The Lincoln Option

After two years in office, Donald Trump finds his presidency at a crossroads. His mode of operation as president has been a continuation of his style as candidate. He says a lot of flippant things about the establishment, many of which are true, but the response is mockery or possibly some pearl clutching. Otherwise, from a policy perspective, the Trump era looks like the Jeb Bush era. The donor class got tax cuts and regulatory reform, while the voters have thus far gotten nothing, other than more of the same.

He can continue down the same path he has been on, reacting to the machinations of his enemies, like a hyper-active version of Richard Nixon, but that promises he will be a one-term president. While the political class ignores him on policy, the Mueller investigation operates like an anaconda wrapped around his administration. It is squeezing the life out of his agenda, by filling the media with salacious nonsense stories and reactions to them, while scaring off serious people interested in joining the administration.

A strange result thus far is that Trump is bad at the thing he was elected to do. That is confront the political class. From the beginning, he has allowed them to push him around and bluff him into bad policy. For example, the Mueller fiasco could have easily been avoided by refusing to appoint the guy. Was the GOP House really going to start impeachment hearings? Would the media be worse on him for not signing off of this ridiculous idea? At every turn, Trump has taken the advice of his enemies.

The conspiratorially minded think the “deep state” has something on him so he is being forced to go along with their agenda. That’s an entertaining theory, but the so-called deep-state has shown itself to be all thumbs when trying to pull off the simplest of capers. The real reason behind his failure thus far is Trump, at heart, still believes in old America, a system of laws and rules where eventually the truth rises to the surface. Trump’s “assault” on the swamp is actually a defense of that old dead American ideal.

After two years of learning that the rule-based system of politics is a myth and what happens in Washington makes New York City real state look innocent, Trump needs to accept the reality of his situation. He can let the Mueller investigation go on forever, as his opponents so desperately desire, or he can end it. If he chooses the former, he is a one-term president whose name will be forgotten. The victors may even have Trump and his family imprisoned, as a warning to others, who dare challenge the establishment.

The other option is to learn a lesson from Lincoln. When you scrape away the slobbering praise from the eventual victors, Lincoln faced a simple dilemma. He could try to preserve the old order, fail and be remembered as a blood thirsty tyrant, who tried to upend the Constitutional order as created by the Founders. Alternatively, he could be the tyrant and overthrow the system, win the war and create a new order. The reason Lincoln is not remembered as the American Sulla is his side won and wrote all of the history books.

That’s the dilemma Trump now faces. He can keep trying to win within the rules being imposed upon him by the establishment, or he can reject those rules entirely. After all, he is in the White House because he did exactly that in the campaign. His primary run was an example of outsider genius to outflank his opponents. His use of novel metrics to create new votes in the general was mostly due to necessity. It is a great reminder that necessity is the mother of invention – and revolutions.

Trump needs to accept that things have a reached the breaking point. It is no longer possible for him to strike a compromise with the establishment. They must be brought to heel and reform must be imposed upon them. They know this, which is why they are endlessly bluffing on what they are doing. Trump needs to call their bluff and fire Mueller, end his investigation and begin the process of investigating the rampant corruption in the intelligence services. More important, he has to be done with flourish.

Imagine news breaks one Friday that the Secret Service has raided the offices and homes of the Mueller team. Their computers, phones and materials were seized and their access to those materials revoked. All of them fired on the spot. Imagine the media hysteria over that move. Now imagine Trump addressing the nation that night, telling the country he has fired Team Mueller and is instructing his new AG to appoint a new special counsel to get to the bottom of the Mueller cover up of the FBI corruption.

That would turn Washington on its ear. When it is further learned that all of the material in the Mueller probe is under 24-hour armed guard and off-limits to everyone until the second investigation is commenced, the game is on. That means the new prosecutor can and will prosecute leaking information in those files. Bob Mueller goes from being the grand inquisitor to a person of interest. His flunkies suddenly become a liability to him and the rest of the conspirators. The rules of the game are suddenly very different.

Would the House Democrats commence impeachment proceedings? Probably. Even if they went forward, would the GOP senate convict? Maybe. There are plenty duplicitous cowards in the Republican Party. A craven loser like Mitt Romney comes to mind. Regardless of how it goes, Trump suddenly becomes an inflection point in the nation’s history. If they remove him from office, exactly no one will believe American democracy is anything but a sham to protect a corrupt ruling elite. The system will be discredited.

That’s where Trump is right now. In a very different context, he is in the same place Lincoln was at when he assumed office. Lincoln could only fail by maintaining the old order, so he had to end the republic. Trump can only fail if he tries to restore the old civic order he fondly remembers from the 1980’s. His choice is to fail or overthrow the current order. The former is a slow death of his administration. They latter does not guarantee success, but it means the end of the old order, for which he will be remembered.

144 thoughts on “The Lincoln Option

  1. Trump is an actor playing the role of populist and nationalist. He isn’t the real deal and hoping that he becomes the modern Lincoln is just wishful thinking.

    Campaign Trump clearly saw what is going on. President Trump has shown he has no intention of doing anything about it. Why? I have no idea but the only thing that will keep him from being a one term president is if the Democrats go off the rails and alienate enough people.

  2. Trump barely beat Clinton thanks to the wisdom of those who gave us the Electoral College. But make no mistake……it was a close one. By implementing the Bump Stock Ban he has alienated a critical component of his victory. Huge numbers of gun owners bought his bullshit about supporting gun rights. Banning bump stocks was about the stupidest thing he could have done. In 2020 vast numbers of gun owners are going to either stay home on election day or vote AGAINST Trump as a direct result of his perfidy. Trump has done a good job of playing the system but his failure to actually support gun rights will cost him a second term. The anti 2A crowd was NEVER going to support him. Supporting gun rights wasn’t going to alienate them any further. So catering to them with this ban was stupid squared.

  3. reminds me of The Road to Serfdom and the arrival of the Strong Man. I think Trump was well on his way to becoming that and may still do so. I think I would rather he be that person than the potential next Democrat President…

  4. You have a point. It’s hard to see how there will be any effective upset to the Deep State, while playing within their rules. As it is, any 9th Circuit Court judge can throw a monkey wrench in his plans.

    I don’t know about that Lincoln analogy though. He was the ultimate insider, running errands for the “internal improvement” gang of looters before he was elected president.

  5. “The conspiratorially minded think the “deep state” has something on him so he is being forced to go along with their agenda. That’s an entertaining theory, but the so-called deep-state has shown itself to be all thumbs when trying to pull off the simplest of capers.”

    Point taken, but really, how hard would it be to find something on Trump? Say what you will about Obomber, but you really had to be “conspiratorially minded” to find something on him (birth certificate, bubble parties, coke hound, etc.). Indeed, his very emptiness and blandness suggested there must be something else hidden somewhere. Trump? Billionaire NYC real estate manipulator and “stubby-fingered vulgarian” (Spy magazine, 1980s); what wouldn’t be in his closet?

  6. Of course, attacking the Deep State that directly could be hazardous for Trump’s health, not to mention that of his family.

    No, as tempting and enjoyable it would be to see such a frontal assault on all that is evil, physical survival requires more subtle action.

    • Yep. It’s wide open, public sedition in the DoJ. Trump is trapped and they know it. Acting AG Whitaker has been quiet as a church mouse. I suspect he’s been informed in no uncertain terms that Trump is finished and he needs to stand down if he knows what’s good for his future. There isn’t a lamppost in the land high enough for Sessions.

      Expect the Mueller report to include insinuations of financial impropriety by Trump and his family. That will be the seed corn which plants a full field of Congressional investigations and calls for another special prosecutor. Trump is finished.

      The time for the Lincoln Option was 2016. At the very least, Trump needed to execute before the midterms. It’s too late now.

  7. Start KILLING the Democrats/Progressives/Leftist/Marxist/Communists. And….ANY others who align with the aforementioned.

    All the dithering, handwringing, begging and voting has brought Traditional Americans to this juncture.

    Sometimes, violence is the answer.

  8. ‘Discrediting’ the system does not bring it down, at least not on a useful time scale. Ppl still need jobs, friends and not being in prison etc.

    Z’s suggestion, which is basically ‘go for the guns’, reminds me of the old gunslingers’ saying that the first to draw loses (I dont know if this is true btw, I only know some claim this. And I can think of some reasons why it might be, but getting too OT). And this brings me to the Lincoln analogy; Lincoln did NOT draw first. He goated the South to do that. This was psychologically very important.

    I dont know if the game is at a place where the slow maneuvering nerve game must transition to something more openly dramatic but if it is, I have one suggestion I believe to be solid; make sure their nerves crack, not yours. If Trump wants to ‘do a Lincoln’, first he needs the DS to do a Sumter, and ppl who decide if something was a ‘Sumter’ are all the blue pill sheep. They dont yet have their Sumter. And until they do, you will look like the aggressor/power grapper if you go big guns first. And then you will lose. Make them draw first. THEN go Genghis on them.

  9. I’m late to the party, but will pitch in.

    Seems to me one of Trump’s main problems is that he has no organization. There’s no infrastructure to rally and direct support for him, or to give his opponents an unpleasant time. Certainly not the republican party. Most other politicians have a network of some kind that connects them to their supporters — at various levels and scales.

    Trump has rallies and Twitter. That’s about it.

    He also has some independent cheerleaders at various levels, but no real chain of command or operations.

    This lack of organization may be one ot the appeals that he had. But it’s not helping him now.

  10. For saying similar such things in a much-abbreviated fashion (as in one or two sentences), I got myself censored on another site. So many “new media” commentators have built their site traffic on endless drama and intrigue, mixed with a few inconsequential facts, that no one wants the party to end.

  11. Trump has shown no signs that he will do anything other than feather the nest of his own family. He’s in office solely to negotiate a deal with the global establishment for the benefit of Trumps. That’s it, there is nothing more to it. As Don Henley croons about extraterrestrial aliens, “they aren’t coming! (to our rescue)”

  12. California’s AB 1921: Ballot Harvesting.

    Below is an example of the “thorough and disciplined” ground game Democrats ran in California:

    https://dailycaller.com/2018/12/01/ballot-harvesting-california-dems-gop/

    Not only in California. Everywhere. zlolzlolz at Paul Ryan’s “can’t understand.”

    So, the reason Trump and Republicans allowed this shit to happen is because they still believe in “the old America, a system of laws and rules where eventually the truth rises to the surface?”

    Sounds nice, pretty, and respectful but, No! Republican leaders like Ryan knew about the ballot harvesting and understood its implications. The poorly organized Republican base didn’t figure it out because, still lazy and reactive after 55 years of failure, they look to “leaders” like Ryan to do their thinking for them.

    Politics is low-intensity war and a 24/7/365 endeavor.

  13. This is at once a great column and the ultimate black pill. I would (I think/hope) do what I could to back him if he did so and things turned serious. But I don’t think he ever will. He’s more or less a civ nat, and his handlers won’t let him go even that far. I fear we must wait, and hope, for the the next act. He appears to have played all his cards and is now in self preservation mode….sigh…

  14. Trump’s role has been to let individual and small groups of men of European ancestry understand just how widespread their revulsion with the current social order is shared by their own kind.

    Anything beyond that…is not within him.

  15. well, historically speaking there are parallels with lincoln. Trump was elected because he wasn’t a politician by cynical people like me who know that they are not represented. trump has the levers of power to do what has to be done. the only question is does he have the balls to do it.

    enter the mathis matrix, and the will to pull off the entire cover of the sewer and toss in the nuke handgrenade, taking down the entire military=indurstrial complex that has been entrenched since nov 22, 1963.

    I hope he has the balls.

  16. “…the Mueller fiasco could have easily been avoided by refusing to appoint the guy.”

    Trump didn’t appoint Mueller, Rosenhack did, and there’s no reason to think Rosenhack notified Trump beforehand. Yes, Trump, if he had good advice, could have rescinded the appointment immediately as illegal (see Andy McCarthy on this one point) and fired Rosenhack for doing it, since he is even more conflicted than Sessions was and anyway deserved firing for signing off on that last FISA warrant application. But refusing to make the appointment wasn’t an option.

    “While the political class ignores him on policy, the Mueller investigation operates like an anaconda wrapped around his administration. It is squeezing the life out of his agenda, by filling the media with salacious nonsense stories and reactions to them, while scaring off serious people interested in joining the administration.”

    Nah, this is wrong too. Mueller is a nothingburger. Or, rather, a help. Given the way he sabotaged Trump’s trip to Russia I thought he was sure to come up with an October Surprise to affect the midterms, but it seems he’s come up so empty that he couldn’t figure a plausible way to make that happen. And, given media complicity, “plausibility” had to meet a very low bar. Yes, his “agenda”, such as it is, has been blocked, but it’s not Mueller doing it — it’s his lack of a Congressional party, and the kritarchy. Two more years of farcical Trump demonization plus, one hopes, an impeachment, and Trump is well on his way to a second term. He won last time, remember, despite all the hysterical claims that the sky would fall. After four years of it not falling, and Trump revealed as basically the not-very-radical Establishment-aspirational 1980’s-nostalgic squish he’s always been that dog’s going to hunt better in 2020? Against which Democrat loon?

  17. >> For example, the Mueller fiasco could have easily been avoided by refusing to appoint the guy.

    To pick a nit, Trump did not appoint Mueller; Rosenstein did. Trump had no authority to block the appointment. Responsibility for this mess falls 100% on Jeff Sessions. Once Sessions resigned the trap was sprung and Trump was caught. Some people blame Trump for appointing Sessions, but that’s bs. Trump had every right to believe that long time Republican and supporter would exhibit at least a modicum of loyalty in the role of the AG. Instead Sessions stabbed Trump in the back days after taking the office.

    It’s over for Trump. He will spend the next two years fighting off investigations by the House and calls for impeachment, getting little help from the Republican party. Members of his cabinet will start resigning in 2019, and those who remain in their positions will blatantly disregard Trump’s instructions. The real power in the Administration will lie with Pompeo and Matthis. The next two years in the White House will be miserable for Trump.

    If the Mueller report is bad, and it will be, I won’t be surprised to see Trump resign in late 2019 in exchange for a full pardon for himself and his family. Pence will assume the Presidency and be positioned to run in 2020. This is what a deep state sponsored soft coup looks like.

      • “America is headed for a bad end unless things change quickly and radically. The suicide cult that has control of our society is not going to stop until we’re all dead. At some point, you have to use every means necessary to prevent a catastrophe. If that means Lindsay Graham winds up in pit covered in lime, so be it. If Bill Kristol has to write his tantrums from exile in Israel, I can live with that.”

        I am emphatically not OK with that last sentence, Z Man.

  18. Don’t forget a blanket invitation to white South Africans and Rhodesians.

    Only. With a shout-out to India to do the same.

  19. He won’t do squat but he may get the ball rolling for a hot civil war because of his refusal to address the overt violent acts against heritage whites by Democrats. And by the time he does act it will only piss off our side(because that’s who he’ll blame, bet on it, remember how he dumped on the NRA?)

    TGP has a post about anti-fa showing up at a Seattle protest with AR-15’s and the cops backing them. This is a bad sign. Really bad since we have no means ot putting the kibosh on them any longer.

    It wouldn’t take much for it to go hot. One guy panicking and cutting loose ,,,

  20. It’s got to be dawning on Trump’s ego, that it’s either go for broke with a bang, or slowly deplete with a whimper. Brash guys hate the slow death thing. Just out of sheer boredom and annoyance, it surely can’t be long before he wakes up. Hopefully his ego is as big as they say it is. He needs to get in touch with his inner self-centered mischievious frat boy quick.

  21. The US Republic is dead. (Lincoln knifed it in the back.) Trump needs to organize a Pinochet style military coup d’etat, and put his enemies (including most elected Republicans) into concentration camps. Perhaps Putin will rent out some of the empty Gulag camps. Or perhaps they could disappear over the Atlantic. Whatever. Up the revolution.

  22. Hell half the country depends on government to live. Why not military coup to take over. What can the people who survive by the largesse of Uncle Sugar do but go along with it?

  23. I think it’s correct to say that the choice before Trump is either to forcefully enact the most assertive form of his agenda—Wall, deportations, extreme restrictions/ moratorium on immigration—or to submit to being a reviled figure in (what’s left of) American history, and likely see himself and his loved ones persecuted and punished.

    My gut tells me Trump is aware of this, although you can’t blame him if he wishes there were some third way. There was a period in the fall of 2016 when he seemed to be resigned to defeat in the campaign; but someone close must have sobered him up with the observation that the Left would never be satisfied with mere victory, but would insist on reviling Trump and his heirs as the Hitler that Almost Happened.

    At least that was my guess at the time. I hope he still understands that if he’s to have a positive name in history he must seize it for himself. No one alive now will give it to him if he fails.

  24. You’ve hit the nail right on the head, Z-Man…Trump needs to get rid of Mueller and start doing things for his voters, or he’s finished…BTW, speaking as an experience attorney, Trump is a complete idiot when he deals with anything related to the legal system, and he doesn’t seem to realize it…The SDNY is far more corrupt than Nigeria…

  25. About half of the country is still composed of productive patriotic citizens with the ability to effectively oppose an incipient tyranny, should the Swamp succeed in overthrowing a duly elected president. However, they would only follow through if they believed they could successfully suppress the ensuing rebellion. They are expecting and planning for a conventional militia-based opposition, but have no answer for alternatives that focus on the inherent weaknesses of government. At its root, government is a parasite and cannot survive if there is no host to feed on.

    • Libertarian/CivNat nonsense. The half of the country that you think is going to overthrow our 100-year-old bureaucratic government is so passive and docile that it can’t even keep drag queens out of elementary schools.

      A good, strong government is the only thing that can reign in the excesses of big tech, big social, big ag, big pharma, big banks, etc. It’s the only thing that can secure a sprawling southern border. You’re confusing “government” as a concept with liberal democratic government and the idiots play-acting at statesmanship. Teddy Roosevelt or Andrew Jackson would have made short work of these losers.

      • This is spot on. Time to ditch the boomercon bromides and time to wake up to reality.

    • Most people don’t care about politics. They really don’t unless it’s in their face. They do however care about their 401k’s and housing prices. It’s what’s keeping whites sedated. The illusion that they are getting wealthier.

      This is why Wall Street has the bubble machine on overdrive. If whites see their 401k’s turn into 201k’s and they go upside down on their homes. You will get your blowback at that point but not before then.

  26. “Trump has taken the advice of his enemies” in Washington trump has only enemies. the GOP Establishment/Bush/Rove/tyson food shills have been actively trying to destroy him . I don’t have any answer for this . The deep state has complete control in DC . look at the FBI raid on the whistle blower on the uranium 1 affair. No GOP voices expressing outrage about this . They wouldn’t do that kind of brazen payback so openly if they weren’t sure nobody would complain. I am completely black pilled on him succeeding in any meaningful way.

    • That FBI raid was the brushback pitch for anyone who has any inclination to bust the deep state. The message is unambiguous. They own the joint, and they intend to own all of us.

      • “Brushback” is what I thought, too.

        At the same time, it’s so damn obvious that …..one thinks of the possibility that there’s something else going on which makes this a “good guy” op instead.

        So I think you’re right, but I’ll take a 30% reservation on it.

        • I think the obviousness of it is an important part of the message. The guys on the street corner who tell the small businessman, “that’s a nice business you have there, it would be a shame if anything happened to it”, use the obviousness of the message, delivered in public in the light of day, as part of the intimidation process.

    • I’m blackpilled on Trump.

      That said, Trump has no support among the GOP and very little in the business community. They oppose him on trade, immigration and everything else for that matter.

      You have to remember during the primary the GOP openly despised Trump and worked against him. The GOP actually collaberated with the Democrats to defeat him.

      In regards to the lack GOP voices expressing outrage over the raid. I suspect it’s because any investigation would implicate some high positioned GOP bosses in the Senate.

      Also have you noticed the stone silence from the GOP on anti-fa threatening MAGA supporters? It shouldn’t be as no surprise since the GOP hates those voters and wants them punished for voting in Trump.

      One thing that most people here don’t get is this about the GOP: THEY HATE US. Everyone of their economic policies since GHW Shrub has been to ass rape white America in the name of profiting some corporate entity. No one can name a policy since Bush41 that actually helped white America, blue collars or the middle-class.

  27. This will never happen because Trump is a fairly dumb man. He beat … Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, and Ted Cruz. Not exactly great opponents. Hillary! was possibly the worst candidate since Dukakis. So Trump is a fairly dumb dude who got lucky. Most of his success was due to Steve Bannon whom he jettison as soon as Ivanka and Jared could make it happen.

    Indeed Trump’s advisers are Ivanka and Jared. I suppose they were reasonably able to not completely wreck everything in his TV production company and various real estate holdings with the various work being done by a small army of lawyers in the latter and Trump himself in the former. And that’s basically it — Trump is the White version of President Hector Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho. He only listens to his idiot daughter who has the wealthy White woman’s utter contempt for most White men and his idiot son in law who wants cravenly the approval of Jay-Z and Young Thug.

    Trump is an accidental President, likely impeached and convicted within a year by Pelosi’s Democrats and the Mittens wing of Republicans. After that its Open Borders as a matter of law, ICE abolished, a permanent White Tax on all White men, White women living with Black dudes exempt of course, and likely mandatory chip implants of RFID for 24/7 Chinese tracking and the Chinese model of total social control, only outsourced to Twitter and Faceborg. [Twitter has not made any money ever — its kept alive by CIA fund obviously as an information monitoring system. Uber is likely the same way.]

    The dream of the elite is a SJW screaming in a White man’s face, forever, kept in place by outsourced Chinese style social gulags run by Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and Microsoft. So far I’d say they are winning. The only threat is raising taxes on ordinary people too high too fast like Macron, sparking a revolt as the taxes quite literally won’t allow the average person to work and keep food on the table at the same time. [Macron is the power bottom idiot ala Trudeau that you see in the elite — not exactly even Dr. Evil level of competence.]

    I don’t even see the possibility of victory, America is destined to be overrun within ten years of most of the Third World to the point of having 1 billion people here, and most Whites will be put into servitude to pay for the endless amounts of gibs that non-Whites will demand. That is if China and various Narco Lords don’t just annex great parts of it first. Even the idea of collective action is a laugh — Americans are far too atomized physically and socially to stage a rampage through Congress like the Pussy Hat brigade did during the Kavanaugh hearings.

    Our job is to survive. Avoid getting an RFID implant like Sweden is already doing to some of its citizens and some tech firm has implemented for some employees. Monkey wrench as much as possible the poz. Avoid stuff as much as possible that enables tracking and control, like social media, Uber, cable tv, Netflix, etc. Recognize that the government, media, law, universities, everything is run by those who wish our extermination, more or less.

    • Since the writing is on the wall, I intend to make the NWO work for me. I will join up and serve them for personal enrichment at expense of the sheeple majority. I have been active on the right for decades and so I know who to name and dox. Given there is no Morpheus let alone Neo, I’m going back to steak dinners and my nightly goblet of fine wine by plugging in.

      • That would be almost concerning if the right wasn’t already full of glory hounds eager and willing to dox themselves. Naming a few nobodies who like to comment on right-wing blogs isn’t going to earn you many steak dinners.

        In your metaphor, it was Morpheus and Neo who caused the offer to be extended in the first place. Were it not for the threat they posed, Cypher probably would have just been killed on the spot.

    • I keep seeing mention of Trump being “dumb” or “a dumb guy” in this thread. He is obviously a very smart and clever guy. But he lives in a bubble, just as each of us does. Trump may have lost the plot in the last couple of years, and now he can’t see beyond his bubble to recognize the reality of the situation.

      • “Daddy, Daddy, my friends are saying mean things about me because of you! Do something liberal!” she sobbed. “Listen to Jared!”

  28. Things I think Trump does understand, are that you do not telegraph your intentions, and that you go all in when you go.

    I don’t know if he has it in him. The clock is running down, the next few weeks and couple of months are critical. If the Dems were smart, they would lay off the smack talk of impeachment and such, and let him do his thing. Trump appears to be making the basic white guy error of believing that people are basically good and want to work together. The Dems are not that sort of people, they will stick in the knife (or swing the bike lock) from behind while they engage you from the front.

  29. Trump is pretty much following the trajectory I was more or less expecting when he was elected. I voted for him, but I always saw him as an ignorant and self-absorbed blowhard who happened to have some decent gut instincts which led him to take advantage of a huge open political opportunity that the Republican establishment had been studiously ignoring for many years.

    Even though Trump was obviously an idiot, millions of Americans — including many who had previously voted Democrat — leaped at to opportunity to vote for someone who at least vaguely resembled a genuine America First conservative. A more capable man could have taken that opportunity and used it to crush the Democrats and force a long term realignment in American politics. An intelligent, upright, and likeable Trump could peeled off 10 or 20 percent of Democratic voters and turned them into Republicans. I think he could even have eased much of “Alt-Right” thinking into the mainstream and made it respectable.

    But instead we have Trump the jackass, who is energizing the Left while simultaneously discrediting everything that got him elected. He’s everything I was afraid he might turn out to be when I pulled the lever for him.

  30. Who remembers the early days of Trump’s presidency? His strategy, which we thought was deliberate, was rapid-fire changes, which kept his enemies off-balance and more importantly, disrupted the 24-hour news cycle. Don’t give the propaganda time to stew.

    He not only doesn’t do this now, he does the opposite: telegraph his strategy ahead of time, by threatening a shutdown or planning a whistleblower announcement for Monday. Giving his enemies time to prepare, and the media days or weeks to spin their propaganda.

    He could start winning again by simply reverting to the original strategy.

    • Yeah, I heard it called the “thousand hazy paths” strategy. Trump had some real stinkers for staff in the early days (Reince Preibus being the biggest one) but he had some good staff members who slipped away. At the moment, the only halfway decent staffer on the payroll is Stephen Miller. Despite all of their flaws, a Trump/Miller/Gorka/Bannon setup saw some of the best days of the administration. Now it’s just Ivanka wanting a pony in the form of criminal justice “reform”. Sad!

  31. There was a reason Trump fired Sessions the day after the election. We’re still waiting to see what that reason was.

    • I thought it was because Sessions was insufficiently loyal to the president. His recusal from the Mueller debacle was BS but Sessions did some decent work otherwise. Meanwhile, he considers Jared and Ivanka to be sufficiently loyal even though they are utter trainwrecks and do irreparable harm to the #MAGA agenda.

    • This ties in with what I said about not moving quickly enough. If he’d instructed the acting AG to immediately fire Mueller, he might still have lost the battle in a kangaroo court but Democrats would have had to spend enormous political capital on it. But now, he’s given them weeks to build up a case in the media about how the appointment was illegitimate, etc.

      It was either a totally amateurish play to kill Russiagate, or he really just fired Sessions out of spite. I can’t think of another possibility, since he’s had several weeks to show his endgame.

  32. I was and still am in many ways a yuge and bigly Trump supporter. However I have resigned to the fact that Trump is not going to deliver on much of anything and if he wins a second term, it will be due more to Democratic incompetence than the collective voter’s overall satisfaction with Trump’s track record.

    This isn’t a blackpill but a realization that Trump is a transition figure and not a transformative figure. We are in the midst of a realignment and I don’t think Trump has the political acumen to see it through. He is still a boomer but he helped usher in a new era where white people are now more and more willing to accept what is at stake here and reject all the lies we’ve heard in the last 50+ years. Trump may want to return to the 1980s but it’s a different world. If he wants to be a neoconservative, he will be treated as such, which is why I’ve braced myself for a Kween Kamala presidency after 2020.

    I think we in the alt right/dissident right need to start thinking about how we can keep facilitating this realignment. The DNC is utterly incompetent right now and was only able to get the House likely due to widescale voter fraud (if we witnessed voter fraud in Florida, what makes you think it didn’t take place in the other 49 states? How many seats would the GOP have retained if they were outside the “margin of fraud” where the DNC could find enough votes to flip the seats?) The enemy is omnipresent but completely incompetent. A smarter version of Trump in the 2020s may be a better outcome than pinning our hopes on an orange boomercon who would rather be a friend to black people than build the wall.

    • I’d hate to reply to my own post but in an alternate universe, Trump finally realizes that he’s been duped by his inner circle, sends them packing, issues executive orders that get upheld by the SCOTUS, soundly beats a hapless Democratic party in 2020, bringing a new wave of Trump Republicans who pass his EOs into law, and then hands the baton to someone like a Kris Kobach who gets elected in 2024 and continues to push the Trump agenda. Birthright citizenship ends, E-Verify is the law of the land, and millions of immigrants self deport when the spigot of government handouts runs dry. Social media gets regulated and conservative thoughts get protected, resulting in a surge of intellectualism with the new wave of paleoconservatives (no longer just dissident right or alt right), and the final gasps of cuckservatism comes to an end when Mitt Romney steps down after one term and the National Review and Weekly Standard shutters operations when their donors realize it’s throwing good money after bad to keep it going.

      A man can dream.

    • The problem was not voter fraud in Broward County. It was ineffective voter fraud led by an incompetent elections chief who did not deliver the win. The complaint in Georgia, as well, is that the woman candidate didn’t get what she was promised, a voting machine that would deliver for her. Similarly, Hillary’s voting machine way underestimated the voting hill they needed to climb. In many other parts of the country, the Democrat voter fraud machine is up and running, and well oiled.

      The old order is gone now, there is no old order to defend. Trump is too comfortable in his 2016 victory, and likely sees himself leaving the field as a hero, which is so far from the truth. In his own way, Trump is as much a disappointment for us (so far) as Obama was for the Left. Getting elected is only the beginning.

    • There was some major voter fraud of course, but it was also the 40 incumbant NeverTrumper Repubs – the ridiculous Surrender Caucus of the GOP – who decided not to run and retire in protest. I think I read where the GOP lost 38 of those 40 seats, and it was yet another self-inflicted gunshot wound by the Stupid Party. Incumbents were’n’t going to do as well as their historical 90% re-election rate, but even if half of those don’t flip to Blue, the Evil Party doesn’t gain control. It’s another reason to hate the spineless Vichy swine of the GoP.

  33. “If they remove him from office, exactly no one will believe American democracy is anything but a sham to protect a corrupt ruling elite. The system will be discredited.”
    I laughed out loud at that! It’s a rare Z Blog where such hilarity ensues.
    The point is nobody cares or, more to the point, they believe they’re profiting from the system. The frogs have been well and truly boiled by now.

    • That’s a common old guy pose, but it is wrong. No system can survive the loss of legitimacy. What keeps this system going is 40% of the population called CivNats, who think democracy is a real thing that can be made to work.

      • I agree. Once the veneer of democracy from America is gone, there is no turning back. We came very close to hitting that point in 2018, with most civnats just thinking Broward County, Florida was the problem. If they saw the total extent of the voter fraud that occurred, it might be that event that pushes the civnats over the edge.

      • How many of the CivNats are privately assuming that the cause is lost, even as they publicly pretend to believe? I can make a case that many are despairing, but they are utterly paralyzed and flummoxed about what to do or how to respond. So they go through the motions in public and Mitt Romney gets some votes out of it.

      • No Zman, the elites are betting that they do NOT need legitimacy, at least not from White men. Their dream is that of a Chinese style social credit system, a “soft” internet driven totalitarianism that substitutes private corporate discrimination for a massive amount of secret police.

        China is the model, and they openly espouse this. Google, Facebook, and Amazon are quite open about adopting this model to crush the deplorables and in particular White men.

        President Xi knew he had both dangerous rivals in the Communist Party all the way down, and not enough men even in China for a Red Guard style purge. Not enough young Chinese men to bust heads. So the “Social Credit” style stuff — fall on President Xi’s bad side for anything — traffic violations, not paying taxes, let alone criticism, and you can’t travel, bank, pay bills, get paid, be employed, purchase anything, or do much of anything save starve in place. I think this model is perfect for creating a mass of lone wolf suicide bombers with nothing literally to lose in bus stations and public squares but that’s just me. President Xi thinks he knows better.

        The Beta version has been rolled out on Gab.ai, on various mainstream conservatives, and likely soon on Donald Trump. The production version 1.0 is coming for us.

        Hollywood certainly sees that Legitimacy has already been won from the only ones who count: White women, gays, trannies, non-Whites, immigrants. From the election results I would say they are probably correct in terms of numbers and social power. When was the last time you saw on TV a show oriented only for White men? Made after 1988?

      • Well, do you have a better idea than the Constitution? Pure “belief” is also keeping the USDollar alive. The whole idea of Trump Agonistes (or Samson) is great, but “overthrow” is a bit more than most people want to bite off in one chew.

  34. From the beginning of recorded time, we love the mythical hero story. The super-hero that is smart, strong, and lives by a code of honor. Most of us are just schlubs that go to work, raise our kids to the best of our abilities, and try to find a little meaning in our lives to make it all worthwhile. We have that ethical where-with-all to keep society churning along. How many of us would commit professional or maybe even literal suicide to expose mans dark corruption? Underneath Trumps blustery energy, he is like us all, just a dude that wants to have some significance in this life. When the banking crises occurred, I thought it would have been better in the long run to have the house of cards fall. But that would have caused a ton of pain, no one wants anything to do with suffering if it can be avoided. Therefore we will continue to limp along putting band-aids on problems that have been percolating for decades. Only a reset that is unforeseeable will get us out of this malaise. As much as I would give anything for the orange man to fight to the death, we probably won’t see it.

  35. My theory is that Trump was a bone thrown in the mix to short circuit any possibility of the emergence of a populist-Right political effort. He was only expected to stall any true opposition. He won unexpectedly, but his mission continues: Stall the opposition and run out the clock. For someone with supposed business accumen, he sure seems to have an extraordinarily bad record of picking people to carry out his agenda. I’m supposing this is the role he has been assigned by those that have sponsored him and bailed him out in the past. And who better to play this role than a reality show performer? After all, it is often called “the political stage”.

    • Thrown in by whom? Whoever you’re blaming, you give them far too much credit. There wasn’t anyone else on the playing field for Trump to stall. And the left is opportunistic, not conspiratorial; lack of planning and inability to defer gratification are persistent leftist traits.

      There are many valid and important criticisms of Trump’s performance, but a Manchurian candidate is one thing he definitely ain’t.

      • I was refering to the stalling of an independent/third party effort. There was no danger of the nominee of either of the two major parties being dangerous. I ask you, how could someone that is a supposedly shrewd, successful businessman pick so many people that just happen to thwart his intentions? And of the campaign promises he has kept (US embassy in Jerusalem, withdrawal from Iran nuclear agreement) who has benefitted? I’m prepared to change my mind if Trump actually does something but it sure looks like the Harlem Globetrotters just passing the ball to each other as the clock counts down the final seconds.

        • The last thing the Cloud People wanted was a third party populist, nationalist uprising. Especially one highlighting immigration. That’s their biggest fear.

        • Even shrewd, successful businessmen can lose when they’re up against superior competitors, and the “deep state” has a whole lot of experience holding onto power.

          If I were to pinpoint the exact turning point, it would actually be very early on, with the loss of Flynn. Not only was he going to be a key player in reigning in the IC, but Trump firing him for bullshit reasons (“he lied to Pence”) in order to save face gave the establishment an early and significant victory which galvanized the “resistance” meme. That also set the tone for additional own-goals, like Sessions’s now-infamous recusal.

          Trump is a shrewd and successful *negotiator*. That’s shown in some areas – for example, getting North Korea to back down, and redoing NAFTA. But the DC swamp doesn’t negotiate. He made a series of grave strategic errors early on, presumably thinking that if he just played along for a little while, they’d get off his back. He didn’t understand that they’re not motivated by profit or personal gain, they’re motivated by ideology and a deep-seated hatred of him and the “common” people he claims to represent.

          Not everything is a literal conspiracy. Sometimes, people just fail.

  36. Geez , who pissed in everyone’s Cheerios this morning ?
    Ah, hello ? His own party has worked against him. The McClain’s and Bush’s can’t die off fast enough.

    A lot of tough talk being thrown around , but we all know what happened to Lincoln. The man is surrounded by pure evil. He’s just trying to get out of this in one piece like anybody else here would.

    President Trump needs our prayers and support more than anything else right now.

    • There are just too many excuses. We’re always a few senators short, or a dozen house members short, or one judge short – funny how we got Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and we’re still, somehow, always one judge short.

      What President Trump *needs* is to learn that the loyalty of his base is not unconditional. He needs to start getting criticized from the right, not just the left. Right now all he hears is conservatives saying he’s great and liberals saying he’s Literally Hitler. If there were more people like Ann Coulter calling him out on his bullshit and demanding he get tougher and less passive, he might actually listen to some of it.

      What Trump absolutely does not need more of right now are: (a) prayers, (b) praise for his tweets and speeches, and (c) promises of unconditional support no matter how far to the left he moves.

  37. Trump has shown no signs that he will do anything other than feather the nest of his own family. He’s in office solely to negotiate a deal with the global establishment for the benefit of Trumps. That’s it, there is nothing more to it. As Don Henley croons about extraterrestrial aliens, “they aren’t coming! (to our rescue)”

    • It’s funny. The immediately above post garnered at least eleven negative votes.

      Yet the identical content in this thread has only received positive votes.

      So you dislike the moniker, correct? Otherwise no question your movements are doomed to fail by logical inconsistency. Carry on and mind the gap.

  38. I think it is too late. Trump came along too far down the road. I was thinking about the death of Bush 41 and what a lost opportunity that was. In 1988 Bush won a huge electoral college win, 426-111 if wikipedia is accurate. It was after 8 years of Reagan and the Cold War was ending and we won. It was a chance to turn our focus back on America and use that political capital to undo the Deep State but instead we elected the ultimate swamp creature and got NAFTA and “kindler, gentler” nonsense. If someone like Trump had won in 1988 or even if somewhat loony Ross Perot, the proto-Trump, or better yet Pat Buchanan had won in 1992, we would be having a different conversation. Now the best we can hope for is some sort of cataclysmic disaster to happen while we still have some demographic advantages or a political division. There are lots of people on this side of the great divide and more every day but not anywhere near enough and too many of those on this side are trying to anoint themselves the monarch of a future ethnostate.

    • Yeah, Arthur, Papa Bush needed to tee off on the Deep State, and he could’ve also went to bat for Quayle on single motherhood.
      Instead, the GOP kept emphasizing abortion, and let the Femmies go on their merry way on single motherhood.
      So they keep popping out neglected kids, who then get abused by their mommies’ carousels of Hookup partners.
      Here lies the road, to generations of traumatized paranoiacs, or some such.

  39. Trump was elected to rip up the rule-book. Everyone knew this before the election. Yet all he’s done since then is play by the rules. A judge says we can’t. Some Senators are waffling. Firing Mueller would be “obstruction”. The rules are literally designed to prevent him from winning, and Candidate Trump knew that: “you can’t fix a rigged system by relying on the very people who rigged it”.

    I’ll disagree on one point: President Trump is NOT acting like Candidate Trump. Candidate Trump was on a mission to crack skulls. President Trump desperately wants to be popular. That is his Achilles Heel and it will be his undoing.

    You live by the poll, you die by the poll.

    • I know that cross-country comparisons are waffly at best, but if Trump had really taken forceful action, I reckon that, like Orban or Salvini, his base would have been behind him all the way and that he would have even become more popular, despite (or maybe even because of) media squealing. The all-talk (all-Tweet) Trump is kind of pathetic.

      • Yes, I think you’re right. Squishy boomer types will hem and haw over this being extreme or that being unnecessary, but ultimately fall in line. Crowder and Hannity are good examples of this type of passive but reliable support.

        Left-wing activists understand this very well. They do a Spectrum-of-Allies analysis to estimate the real impact. “Reactionary” conservatives are only 10-15% of the population, but another 40-50% won’t move against them.

        • …that being said, America’s massive, sprawling, and corrupt-to-the-core “Intelligence Community” may have something to do with Trump’s inaction. Orban and Salvini don’t have to contend with enormously powerful domestic fifth columns; it’s all run by America and although it does reach into Europe, its power is much weaker there.

  40. “If they remove him from office, exactly no one will believe American democracy is anything but a sham to protect a corrupt ruling elite. The system will be discredited.”

    Proof that American democracy is a sham to protect a corrupt ruling class has been continuously presented since 9 November 2016. The system has already discredited itself . The question is, will we be able to do anything to fix it?

    • It was apparent in the fall of 2008 when the assholes baled out the big banks using public tax money. We haven’t forgotten that.

      • Some of us haven’t forgotten that. The fall of 2006 was just a practice run for the fall of 2008. Remember the stock market crash of mid-September 2006?
        (rant on) Bush and Congress announced they were going to bail out Wall Street. The US public was furious — members of BOTH PARTIES — and let Congress know they were firmly opposed. The bill was written, put up, and went down to crashing defeat.
        The next week, the talking heads came on TV agreed that Ya know, really, something, i.e., a bailout, had to be done. Another bill was written. The US public took a powder. The bill passed. October came and went.
        November: Midterm elections. With few exceptions, the US public voted the SoBs right back in. (rant off)
        Do I really need to write a conclusion?

        • Yes, agree this nonsense investigating is hobbling the trump presidency. Weirdly, not to make common cause, but notice how the Clintons are constantly under “investigation” as well. The only presidents who are not “investigated” by the deep state appear to be the Zionist wackos like bush junior and senior. And Obama, I suppose because the notion of a black president supersedes other considerations. Bottom line, I bet the entire country would benefit from a washing of the augenean stables that is the fbi.

          • Dept. of Just-Us and their armed corrupt and cowardly proxy the fbi. And equally as much the cia, dia, and components of other 3 letters. I’d volunteer and pay my own way to hang both brennan and clapper and some 25 more of their ilk. Hand over hand. I’ll be called to account before my Lord in judgement (Sixth Command given to Moses), but surely what these serpents have committed against a good and kind American Heartland has reached His ears.

    • The minute the democrats take office in the House he’ll be under threat of impeachment for the rest of his tenure anyway, teapartydoc. Hell, they’ve been threatening impeachment since before he was inaugurated. Having the Senate do the deed is another thing all together. But if he keeps showing weakness the Senate will not back him. Remember the democrats may be traitors but the Republicans are cuckolds.

      • He should do the Godfather II bit.

        While he’s at Bush the wrinkled’s funeral Mueller’s office should be sealed and all his aides subpoenaed or arrested with a warrant waiting for Mueller when he walks out of the church.
        The top 200 people of the FBI, CIA and NSA should be dismissed.

    • If he does nothing more than work within the existing system, then the demonRats will have an FDR type stranglehold on the country. Fight now or surrender. The only question is whether the nation will be better off with the old order of progressive globalism lead by radicals or by the potential new order that may snuff out the progressives for good but lead to economic turmoil in the short term.

  41. He’s an old man full of bluster, not the sort that would follow your excellent advice. Few would.

    It is painfully obvious he is a stop gap or interregnum for something better to follow, but nothing will. We are not going to vote ourselves out of this and hopefully some type of divine providence in the form of a financial or international crisis will push for something better to happen.

  42. This week is likely the inflection point of Trump’s tenure. Many think he’s going to unload everything in his possession on the deep state by week’s end. GHBs death will likely not deter him, but it is an unfortunate event, timing wise. Nevertheless it’s now or never for Trump. Put up or forever be shut up. The time for half measures and endless hollow tweets has expired.

    • Actually, I think Bush the Elder’s death now was fortunate. It sucked all the air out of the anti-Trump media for several days (still ongoing), and if El Presidente times things properly, something he’s good at, we may get a real media shit storm on the document dump sooner rather than later. He has stated that he needs bargaining chips with congress, which also implies he will do nothing until he sees how much harassment he will get from the new Dem leadership.

  43. Another element is to sign an executive order or something that would have him ignore federal judges – especially those in remote places like Hawaii ordering something for the entire USA – until the Supreme Court has spoken, at least with something from them staying or affirming the order until they can hear the entire case. Or just say “I’m an equal branch with equal ability to do the Constitution how I want”.

  44. At this point this is all that matters:

    “Nobel Prize winning Economist Paul Krugman (MIT, Princeton) opines on the future demographics of America:

    “The real craziness in America comes from, if you like, rural white Americans who feel their power is going away, that they are losing their ownership of their country, and they’re right; we’re becoming more diverse, more multicultural. Rural whites are not the future. In the end the power they still have will go away. But it’s still very difficult until that happens. The future is Mayor Bill DeBlasio of New York, but there is still Ted Cruz out there, and he still has tremendous power to inflict damage.”

    Trump doesn’t matter. The plan for us is plain to see. Only demographics and the White race’s willingness to fight matter. The die is cast. See you on the other side.

    • “The future is Mayor Bill deBlasio of New York, but there is still Ted Cruz out there…”. Does anyone doubt that deBlasio (an invented, fake name, by the way) would eagerly accept any political crumbs offered by an invading force, serving as a Vichy collaborator to any malign but powerful political interest? Cruz might actually push back. The Left welcomes collaborationist toadies, and looks forward to such a state of affairs. They have no shame.

      • de Blasio isn’t “made up”. It’s his mother’s maiden name. “Bill” is made up, though.

    • Ummnhhh…..Krugman’s been wrong FAR MORE times than he’s been correct, but in that quote he’s playing to his audience: the last remaining WASP-cum-Commie gang in America: the coasts.

      • dad29, I have a degree in economics and I’m not an economist just a lowly businessman. Krugman also has a degree in economics and he is also not an economist. He was marginally correct about New Trade Theory and provably incorrect about New Economic Geography for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize. And he’s not even a businessman. He’s a phony. I have yet to read one of his predictions that ended up being correct. The man is a charlatan and grifts money off of Keyesian and socialist “players” to pontificate their nonsense and yap about it in the Lame Stream Media. IOW, he’s what Trump (and I) would call a Fake Economist.

    • There is no such thing as a Nobel Prize in economics. Like everything else about Krugman, it’s a lie.

    • as much as krugman lies about economics, he is completely correct about most of this . The only part he has wrong is that ted cruz is a complete party tool . don’t buy the theater in the media , he campaigned against trump long after he was mathematically eliminated from the primary . The GOPe wanted to get Hillary in so they could run an insider in 2020. many of them said that at the time. Cruz was their tool to try to damage trump .

  45. Before this “inside politics” stuff – timing is everything and I think the Democrats will blow themselves up at the right time.
    And needs an Attorney General who would go along.
    Some things he could do is suspend collection of student loans in default and insist the Congress pass a 1 year bankruptcy for any reason.
    Also not enforce importing drugs or medical devices for a tenth the cost from Canada (or Mexico – the identical stuff).
    Pardons and commutations (why wait for Congress).
    You can probably think of more things that will be for the average man.
    So Trump becomes the People’s Pesident, then goes after the Mueller circus.

    • Did you see Trump tell Acosta how much we “need” to import workers? A “People’s Pesident” is not in prospect. What’s Plan B?

  46. There is a parallel situation happening in the Roman Catholic church; the rule of (Canon) Law is being systematically destroyed by the current Pope, just as the rule of Constitutional Law is being demolished by various judges, agencies, and congress-slime.

    • Snakes are largely a positive symbol in most world cultures, because the have the power to throw off their skin, and renew life.

      And then there is Pope Francis

  47. Being the political fool that I am I actually believed the reason I and millions of other Americans voted for Trump was to do exactly that: overthrow the old order. I also somehow came to believe he would “Build That Wall”, eject illegal aliens, end Obamacare and walk across the Potomac just to show Hillary! he could. I was wrong on all counts.

    But as Zman says, if he doesn’t get his act together the constant 24/7/365 erosion by the media/radical left/Hollywood of his administration will have him and his family doing ten-twenty when president Sparticus takes over. He needs a dramatic move and he needs it now. And it should be a move so strong, so blatant, so in-your-face to the established media, Deep State and leftists in general that it literally splits this nation in two just like Lincoln did. We absolutely positively need a clear cut divide in America in order to dispose of the leftists that want to extinguish the white race, the Christian faith and the American Republic for some Browned-out communist despotic kleptocracy.

    • That’s not why I voted for him. He was for touchback amnesty right out of the box, and if you thought he could build a wall with the kind of Congressional GOPe that picks a Ryan and a McConnell you were really delusional. Trump is a flawed tool for fixing that, but he was the best tool we had. The real job still needs doing. One can only hope 2024 will be a year of progress, too.

      • none of that can be done until he uses the justice dept to bring the deep state to heel . and his window of opportunity is closing fast.

    • Agreed, but you lost me with: “Build That Wall, eject illegal aliens, end Obamacare”. PDT doesn’t do this alone. See ANY help from Michelle or Squeaker Ryan have you? Eight (8) years cucking they’d end 0bamacare and had, and did, NOTHING. Just as they lent to the wall, ejecting illegals, 0bamacare. Michelle McConnelle will be farting into his leather chair in Mordor through 2020 and Ryan likely becomes a stealth lobbyist or buys into a Dairy Queen franchise wherever the hell he returns to in WI. The House is now lost along with control of Appropriations and Ways/Means (not that any other “chairperson” would have lent Trump the back to actually DO IT – aka how America says Thank-you to the first Citizen Statesman in some 200 years. Leader/s of the House will be Pelosi and her Uniparty ally McCarthy who I clearly heard state the dead duck republican caucus would be able to fund the wall before having to hand over the House. Won’t happen either, but I pray for a shutdown. For as long as it takes. And right now PDT is all we have. Unfortunately he’s likely too late, too little.

  48. The “print the legend” tendency with Lincoln washes over his essential ruthlessness. My g-g-grandfather saw him speak twice in during 1860 and recounted in his memoirs Lincoln telling the young men in the crowd that “they would soon be in uniform”. Read Grant and Sherman’s memoirs…the utter destruction of the South during Sherman’s campaign was deliberate and calculated (that same gggrandfather fought in the entire campaign). Like Sulla, Lincoln understood that will can only be imposed on an utterly defeated enemy. Trump would do well to learn that lesson. Besides, “proscriptions” on certain of the miscreants in our political system today would be a fuck ton of fun.

      • Funny. Did beat ’em like a rented mule in 64-65, though. Irony is we’re on the same side now.

    • There was a nonviolent political solution then. There isn’t one now. Lincoln invaded and killed because he wanted to. American governments have been invading whoever the fuck they want ever since then. Haven’t they?

      Trump, in marked contrast, is offered no nonviolent political solution.

      There is no parallel to draw between the two situations.

    • There is a nonviolent solution available to us now and it is what the Z man outlined . But this is the end of it , because the deep state will never be so careless again as to let a real outsider win . trump is in a unique position of power in that he is the legitimate elected leader, and can lead the necessary changes from the top . I think faced with the use of legitimate legal authority, the deep state will blink. the worst of the worst will be sent up the river , and there is the possibility of reform . once trump is gone, that opportunity is gone. lets all pray he wises up and does something . no sane person wants unrest like paris is having.

  49. Yeah. Something–some big thing–needs to happen. Nothing to lose now. But you do get the feeling that Trump’s “advisors,” i.e., seemingly now mostly anti-Trump swampers, are trying to insulate him from anything but establishment ideas and routes of action. We need to train a pigeon with Zman’s article wrapped around its leg to fly through a White House window and onto Trump’s shoulder.

    • I doubt it would help, because we know that Trump already knows. This exact topic was the subject of half his candidate speeches and rallies.

      He knows, he just either doesn’t care or is unable to act. Neither would surprise me. From the beginning it was clear that he had a lot of work to do in order to consolidate Official Power. It’s clear now that he failed. He’s surrounded by the wrong people. In theory he could try to mobilize his base, but I suspect that most of them are simply too passive.

    • There is that option for a war with Iran. That would be something “big”. But I’m not sure that would help us.

      • HOWEVER right or wrong this piece may be, Zman, I hope and pray that someone sticks it under Trump’s nose when he’s on the can tomorrow morning.

        He’s always said if you want to do something you might as well think big, and this would give him pause to think about how he wants to go down in the record books.

        I want to see him DETONATE the center of the swamp. Maybe Hillary gets a public perp-walk same day as Mueller’s raid!

        In chaos is opportunity. Go, Donny, go!

        • He should let it all rip. Everything! Disprove the conspiracy theories once and for all. He will be remembered as a one in a million President. He will reset the 240 year clock. Maybe, just maybe the next time we will get it right.

    • If Trump fails to act, it will be the fault of his children. Family is big for him, and they have an outsized influence. What Trump’s kids don’t understand (IMO) is that the entire extended Trump family is already down the rabbit hole, and there is only one way out that has any reasonably good ending. The kids think they can be the Kennedy family or the Bush family over time, and are selling Dad on that legacy. The “Trump brand” and all. We’ll see, I don’t think that bird can fly any more, under any circumstances.

      Carl Icahn is one of the most ruthless and savvy investors of all. He is a professional friend of Trump’s, and has turned down any role in the administration. Carl knows the score and knows to keep his distance, and lay low. I think he saw all of this coming, from a long way off.

      • Dutch, I agree with most of what you wrote but I take exception to your belief that Icahn is staying away because he thinks being part of a Trump administration will be trouble. I think that Icahn, being that ruthless and savvy dude we all know him to be would rather not hitch his personal business Logo to a political party because , being savvy he realizes that would compromise at least half his potential customers and that ain’t savvy nor ruthless. It’s bad business. It’s like Dick’s being anti gun. Pure stupidity. Just my guess.

      • I was going to observe the kids, too. They (especially Ivanka) are fully invested in the swamp. She cannot bear being ostracized. Trump has a hard time with it, too.

      • Dutch,
        Not sure the kids are the only ones with this idea. There is clearly a “power family / legacy” thing with extremely ambitious types. DC is a swamp of power couple wanna-bees.

        Z: Lincoln invaded sovereign Virginia because he didnt want HIS legacy to be the man whose election caused the breakup of the US, and he was willing to kill hundreds of thousands of Americans to make sure of it. Had Lincoln merely stood aside while the southern states exercised their sovereignty, the US and the CSA would have relations comparable to that which we have with Canada. I cant believe you compare Trump to the greatest traitor the US has ever known, Lincoln. The situation bears no semblance at all.

        • This neo-confederate crap on the right has to stop. We get it; the war was unjust, slavery was an ex post facto excuse, etc. But the Confederate south was incompetent, and its combination of free trade and slavery were disrupting all American industry.

          The “CSA” would have Puerto Rico-tier poverty today were it not for Lincoln’s intervention. Lincoln wasn’t a “traitor” to the south in the same way Putin isn’t a “traitor” to progressives. You can only be a traitor to your OWN side.

          History is full of wars. The victors get to write the rules and the narrative. That’s exactly what we want Trump to do: win.

          • I’m not a neo confederate, and I’m not on what you would call the right. I’m one of those horrid small-l old school libertarians. I’ve invested a great deal of time studying American history. You can give Lincoln a public school blowjob if you want. He destroyed federalism, and in so doing rendered the Constitution powerless. You guys love to bitch about “muh consteetooshun”. Lincoln is the one who destroyed it, along with 625,000 Americans. Thats 2% of the population then. Do the math today. Lincoln is the greatest American mass murderer. Do you like death and killing?

            You agree with Lincoln. IOW, it’s your fault. Not mine, yours, and people like you. Congratulations. Let me guess…Michigan or Ohio?

            Chattel Slavery ended everywhere in the West because it wasnt economically viable. It would have ended in the CSA of its own weight.

          • “…the Confederate south[‘]s combination of free trade and slavery were(sic) disrupting all American industry.”

            How?

      • nonsense , it’s already lost . Did you net see the midterms? not only will the left rage be cranked up for trumps run , they have 2 years between now wand the to settle dreamers and refugees in the close states. Florida is gone. Georgia will be gone. Arizona is gone , and most likely Texas will be gone because in 2 years, about 1 million “new ” voters from south of the border will be registered . rush and hanity agree with you , but they also told us for 4 years that Obama would be a one term president.

    • By God call the white house, tell them what your thinking he and the country are at a crossroads what happens in the next week will determine whether our heritage dissappears or whether we make whatever sacrifice nessisary to reclaim it.

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