CHAPTER TEN   

“But He Fights!”

Toward the fall of 2016, Trump was pounding on Hillary with as much gusto as she was pounding on him. But the Elite did not recognize the critical significance of a Republican who fought back. To the Elite, the election superficially looked like 1964 all over again—a looming rout. Their eyes were fixed on the future. They were With Her.

Far be it for the Elite to look back five decades and learn something from history—even something useful. The modern Elite, marinated in Frankfurt School nonsense, considers history racist and besides, past people—especially past people of pallor—have nothing to teach the Elite. The Elite knows all.

The past was at best irrelevant, if not actively evil. Back then, they thought there were only two genders—can you believe it?

There were some similarities between the elections on the surface. In 1964, the liberal Elite and their Republican fellow travelers like Nelson Rockefeller had worked together to marginalize the straight-arrow, committed conservative war hero from Arizona, as well as his followers, who were the real target, as they always are. In 2016 the Elite was making the same play with a guy who was as different from Barry Goldwater as any biped could be. The two men did share one key attribute in common—the Elite hated them both. The candidates were different, but the strategy was the same.

Destroy them, and thereby suppress those horrible people who supported them.

But there was something to learn from what went on in that election a half-century before, if you looked. The candidates were different in 2016, but so were the people the Elite were determined to disenfranchise.

Once again, the liberal Elite and their Republican fellow travelers would simultaneously work together to marginalize the candidate who captured the base’s imagination. Except the new guy was Donald Trump, and the Normals had gotten woke to the fact that they were in a real fight. They had selected a candidate who understood the situation, who saw it as it was and not as he wanted it to be.

Which is why the Elite’s playbook did not work.

Trump fought.

Goldwater was a fighter in war, but he was unprepared for the kind of combat taking on LBJ and the entire Elite would require. At some level, Barry Goldwater had a level of respect for his opponents and considered the system essentially fair. Oh, the good old days of such naïveté. Think of how Trump would have blown the minds of the squares.

Trump was what he was, but he was certainly the right man for the present era.

Hate the era, not the player.

Trump was no button-down Arizonan whose hobbies included operating his ham radio and collecting Indian art. He was a playboy who spent decades in the limelight, mingling with the Elite, and learning to have nothing but contempt for them and their minions in the press. He operated a huge company, he hosted a reality television show, and he collected beautiful women.

Trump was vulgar and prickly, and his habits—like a love of Big Macs—scandalized the smart set. But unlike Goldwater, Donald Trump did not have any residual awe for those who presumed themselves to be his betters.

Instead, he had active contempt for them.

After all, weasels like Hillary Clinton, Kirsten Gillibrand, Chuck Schumer, and hundreds of others had crawled on their bellies to him as he sat in his Trump Tower throne room, begging for his money.

They weren’t his superiors.

They were his supplicants.

And he laughed at them. He was delighted to rub the fact that they had abased themselves before him in their smug faces.

To the Elite, Trump was a million times worse than Goldwater because he laughed at them.

Because the Elite didn’t impress him.

Because he took the garbage they had been serving up everyone outside of their caste and shoved it back in their smug faces.

He fought.

And the Normals of 2016 loved it.

Back in 1964, the Normals had respect. They revered the institutions. They played by the rules—and the Elite was wise enough to hide the fact that they were creating their own special rules from the people out there on the other side of the television screen. Think of the scandal if more than a whiff of John F. Kennedy’s reckless bimbomania escaped into the culture past the phalanx of his media praetorian guard. This guy was passing around secretaries to service his cronies in the White House pool. Middle America would have been more than shocked; they would have demanded retribution.

Back then, you could not have everyone knowing that King Arthur was grabbing a quickie with Guinevere’s lady-in-waiting out by the drawbridge. It was supposed to be Camelot, and that was true to the extent that the satyr-in-chief sure came a lot.

But the truth about his needy pursuit of side action—which was so unfathomably and arrogantly reckless that it included banging mobsters’ molls—did not escape into the culture while he lived. His buddies hid it for him. His Elite buddies, including his buddies in the press. Buddies like Ben Bradlee, the Washington Post editor lauded for his bravery and courage and dedication and stuff in movies like All the President’s Men (1976) and The Post (2017)—you know, movies that made this enabler a hero for his undying dedication to exposing the truth about anybody who didn’t rate Elite professional courtesy.

People like Richard Nixon.

When the truth about Cover-Up-a-Lot finally came out decades later, and the Elite snickered and shrugged, it was just one more chip in the Elite’s façade. There were plenty of chips by then. The Elite had gotten comfy and had forgotten that to get the rabble to keep granting you all of the perks of being Elite—like respect and trust—you had to eventually earn them.

So by 2016, the Normals had spent decades being commanded to submit to disrespect and neglect without complaint by people who did nothing but complain about Normals. But Trump had turned the tables. Now he was complaining, loudly and crudely, and therefore prominently and clearly. The media suddenly could not ignore the issues that the Elite had declared off limits. How can you crucify the Orange Monster from Queens for being racist against illegal aliens without mentioning what he said? You could try, but when Trump talked about illegal aliens killing Americans and mentioned Kate Steinle, a lot of people thought, “Yeah, keeping people here who shoot young women out for walks is a bad thing.”

If anything exposed the priorities of the Elite and how the interests of the Normals were an afterthought, it was illegal immigration. The Elite got cheaper nannies and gardeners and that sweet rush that comes with cost-free munificence. The Normals got the consequences. No, not every illegal was a murderer or even a major criminal, but they were all breaking the law—the law the Normals had been taught came about because their representatives had voted for it. But now it was being effectively repealed. How did that happen? No one had asked them. They never got to vote on that change. The Elite just… did it.

The Elite chose not to defend the border and chose not to deport the illegals. The Elite was delighted to let Uncle Sucker grant them handouts. Based on 2012 data, 61.9 percent of illegal alien families received some form of welfare; for actual Americans, the number was 28.1 percent.¹

Sure, you had to have some grudging respect for a guy who would swim a river and hike through a desert to take a subminimum-wage job. But then, would not this hardworking exemplar of industriousness be more useful back home turning his homeland into the kind of place that does not inspire you to swim a river and hike a desert to take a subminimum-wage job somewhere else?

Oh, the Elite had a name for people who complained about illegal aliens, too: “racists.” But, of course, when everything is racist, nothing is. What was once a verbal Mother of All Bombs was now a piddly firecracker. Normals were tired of the constant race hustling that had become the go-to move of the Elites and their media flunkies. Now, “You’re racist!” was less a cutting charge that demanded a personal inventory than a punchline in a semi-funny joke.

“Dude, pour me a beer.”

“Keg’s empty!”

“That’s so racist, dude.”

Trump didn’t care if he was called a “racist,” which was what his more kindly inclined ones went with. The rest of his enemies went Full Hitler. Never go Full Hitler. Trump had the advantage going into the arena of having been called much, much worse, well before even the late eighties when Spy magazine first made Trump’s allegedly tiny paws a running gag.

Today, Trump is the president and Spy is a vague memory from long ago.

So Trump, unlike Goldwater, was not only uniquely suited to surviving these Elite attacks, but he came into the fight skilled at converting the slings and arrows into ribbons that he could wear proudly on his chest to attest to his having exactly the right people as enemies.

That which did not kill him made the Normals like him more and more. Where the hate froze Barry Goldwater, because Barry Goldwater was a gentleman and gentlemen expect gentlemanly behavior from opponents, Trump didn’t give a shit.

He fought.

He fought.

The Never Trump crew would eventually sneer, “But he fights!” to dismiss the popularity of the guy who displaced them at the vanguard of conservatism. That would morph into “But Gorsuch,” and then “But the repeal of economy-killing EPA regulations,” and after that—after his string of conservative victories the Vichy Republicans had been promising but never delivering for decades grew longer and longer—they just went with their empty sigh of “We’re better than that.”

The Normals were sick of being better than that. They were sick of having their morals and values rejected, spit upon, rolled up tight, lit on fire, and shoved up their asses by an Elite that thought morality was a joke and decency a weakness.

See, the problem with creating new rules is that the other side gets to play by them. JFK—the F was for “Fornication”—created new rules. His bro Teddy created new rules—and a delicious recipe for a waitress sandwich.² Bill Clinton created new rules. And so when the Elite confidently dusted off the old rules to deploy against Donald Trump, they found that the Normals had adopted the new ones.

Do I vote for the guy who lays pipe with supermodels and porn stars, or for the woman who won’t let me get a high-paying job laying the Keystone Pipeline because some weather cultists in Palo Alto object?

Tough call.

And there was the undeniable satisfaction that came from watching Donald Trump gleefully fling the monkey poo back at his tormenters. It’s hard to underestimate the joy it was for Normals—bereft of a real champion for so long—to see someone finally swinging at the snobs and the schmucks who had trashed them with impunity. The Elite sure as hell was not used to it. The usual Republican was tame, rolling over and displaying various amounts of belly.

Ted Cruz fought, for example, but nicely, using carefully crafted intellectual arguments like those befitting a genius from Harvard Law who had argued in front of the Supreme Court a bunch of times. Liberals pivoted to their usual hate tactics, and Cruz looked like a gentleman—a gentleman who was fighting the good fight but was getting his butt kicked. But then the primary got down to him and Trump, and Trump devoured him like a Big Mac on Air Force One.

Trump even insinuated that Cruz’s father, Rafael, had helped take out JFK, a bizarre comment that the Elite insisted on treating as an unequivocal statement of fact rather than what Normals saw as good, old-fashioned Queens ball-busting. Cruz fumed, the media wet itself, and, at worst, the Normals thought it was silly while many thought it was hilarious.

Trump knew their weakness. They needed reverence.

That’s how the hippies in the sixties had really done their damage—they refused to concede and recognize the status and respect their opponents felt they had earned and deserved. If you spit on a soldier at LAX, you are telling him that the military service he fulfilled means nothing. Now what is he? Just a guy in green clothes with a loogie hanging off his ribbon rack.

Once the Elite had even offered the Normals a slice of reverence. The Elite, though sometimes falsely like the Kennedys, honored and shared the basic bourgeois values of regular Americans. Family, faith, patriotism, hard work. The Elite tipped its bowlers at those values—until people stopped wearing hats. Then those values became a joke that the young Elite giggled about.

Normals’ betters thought they were a joke.

The expectation of reverence applied to the senior Elite, too—the sixties can be understood as a civil war within the Elite as the younger generation of the Elite trying to take power from the older generation of the Elite in large part by refusing to revere what they stood for. The sixties were less a rebellion against the Normals than the values the Normals and older Elite shared. But it was the mobilized Normals, in the form of the Silent Majority, who finally crushed the youth movement and forced its members to retreat into the institutions and conduct their Long March toward their current dominance.

Irreverence was akin to ridicule, which Saul Alinsky had pointed out was a devastating weapon. Laugh-In socked it to the politicians. It gave them none of the respect they thought they were due—that all the politicians before them had been granted. The fans loved it—they loved seeing the stuffy stodgy Elite battered by the hip, cool, outta sight Elite.

But in 2016, those Laugh-In fans from the sixties largely were the politicians, and they were smart enough to pack the cultural institutions to ensure there would be no dangerous irreverence. They now hated irreverence, because reverence is the key to how those with power in the Elite rule. As a practical matter, that meant protecting the Elite’s candidate. From Saturday Night Live to the interchangeable late-night comics, from movies to music, to the extent the topic of Hillary Clinton came up, it was along the lines of the apocryphal humble job applicant.

My biggest weaknesses? Why, I work too hard. I am a perfectionist. And I care too darn much.

Irreverence was the young Elite’s tool back then, but in 2016 those young Elites were the old Elite trying to install Her Hillaryness in the White House. Now, they needed reverence. And they were used to having it. That was a weakness.

Trump was not reverent. He was the anti-reverent. And he knew how to exploit an opponent’s weaknesses.

Still, the Elite expected Trump to fold, because all decent folks—that meant all the people who recognized their authority, all the people who were reverent—would join together and help bury this throwback and the agenda he represented. And all reverent folks did. There just weren’t enough of them outside of the blue cities to elect the queen.

With everyone against him in the press, and everyone in politics against him, too, Trump’s ideology really did not matter, at least not its specifics. It was not about position papers. The Elite allowed him to position himself—a boisterous, pugnacious billionaire who partied with supermodels when he wasn’t marrying them—in opposition to everyone who hated the Normals.

They walked right into his ambush. If they had studied some history, if they had understood that the Normals of 2016 were not the Normals of 1964, they might have realized that cranking the contempt up to eleven was not going to have the same effect as it did fifty-two years earlier.

They had options, but it was no longer an Elite that could conceive of them. This Elite had not shared foxholes in the Ardennes with guys from Idaho and Alabama. This Elite was so out of touch it could not conceive of getting back in touch with the Normals. So it could not conceive of how to cut Trump’s legs out from under him.

They could have addressed the subjects Trump raised with concern instead of condescension.

They could have talked to the people Trump talked to, out in the small towns he visited.

They could have stopped acting like the people supporting Trump were something to be scraped off the soles of their Manolo Blahniks.

But they couldn’t do that.

It never occurred to them.

That would have required the Elite to question their values and norms, and the Elite can’t question their values and norms. It’s not allowed, because to question the consensus is to question their own status, since being in the Elite is all about agreeing to submit to the consensus. Once you start questioning Elite beliefs, everything falls apart, since you are only Elite because you choose to believe what the Elite believes about itself.

Trump was Trump, a sui generis creature with his own bulging bank account and the unshakeable confidence one needed to truly, deeply not give a flying fig.

Not caring was his Kevlar. Trump didn’t need the Elite. If the four prior decades had taught him anything, it was that the Elite needed him, or at least the money and exposure he could bestow upon it. Why should he respect people who sniffed around him like stray mongrels hoping for scraps from his table?

The Elite sensed that he refused to respect them, and their hatred grew and grew and grew. And Trump?

He rejected reverence in favor of contempt—the same exchange the Elite had made regarding the Normals when it stopped paying lip service to honoring regular folks and began laughing at them.

Trump laughed at the Elite. He is still laughing. And he fights. To the Elite, that was and remains unforgiveable.