with. It's particularly exaggerated in the case of Trump 2.0. Why? Because Trump 2.0 has been so massively successful. Go back just six months. It was win after win after win. We shut down the border. We took out Iran's nuclear program. DOGE was purging timeservers and non-hackers. We were kicking over the feed troughs at USAID and elsewhere. Freaking PBS was dead. Sure, there were obstacles, but the pinkos were not going to just give up their power politely merely because the voters rejected them. It was awesome.
Yet, it is the comparison with those dizzying heights that makes the current depths look so much more bottomless. They're not. The conservative movement/MAGA/America First/Whatever You Call It is unlikely to crack up because Tucker Carlson has cracked up. The affordability crisis is unlikely to persist all the way to the next elections. And those elections are not necessarily going to be a massive defeat. But it sometimes seems like those things are inevitable because it's so miserable right now. It's always darkest before things go completely black.
Now, all of these things could happen. We could be idiots and continue to focus on tearing ourselves apart rather than getting back to delivering more wins. We are going to have to devote valuable time, effort, and money to defeating the dummies, backstabbers, and morally preening puffboys in our own party who distract and undermine us. The economy could stubbornly refuse to get better. We could be wiped out in next year's elections, and there's a lot of evidence that this would happen if the elections were held today.
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But we don't have to tear ourselves apart. A lot of the tearing apart is by people who haven't been Republicans very long at all, people who joined the brand-new Trump coalition in 2024 because Kamala Harris was so much worse. It's not a solid coalition yet, and it can't be expected to be a solid coalition yet. Those take years to solidify. Remember, a lot of the people with us aren't actually conservative. They don't actually like a lot of the things that we like. They just had much more in common with us, or felt especially threatened by, the wine-sodden, communist menace that was Kamala Harris. We've got major disagreements, and those are going to come up. And there's also the psychological issue – some people are uncomfortable being allied with us. They still think we're John Lithgow in "Footloose."
The economy may remain stubbornly bad, or stubbornly perceived as bad, but we've been to this rodeo before. Ronald Reagan took a couple of years to turn things around, but when he did, there was an enormous boom. Donald Trump took a couple of years to turn things around during 1.0, but when he did, there was an enormous boom. Are you seeing a pattern of what happens when conservative policies are put in place? Sure, we have the tariffs wildcard, but we haven't seen tariffs driving up inflation the way we were promised by the critics. The inflation rate is down. That's undeniable, and it's beginning to manifest in certain products. Other products, not so much, and you know our enemies across the aisle, in our own aisle, and in the regime media are going to keep pointing that out. It's those enemies in our own aisle who lay down the marker against tariffs and are hoping they'll be proven right about it being a disaster, even though it's not quite been a disaster. Plus, Trump's going to be able to replace the Fed chairman next year, and then we're probably going to see reasonable interest rates again. Of course, there are structural problems with the economy, and even these initial fixes that Trump's putting into place are going to take time. But that's one of our advantages. We've got time.
Not endless time. The midterms are just a hair under a year away. That's both forever and tomorrow. A lot is going to happen in the next 12 months. We've already established a solid foundation for improvement. But let's face it, we're going against historical trends. We're also going against hysterical trends. The Left has gone completely insane, not because Trump is failing but because he's succeeding. He's throwing out their entire new slate of replacement voters. He's cutting off Dem money. He's refusing to indulge their perverted and racist social pathologies. He's actually acting like a president and using the powers of the office to which he won election fair and square. They call this "being a king" when a Republican does it. They call it "being a president" when a Democrat does it.
Those elections a few weeks ago were a warning. They can also be a blessing if we learn their lessons. We've seen where we're weak. We've seen where we have to improve. We've got 12 months to do it, and the key is actually doing it. We've got to get our voters motivated, which is hard because – as we discussed above – this is a new coalition, and a lot of these are not the reliable voters that the Republican Party once had. I am always amused when Trump gets criticism for allegedly trading reliable suburban voters for less reliable new voters, but those suburban voters who reliably go to the polls were often supporting policies that we vehemently oppose. Trump didn't leave them. They left us and went over to cavort with the weirdos, losers, and mutations with nose rings, Ibram X. Kendi books, and an inability to state the correct number of genders.
History is against us, but that's just the culmination of trends we recognize regarding motivated out-of-power voters and complacent voters from the party in power. We can address those issues, and others, including by aggressively redistricting. But we actually have to do it. We've got to do the work.
That's the thing. We've got to motivate ourselves to do what we have to do, and that's hard because you look around and everything sucks right now. This is when it's miserable. This is when everything seems to be going wrong. But that moment is just a moment. It doesn't last. It's not a permanent state. It's a necessary phase, an unpleasant one, one that we could sure as hell do without, but every team has losing weeks except the 1972 Dolphins and the 2007 Patriots – I'm very proud I managed to use a sports analogy correctly. Accept it. Don't let it break you down. Losing is part of winning. That's just how it works. And it sucks, but the answer is to get used to it, get to work, and get through it.
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