President Abraham Lincoln once correctly stated: “If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem. It is true that you may fool all the people sometimes; you can even fool some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” With the resounding victory of President-elect Donald J. Trump on November 5th, tens of millions of Americans proclaimed they will never be fooled again.
For decades, the game plan of the left has been about fooling all the people all the time. The left has known for years that the facts and the truth were not on their side. And for that reason, they created the largest Ponzi scheme in our nation's history. Their only products for that scheme are snake oil and fabrication.
A Ponzi scheme that succeeded in large measure for many years because they also controlled what I call the “five major megaphones” of our nation. Those are the media, academia, entertainment, science, and medicine.
And just who has been “fooling” these hard-working, tax-paying, law-abiding, and often disenfranchised Americans? The list is long but includes the Democratic Party, the failed Biden-Harris White House, the failing far-left media, the failed and corrupt teachers’ unions, failing far-left academic administrators and professors, the far-left woke scientists and doctors who have invaded science and medicine like a virus; the Deep State; and the woke Flag Officers in our Pentagon and military.
While, in some ways, a diverse list of pro-censorship and anti-liberty offenders, they all share one thing. That being that for coming up on one decade, they have all worked tirelessly, unethically, and even illegally to demonize first businessman, then President, then-candidate, and now President-elect Donald Trump. But in doing so, they created a “bridge too far” and opened the eyes of the people they have been subjugating and abusing.
The left and the far left have several nation-destroying flaws. But the first, above all, is that they continually underestimate working-class Americans' intelligence, resolve, and decency. It is a flaw that just cost them this election.
The American people – and most especially the working class – are intelligent. For the last decade, as every faction from the left relentlessly attacked Trump, tens of millions of these Americans stepped back from the onslaught and chose to believe their “lying eyes” instead. Eyes, which showed them that businessman Trump had built a global business empire from the ground up, that candidate Trump was speaking out against the entrenched elites ignoring them and their rising fears, and that the policies of President Trump were the best thing to have happened to them in years; and that he was anything but a “dictator” or them “fascists,” “deplorable,” or “garbage.”
And it was candidate Trump who helped to open their eyes throughout this last election. He did so purposely and continually by weakening the left's vice-like grip on the five major megaphones. He did so in two critically important ways.
First, candidate Trump orchestrated the greatest communications end-around in campaign history. Knowing the left had a lock on the corrupt legacy media, woke Hollywood, and failing academia, he went straight to the American people by doing hundreds and hundreds of podcasts. Podcasts, collectively – and even individually in some cases such as Joe Rogan and amplified by Elon Musk on X – swamped the viewership, listenership, and readership of the far-left megaphones.
Next, candidate Trump did what so many previous Republican candidates have been too afraid—or too ignorant—to do for decades: He took his message and vision for America straight into blue states, blue cities, and blue constituencies.
More eyes opened. More votes gained. More hope was created.
Eyes that have joined with tens of millions of others to now clearly see the unintended by-product of the left’s decades-long snake oil campaign: Fear.
These Americans from every community and every walk of life now see real fear in the eyes of the Democratic Party, in the eyes of the Biden-Harris White House, in the eyes of the failing legacy media, in the eyes of the Deep State, and in the eyes of scientists and doctors who have been spreading misinformation for reasons of hate or ideology.
These tens of millions of Americans now see that the agents of the left and far left are truly petrified that President-elect Trump is going to succeed. And is going to not only make America great again but make the world safer at the same time.
We “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” The iconic English rock band “The Who” released that song in 1971. Fifty-three years later, the American people are screaming it out from every corner of our nation. President Trump has shown them the truth, and it has set them free.
Douglas MacKinnon is a former White House and Pentagon official and author of the book The 56 – Liberty Lessons from those who risked all to sign The Declaration of Independence.