CHAPTER ONE   

The Sleeping Giant Awakens, and Boy, Is He Pissed Off

I did not start out as a Donald Trump fan. That actually puts it mildly—I started out as a hardcore Trump opponent, though I was never Never Trump. I would have voted for pretty much anyone else before checking the box for that monstrous harridan Hillary Clinton. I had proved that in the past—I voted for John McCain and Mitt Romney, though they were each unsatisfactory in their own way. I drew the line at Jeb! Bush, though—I would have refused to vote for either Sr. Please Clap or Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit. Instead, I would have spent election night consoling myself with a full-bodied California cabernet while I watched Fox report on what America did when faced with the political equivalent of choosing between a cold sore and leprosy.

You see, I was an ideological conservative. I dug the ideas, the wonderful mix of individual freedom and ordered liberty envisioned by the Founders. I had for as long as I could remember. I was deep in the conservative movement, and joined up in the mid-eighties when I fought Marx-loving ex-hippie professors among the eucalyptus trees at the University of California, San Diego, while writing for its conservative campus paper, California Review. I read National Review and the American Spectator, because if you were a conservative back in the day, you had nowhere else to score your conserva-fix but National Review and the American Spectator.

So, when Donald Trump came down that escalator with his latest wife and announced he was running, I wasn’t paying attention because the whole idea was ridiculous. Hell, I had been laughing at Trump since reading Spy magazine thirty years ago. I even remembered the whole tiny hands thing from back then. I was vaguely aware he had a television show in the 2000s, but I never took him seriously. Why would any conservative? Trump was a novelty act, a joke distracting from the seriousness of the mission to stop the progressive onslaught.

We were losing, and our country was at stake. And some people were putting their money on the host of The Apprentice?

Nope. Count me out.

So, like most hardcore cons, I ignored Donald Trump and focused on the real candidates. You know, the ones who could actually win.

Those would be the ones Trump eventually mopped the floor with.

Those guys.

Pretty soon Trump was running at the top of the polls, besting sixteen other candidates, and I was shaking my head. It baffled me, and many like me. We Republicans were running a bunch of accomplished, intelligent, truly conservative candidates, as well as Jeb!, and they were all losing to… this guy?

Really?

Who the hell was supporting Trump anyway? Where were these people? I sure didn’t know any of them. By then I had recently retired as an Army reservist, and I was mostly hanging around other Los Angeles lawyer types on the western edge of Los Angeles. The rest of my time was spent with doctrinaire conservative activists. Not a lot of diversity. The upshot was that I wasn’t around many normal Americans.

And like my conservative comrades, I had forgotten about them.

That was the problem, and I didn’t even know it. I had forgotten about the very people who fueled our movement, who fueled our country, figuratively and literally.

Who are they anyway?

These are the normal Americans, the Normals, the people who made America into what we think of when we think of America. They built this country, and they defended it. They grow the food and truck it to our Trader Joe’s. They don’t unfriend people on Facebook for having wrong thoughts, and they aren’t focused on perfecting their neighbors through the power of social justice. They just want to live their lives in a stable society, meaning they don’t want to be robbed walking down the sidewalk, and they want to be shown a little respect.

What they are not defined by are color, sex, religion, or even sexual orientation. They don’t inform you of their preferred pronouns when they meet you and shake your hand. They don’t obsess on those things, like their alleged betters do.

They don’t read policy papers, and they find politics a necessary evil. Most don’t live in big cities on the coasts. Most don’t drive Priuses or bike to work. And most don’t eat kale, to their credit—if you need a reason to doubt the eliteness of the Elite, you need only cite its inexplicable fondness for salads made with that noxious weed.

Normals don’t think about their carbon footprint, mostly because they think that if Channel 7 Eyewitness News Action Weather’s weatherman Sunwood “Sunny” Blueskies is hit and miss about the chance of rain next Monday, nobody has an actual clue about what the weather will be in the year 2118. They’ll roll the climate dice and keep driving their Ford Explorer with the third row of seats that holds most of their kid’s soccer team, thank you very much.

They just want to live their lives freely, while having a say in their government and culture. They do not want to do politics 24/7 like I do, and maybe you do. They would prefer to leave that to the Elite to do, the self-appointed caretakers of the duties of running the country at the macro level.

But what they are done tolerating is an uppity Elite that has screwed up its macro task of running society’s institutions yet has taken unto itself the job of micro-regulation of Normals’ lives. You see, the Elite finds the Normals morally deficient and thinks it has to correct them.

The Elite is wrong.

Normals want to be able to support their families without being disrespected by Elitist snobs and without being exploited by the ruling class. They prefer their kids not get killed fighting wars the politicians who send them do not consider important enough to win.

And in 2016, Donald Trump was the only candidate really talking to them.

Hell, he was the only one who acknowledged the Normals even existed.

But I didn’t see that.

Nor did the vast majority of my fellow ideological conservatives. Most of us had signed on with the Elite—yes, conservatives can be part of that caste, though they are not the majority—and we had adopted many of their tribal prejudices and preconceptions. But we forgot about the people whose hard work and, sometimes, blood let us be Elite.

Because he had no respect for the things I thought he should have respect for, like ideology, Trump set off my charlatan detector big time. His embrace of conservative heresies, like protectionism and not bombing the shit out of anyone who looked at us sideways, did not impress me. This guy wasn’t a Republican, not like the ones I knew, not like the kind I was. He was certainly not like Saint Ronald—one of my greatest memories was seeing Reagan’s last campaign appearance ever in 1984 at a shopping center in San Diego just before he pummeled that hapless sap Walter Mondale in the first presidential election in which I ever voted. But while Trump may not have had the conservative ideological rigor Reagan had, he did have something else.

He connected with people. Just not with people like me.

In fact, he did the opposite. By going all in on the Normals, Trump drew the wrath of the Elite, this time including both the majority on the left and the minority on the right. Except instead of being crushed by the Elite, like Mitt Romney was or Jeb! would have been, Trump reveled in the Elite’s hatred. He fed on it. He wore it like a medal.

My primary season Townhall.com columns about Trump were scathing, and pretty soon CNN was calling me in as a coherent conservative who would reliably trash Trump. I didn’t mind—I was simply saying what I sincerely felt, and I thought it was my sacred duty to talk my fellow Republicans out of their growing insanity. The day of the debate in Las Vegas on December 15, 2015, I sat on an outside set with CNN’s Brooke Baldwin, cracking her up with my latest column about how Trump was the GOP’s crazy girlfriend—sure, she’s fun for now, but one morning you’re going to wake up alone with the bed on fire plus your credit cards and the keys to your Porsche gone, if not your kidneys.

We laughed. Then that night, onstage, Trump slaughtered the opposition.

Trump’s message was resonating. Not yet with me, but with others. And he was saying some good things, too, things I liked. While other candidates were dancing around the idea of cracking down on illegal immigration, if not embracing all-out amnesty, Trump was all in for enforcing the law. And I had to admit, the idea of not getting into any more wars where we were not willing to do what was necessary to win was starting to appeal to me. Killing bad guys is one thing, and I’m all for it. Killing our own guys because we are playing footsie with our enemies and tying our boys’ hands with rules of engagement that put them in danger? I had deployed twice, and there was a lot to be said for win or go home.

It all came together for me a week later on December 22, 2015. A CNN producer contacted me at the last minute to come on and do a segment about Trump, of course, because CNN never talked about anything else except Trump. It would be a short Skype hit from my office instead of up in Hollywood at the Sunset Boulevard studio, which was fine. I hated that drive through Los Angeles traffic—everywhere is over an hour away from everywhere else in Los Angeles. I did not ask the specific topic because I didn’t really care. Whatever they pitched me, I’d hit.

So, I threw on a jacket and tie and sat down, hooked up on Skype, and there was Don Lemon guest hosting. I never liked the little weasel much, but whatever. He was just another lightweight host to joust with on a Tuesday morning. There was also a Trump supporter on the panel, a nice lady who would barely have a chance to speak, and then me, the designated Trump hitter.

Lemon then started up with the Trump atrocity du jour. Every day, something was The Worst Thing Ever. That tradition continues to the present.

That fateful day, The Worst Thing Ever was that Trump had characterized Hillary’s loss to Barack Obama in the 2008 primary as her having been “schlonged.” Yeah, Trump uttered a minor Yiddish vulgarity. Colorful and evocative, sure, but from Lemon’s demeanor and breathless outrage, this was apparently the greatest crime any man had ever committed in the history of ever. Lemon fulminated for a bit, and then he threw it to me to comment.

But something snapped.

“Schlonged?”

I just didn’t care.

I couldn’t care.

And I told Don Lemon so. I explained to him that Trump uttering the word “schlonged” could not stir within me even the most rudimentary concern. I believe I suggested that only Dr. Stephen Hawking could calculate the inconceivably vast figure quantifying my lack of caring.

I simply refused to give a damn.

Lemon was stunned.

I was off narrative, and he struggled to wrangle me back into the herd. But I felt ornery, and I went further astray.

I mentioned that I especially couldn’t care about Trump saying “schlonged” when Hillary Clinton was herself a notorious sex abuser enabler.

Oh, and I pointed out that Bill had used his intern as a walking humidor.

I think I pointed that out twice.

Lemon went nuts. Failing to deliver the Trump thumping I was so good at was bad, but to disrespect Her Majesty in such a colorful and memorable manner? Well, that was unforgiveable.

Lemon told me I couldn’t talk about Hillary’s history of covering up for her perv hubby. It was verboten.

Oh, really?

Now, I didn’t go to war to come home to seek permission from the likes of Don Lemon to speak my mind, so I repeated my point because the hell with Don Lemon.

Things got a bit heated.

Suddenly, my Skype screen went blank.

Hmmm.

I thought it was a technical glitch—Skype television appearances are always hit and miss. But then a monotone voice came up from my speakers.

“You’re clear.” Then nothing. The connection closed.

CNN had hung up.

Hmmm again.

Usually the producer would tell me how awesome I was before clearing me. I figured she was probably just busy. I thought no more about it and started back to work on some legal brief when my iPhone went crazy.

Texts. Twitter direct messages. Emails.

It seemed Don Lemon had cut me off on-air. And the conservative world loved it.

I have never been back on CNN since, which saves me the nightmare drive. And getting cut off got me a bunch of media hits and a couple thousand new Twitter followers, so advantage Schlichter.

Yet, it seemed… odd. Why the overreaction? Things had gotten testy on the air before, but it was never a thing. Sure, I was hinting pretty graphically about Bill’s Cohiba peccadillos, but if you’ve ever seen Lemon looking like he’s half in the bag pawing at his co-hosts on CNN’s New Year’s Eve shows, you know he’s no prude.

But this time I had, at least for a moment, disrupted the network’s attempt to derail Trump, and its flunkies had freaked out. Then I realized why.

They were afraid of him.

But that was not the specific moment that I knew Trump could win. That was just one of many moments that were slowly opening me up to the possibility that perhaps Trump could win, that something was happening with the Trump movement that posed a profound threat to the status quo. To the Elite.

The moment I first knew Trump could win, that it was not just a theoretical possibility, occurred when my wife and I were talking to another couple in our Los Angeles beach-adjacent town. I’ll mask their identities a bit to try and keep the identity of the gentleman who convinced me secret—if he were unmasked he might end up un-masculated. Literally.

It was in the midst of the primaries. We were out somewhere in town and met this other couple, your typical upper-middle-class SoCal people with good jobs, a nice but hugely overpriced house, and some kids they treat like royalty. The wife is a nice lady, but let’s just say she was not a Trump fan. She was getting wound up. You know the drill. “Trump’s a racist and sexist and a misogynist and hates women and Mexicans and blah blah blah.”

I expect that even today, somewhere in her walk-in designer custom closet, she’s got a gyno sombrero just waiting for the next ridiculous march of the unoppressed.

Anyway, I decided to let Irina deal with her—I preferred drinking my cabernet to being bombarded with her basic opinions. These were the same ill-formed, simplistic, and condescending bits of consensus leftist group-think that the establishment and its poodle media were dumping on all Americans every single day. Pure Elite drivel.

I took a sip and I pitied her husband. The poor guy. If she nattered and ranted like this to random people, I could only imagine the bombardment of grating Trump whining he endured day in and day out. I looked over at him standing silent out of her line of sight.

Then it happened. He did something, and I just knew.

He rolled his eyes.

Not hugely, not theatrically, but subtly.

She was droning on about Trump’s myriad failings, and he rolled his eyes.

He was not yet completely broken.

He was rebelling.

He wasn’t going to scream or shout, or get in her face. He wasn’t going to say a word. No, he was just going to march into that voting booth, pull the curtain shut, and mark his secret ballot for whoever he damned well pleased regardless of what she thought.

He was just a Normal guy, and he wanted Trump.

Maybe he truly liked Trump, living vicariously through him as the candidate told off all of the kinds of people who sought to squash this average suburbanite dad. Maybe he hated Hillary, since he had to deal with the progeny of the movement that had turned The Smartest Woman Ever Was from a nice, repressed Goldwater Gal into a spiteful, repressed commie-lite crone. Or maybe he just wanted to flip his wife the bird without getting a shit-ton of grief and being cut off from the suburban booty.

Maybe it was all of them.

Regardless, he was going to tell her he voted for Hillary, but he was really going to pull that lever for Donald J. Trump because the hell with you for telling me I can’t.

I knew then that Trump could win.

Could win. I wasn’t certain of it, not even early on Election Day, that most glorious of days when Frau von Pantsuit’s dreams died in such a public and humiliating way. I thought Trump might pull it out, with some luck and some divine intervention, but I was pretty certain we would be inaugurating another President Clinton. With her unique combination of malice, stupidity, and absolute certainty of her superior moral and intellectual standing, I gave that dizzy diva a fifty-fifty shot at pushing our country into a civil war.

But when it came to Hillary, the American people had other ideas.

Trump’s voters, the Normals, were a lot like that husband. For a long time, they have been disrespected, taken for granted, and bossed around by their purported betters. Now they are done with it. Openly or covertly, they’re down for a fight.

Typically, Normals aren’t political, except when they have to be. They have better things to do, like their jobs and barbecues and anything else besides obsessing about other people using their proscribed pronoun. They just want to support their families, and be with them. They want to be able to count on a stable society where their families are safe on the streets, and they want a stable economy where their talent and hard work can get them ahead. And, instead of being needled by social justice warriors and smug late-night hosts about the faults liberals always seem to find in them, they want a modicum of respect.

But for so long, America’s ruling caste—the Elite and its adherents in the media and academia—have failed to provide any of that. There was once an unspoken agreement with the Elite: You can be the Elite and do your Elite things and we won’t pay much attention, but you have to do it well and let us live relatively undisturbed. If you do that, we’re cool.

But the Elite didn’t keep its end of the bargain, so we’re not cool.

The Elite did not just fail to do its job running our institutions and providing us a stable society and economy, though it has failed to do those things. The Elite has decided to declare war on the people who make up the backbone of this country because it just cannot live knowing the Normals are out there living free and uncontrolled. And in doing so, the Elite ignited the conflict we are living through today.

The Elite decided they had to burn down the country to save it.

There was an economic war on the Normals. You saw it on your bank statement when you diligently saved for a rainy day, like responsible people do, and you scored a big 0.5 percent interest because the Fed is holding down the rates. The Elite loves low rates. But if you are saving for retirement, you can’t tolerate that, so where do you have to put your money? In the market, which means you are giving your money to Wall Street, which means… the Elite.

Weird how that works out for the Elite and not for the Normals. But then, everything always works out for the Elite and not for the Normals.

How about illegal aliens? The Elite is unified on that, though for different reasons. The Democrat Elite like illegal immigration because they hope that these trespassers will import the same foolish leftist voting patterns that made their homelands into the shitholes they fled from. The Republican Elite loves the idea of a docile workforce that won’t complain or get uppity because their big corporate donors love that idea. Heck, everyone loves illegal immigration—except Normals.

Normals are the ones who get hit-and-run by illegals driving without insurance and see the cop shrug as the laughing intruder drives away from the scene in his rickety Corolla. Normals are the ones who find that the jobs Americans won’t do are really jobs Americans aren’t allowed to do because someone who snuck up here from Guatemala will sweep floors for four dollars an hour under the table instead of demanding minimum wage plus employer payroll taxes. Normals are the ones who bury their kids when some MS-13 Dreamer caps them as part of his gang initiation.

Ted Cruz ran a brilliant campaign ad¹ created by the Madison McQueen firm that pointed out how, if illegal aliens were taking jobs as trial lawyers, stockbrokers, and newspaper editorial writers, there would totally be an illegal alien crisis.

Oh, there would so totally be a crisis.

And then there is the condescension and contempt Normals endure at the hands of their betters, something made even more galling because our betters rarely turn out to actually be better. Barack Obama summed up the Elite’s attitude toward Normals pretty well with his “bitter clingers” comment. But Hillary Clinton did it even better. Leveraging the political savvy and smarts for which she is known by those lacking both political savvy and smarts, in the midst of an election she felt compelled to call half of America “deplorables” for opposing her.

The punchline is that she still has no idea why she lost.

Maybe someone can interrupt her nightly Chardonnay guzzle and email her the 411 via her private server. She lost because Normals are tired of this crap.

They are tired of being treated as if they are stupid.

They are tired of being treated as if they are moral illiterates.

They are tired of being disrespected.

And they are especially tired of it being done to them by an Elite that has no foundation for considering itself elite other than its members consider themselves elite. What, exactly, is so damn elite about today’s American ruling class? Does it have some sort of unbroken track record of success that we just haven’t heard about?

Let’s review some of the Elite’s greatest hits from recent years.

Let’s see… Iraq. The establishment begged us to trust them and, well, that went poorly.

How about the financial crisis of 2008? Normals didn’t have a lot to do with the levers of the economy, so that kind of leaves only one class to blame, doesn’t it? But hey, don’t worry. The Elite that caused the disaster got the bailouts. The Normals who didn’t? Well, they got to fund the bailouts of the people who did.

Stagnant wages. Opioid crisis. Obamacare. Is it too much to ask that this meritocracy demonstrate a little merit once in a while?

If our Elite had achievements commensurate with its level of self-regard, there would be no Trump because we would already be living in Eden.

This is not the first time this kind of uprising has happened. There have been revolts by the Normals in the past. Most of the time, the Normals rise up, make their point, and go back to watching their kids play soccer or whatever they did in the past before America’s youth was infected with foot-and-ball disease. In the late sixties, Richard Nixon called on the “Silent Majority” to help him (and the older Elite) beat back the hippies and the New Left when the cowed Democrat Party nominated George McGovern. The Normals answered, kicked ass, and then went back to bed.

The Normals roused themselves again at the end of the seventies with the tax revolt and the election of Ronald Reagan. Then they went back to sleep.

Ross Perot helped stir them a little, mostly unsuccessfully. Bill Clinton, for all his faults, is a master political operator, and he had grown up around Normals. He knew how to keep them if not happy at least from not getting particularly riled up. Remember, it was conservative activists who led the charge to impeach him, not Normals. Most Normal Americans knew he was a creep, but things were going okay, so “Meh.”

Normals don’t expect the Elite to be perfect. If the Elite delivers, it gets a lot more leeway when it misbehaves.

Then came the Tea Party in 2009, a direct response to the bailouts and Obamacare. The bipartisan establishment went all in to strangle the movement in its crib, and to some extent the Elite succeeded in temporarily driving the movement underground. But what was different this time was, unlike with Nixon or Reagan or even Bill Clinton, the Normals did not get what they wanted. And because they were never satisfied, and because they remained under constant attack, they never went back to sleep.

Instead, they came back again in 2016 demanding change, this time less politely, with red Donald Trump ball caps reading MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN instead of pitchforks and torches.

The axis of American politics used to be really simple—“Left/Right,” with most folks clustered in the center. If you were a Democrat, you were generally left. If Republican, generally right. There was some overlap, but that one axis was a pretty effective metric for American politics.

Not anymore.

There’s a new axis in town, and it’s shaking things up. The new axis is best understood as “Elite/Normal.” You could also call it “Establishment/Anti-Establishment,” or maybe “Insider/Outsider,” and it crosses right over the old “Left/Right” axis to give a much more complex, but accurate, picture of American politics today.

It’s about class.

It didn’t used to be, because the Elite and the Normals both generally accepted and respected the same traditions and values.

They no longer do, and the distinguishing feature of our current situation is the permanent war of the Elite against the Normals based on that schism. Throw in the failure of the Elite’s institutions to meet the demands of the angry Normals, stir in social media tools that did not exist before, and you have a corresponding permanent mobilization by the Normals. The Elite backlash against the Normals’ demands for relief was vicious, and therefore the Normals have grown more vicious in response—witness the widespread cheering when Trump bludgeons some establishment hack on Twitter.

The Elite started playing by new rules, and it should not have been a surprise to anyone that the Normals got behind someone who was a master of those new rules.

This battle of the castes explains some of what we have seen in the wake of Trump’s success, especially some of the strange bedfellows we’ve observed. A number of Trump voters did not come to Trump from some other Republican—it’s pretty hard to imagine someone digging Jeb! then thinking, “Well, no one clapped when he said please, so I guess I need another candidate… gee, Trump looks pretty similar.” Some of Trump’s voters came from Bernie Sanders, a socialist running as a Democrat Party member, a party which today itself seems to consist mostly of socialists.

Bernie was as much an outsider as Trump—the Democrats were just nicer to him when they lied, cheated, and stole the nomination away from him. Many of his voters cared much less about “Left/Right” than “More of the Same/Change.” They figured Trump might deal the pain to the Elite, while Hillary would just bring down upon them more of the same misery they had been experiencing. They voted for Trump.

On the Republican side, you have pols much, much more interested in keeping business as usual as opposed to implementing the policies they paid lip service to back home in the sticks at election time. That’s why their enemy often seems not to be the liberals across the aisle but the conservatives expecting them to vote like they promised, which tends to be how the Normals prefer. But at a certain point, establishment Democrats and Republicans—all members of the Elite—have more in common with each other than with their frustrated voters who are at the point where they just want to burn the whole mother down.

This can’t continue. The sleeping giant is awake again, and it is really pissed off and is showing no signs of drowsiness. There’s a fight going on between the bipartisan establishment committed to the status quo and the Militant Normals who want change. The stakes are enormous. There will be a resolution. Somebody has got to win. Which means somebody has got to lose.

The only question is, “Who?”