It’s all over. Something just happened. A kind of die is cast.
For many of us, this was our first vote, and for America, it was the first one in a long time that mattered. This is the first true outsider to win the presidency that I can think of. If you can even call the group around Trump a ‘faction’ of the ruling class, they haven’t had power in this country since Nixon, before the Bush pestilence engulfed Reagan’s GOP.
Something just happened, and it was probably the last time it could have happened, and so it happened just in time.
What’s called the country party sometimes, the Midwest other times, the rustbelt, Middle America, the heartland, flyover country… The isolationists. The anti-globalists. They have put their man through.
But what next? How will Trump win the country now that he’s won the presidency? How will he pass legislation with the votes of beltway Republicans and all kinds of Democrats smarting from their defeats and together dominating a divided congress?
First, he must carefully choose his key legislative goals, the stuff that can’t be done by executive order or reverse-executive order, or be bundled in with other legislation in return for concessions and horse-trading. The tough stuff, the stuff he really wants to accomplish.
- Border security
- Reduction in the number of illegal immigrants here
- A formal, out of the shadows resolution for the rest, without effecting voter rolls
- A new industrial policy that puts America back on firm footing (economic nationalism)
- Restoration of middle class health with good paying jobs for those not highly educated
- De-escalation of international tensions, suring up the ground we hold without losing anymore to the Asian-Russian bloc that’s been expanding due to the recklessness and credulousness of the Bush-Obama-Clinton foreign policy in practiced since the end of the Cold War
Bonus suggestions
- End the obsession with maintaining an unemployment buffer-stock as a tool for management of monetary conditions that’s been Fed gospel since Paul Volker; look cautiously to heterodox economic advice
- Goal: clearing household debt and student debt
- A policy of full employment, including infrastructure rebuilding.
- Win Russia over from China’s tender embraces and forge a new series of alliances that eliminate our use of radical Sunnis as proxies against Russia and its allies
- Rapprochement with Iran without sacrificing Israel’s bedrock interests; pursue peace between Israel and Iran
- Make Mexico Great Again with favored trade status clawed back from Asia; bolster Mexican wages and assist with ending cartel rule in exchange for cooperation against cross border drug and human traffic from the rest of Latin America; i.e., outsource border control to Mexico with a good deal
To accomplish his agenda, Trump must go above the media, which have now been soundly thrashed, and reach the people directly. Start by forming a new WH press pool with a fair balance of media, ending special access to those that have exposed themselves as totally biased Clinton SuperPacs like CNN, NYT, WAPO, and many others of similar model and culture. Invite new media.
Maintain the excitement and positive engagement of the country by holding the kinds of rallies that were a staple of the campaign; aim to generate 60% plus support for legislation, forcing recalcitrant Senators and Congressman to cooperate with that agenda out of their own political interest and survival instincts.
Reverse the damage done by Obamacare, heavy-handed regulation, TSA and other federal impotence, and stop dead the normalization of terrorism and violence against police.
Continue to offer a new deal to the Black inner city. Prove you were sincere and that they can trust a new Republican party just as they were won over by the Democrats decades ago. How? Have the GOP seed a new cadre of real black leaders, young political entrepreneurs with their hearts in the right place, focused on the long term economic interests of the black community: capital accumulation, skill development relevant to the inner city, trade policy that leads to job availability, and immigration policy that protects wages and Black demographic clout.
Replace the top-down identity politics that play on emotion and only benefit the so-called leadership while doing nothing for the people.
Trump must make permanent the revolutionary changes to the political map that his election has prefaced, for decades to come, by assembling a new majority of working and middle class Whites and Blacks, and Latinos reconciled to a controlled border and legal immigration system.
And he needs to do all this in 4 years, so that 2020 is a 40+ state landslide, leaving only the most dug-in Never Trumpers, SJWs and northeast establishment blueblood zombies staggering and straggling to the polls for whatever DNC retread or new empty suit they see fit to field in 4 years, if they’re not still reeling from the WikiLeaks devastation Assange has wrought.
There are lots of ways we can make American great again, now that we have a worker in the White House who loves America and isn’t taking orders from above. This is how we get it done, and make the gains last longer than two terms.