Donald Trump has done the unthinkable–unthinkable, that is, to the sneering elites: the “journalists” who have been spending their days snarking at Trump on Twitter, the DC mandarins who disdained him from the beginning, and the foreign policy “experts” who gasped in horror as he challenged the basic premises of the post-World War II international order. And he did it by overcoming a host of the most powerful enemies one could conjure: The Republican Establishment, the Democratic party machine, the Money Power, and a media united in their hatred of him.
That this is a revolution is a bit of an understatement: revolutions are usually national in scope. This is an earthquake that will shake the whole world.
The United States is a global empire, and from the Korean peninsula to the Baltic states, our protectorates are quavering in panic that the system they’ve depended on for over half a century is about to come down. During the election, America’s client states all but formally endorsed Hillary Clinton, and expressed their unmitigated horror at the prospect of a Trump presidency. After all, the GOP candidate pledged to make our allies start paying their own way, a possibility that naturally fills them with dread. And Trump committed the biggest heresy of all by not only openly questioning the continued existence of NATO, but also by asking “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could get along with Russia?”
The Clinton campaign’s response was to do what no presidential candidate has done since the earliest days of the Republic: they accused Trump of being a Russian “puppet.” Former CIA director Mike Morrell, in endorsing Clinton, wrote that Trump is “an unconscious agent” of the Kremlin. In the hothouse atmosphere of Washington, D.C., this was not only acceptable: it was the conventional wisdom. Indeed, it no doubt still is. However, out in the real world, it fell flat: no normal American believed that for a minute. Endless articles appeared in the media, linking Trump to the Kremlin: a major piece of “evidence” for the “puppet” theory is that the Trump people pushed to keep a plank calling for arming Ukraine out of the Republican party platform. What the new McCarthyites didn’t understand, however, is that nobody cares about Ukraine, as polls consistently show.
The political class is reeling: how could this have happened?
We’ll doubtless be subjected to endless essays on the subject of who or what is to “blame” for Trump: FBI Director James Comey? The “alt right”? WikiLeaks? Putin?
Their problem is that these people live in a bubble: the conservative writer Mollie Hemingway tweeted the night of the election that “ I was at a small DC dinner several weeks ago where several people said they knew not a single Trump supporter. I was like, ‘I know 100s.’” This evokes the famous Pauline Kael quote, who is reputed to have responded to Richard Nixon’s 1972 landslide victory by saying: “I don’t know how Nixon won. I don’t know anybody who voted for him.” Actually, the acerbic film critic didn’t say that, exactly. What she really said was far more telling:
“I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.”
This puts it succinctly: the inhabitants of the “special world” of the political class–self-satisfied pundits, self-serving politicians, avaricious hedge fund managers, arrogant academics, less-than-thoughtful thinktankers, politically correct scolds, neoconservative warmongers–couldn’t imagine a world in which Donald Trump could win the White House. They laughed at him when he announced, they sneered at him even as he was winning the primaries, and they unleashed more venom than an army of rattlesnakes when he won the Republican nomination, even as they claimed he was headed for a Goldwater-like defeat. The American ruling class lives in a world entirely separate from that of their subjects: even as the peasants with pitchforks gathered in the shadow of the castle, they never saw the Trumpian revolution coming.
In short, they have no idea why he won because they live on a different planet than the rest of us. And yet the reason for his victory is very simple, and it’s no secret. He stated it clearly and succinctly in a remarkable television ad in the final days of the campaign.
Trump understands that, as I put it in my last column, “The main issue in the world today is globalism versus national sovereignty, and it is playing out in the politics of countries on every continent.” A transnational ruling elite, the types who flock to Davos every year, has arisen that believes it has the right to manipulate the peoples of the world like pawns on a chessboard. These lords of creation engage in “regime change” when a government they don’t like challenges their imperial prerogatives: they move entire populations around as if they were human dust–they manipulate currencies, “manage” the world economy–and woe to those who challenge their rule!
And the epicenter of this global ruling elite is located in Washington, D.C., with the White House as the inner sanctum of the whole rotten system. And now that Fortress of Power has been breached. Thus, the panic of the elites.
And the epicenter of this global ruling elite is located in Washington, D.C., with the White House as the inner sanctum of the whole rotten system. And now that Fortress of Power has been breached. Thus, the panic of the elites.
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