The Very Stable Genius's gratuitous, vulgar and juvenile victory lap

Last Saturday, I wrote an initial-thoughts post about the Mueller report. I spoke of how the Leftists would launch Congressional investigations to take up where they see the report leaving off. If my powers of prediction had been a little sharper, I might have also mentioned the cascade of punditry devoted to the desperate search for some remaining path to a smoking gun. Hope springs eternal.

But I also predicted, quite accurately, it turns out, how the Trumpists would react:

The throne-sniffers will crow. Their king will be insufferable. 

The VSG's rally in Grand Rapids last night was an orgy of crowing and insufferable bellowing.  

I know it's 2019 and many, probably most, people have the position that the use of expletives is no big deal anymore. (I remember mentioning, in some past post about cultural rot, that the first time I heard the s-word in a Hollywood movie was 1969's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, in the scene in which they jump from a cliff to evade a sheriff's posse. I recently, when watching Bullitt on TCM, discovered that such cinematic usage goes back at least to 1968.) Nobody thinks twice about employing profanity on social media, even conservative television personalities. We all know about Rashid Tlaib's "Impeach the mother----r!" exhortation right after getting sworn in to Congress early this year.

In full disclosure, I must own a certain degree of hypocrisy here. When sufficiently startled or angered, my mouth becomes a veritable sewer. I'm not proud of that. And I do pretty successfully keep it contained within the private sphere of my life.

Still, I'd held out feeble hope that someone who holds the planet's most powerful position and is in so many ways the face of America on the world stage would refrain from making it part of his public uttering, even in situations in which he's understandably exuberant.

But not only he, but his namesake son employed the s-word in Grand Rapids last night. (His son often comes in for the "he's more thoughtful and consistently conservative than his dad and could conceivably make a viable candidate for high office someday" treatment. That would be he whose wife divorced him over an affair and who, immediately upon that divorce getting underway, took up with Kimberly Guilfoyle, whose own marital track record includes once being married to Gavin Newsom.)

'The Democrats have to decide whether or not to continue defrauding the public with ridiculous bulls**t,' he said. 

Trump's eldest son Don Jr. warmed up the crowd by deriding Schiff's 'bullschiff,' and claiming he 'really schiffed the bed.'

Then came the high-decibel schadenfreude about leftist media ratings. The VSG can never resist grinding "losers" under the heel of his wing tip:

The president cited 'all of the Democrat politicians, the media bosses – bad people – the crooked journalists, the totally dishonest TV pundits,' as boos rained down from the packed rafters of the Van Andel Arena.

'They know it's not true! They just got great ratings!'

'By the way,' Trump grinned, 'their ratings dropped through the floor last night.' 

I know there are degrees of grace that it is or is not appropriate to extend to the vanquished, and, to be sure, we are talking here about leftists - people who want to grind any and all who resist their agenda under their heel. Still, the VSG could have made some subtle reference to their current despair and moved on to the matter of how we prevent this kind of thing from occurring again. (For instance, one little mention of Rachel Maddow's near-crying jag, crafted with subtle humor, would have covered the whole subject of how delicious the moment is. But subtle humor would be asking too much of the VSG.)

I've recently had ample cause to think about Victor Davis Hanson's CNN piece entitled "What Progressives Should Know About Trump Voters." I was particularly gratified, because I'd found all of Hanson's previous attempts to stake out where he stood regarding Trump to be inadequate in one way or another. Here, he outlines the factors that have led to the Trump phenomenon with clarity and precision:

1. Voters appreciate that the economy is currently experiencing near record-low peacetime unemployment, record-low minority unemployment, and virtual 3% annualized GDP growth. Interest andinflation rates remain low. Workers' wages increasedafter years of stagnation. The US is now the world's largest producer of oil and natural gas. And gasoline prices remain affordable. The President continues to redress asymmetrical trade with China, as well as with former NAFTA partners and Europe. He jawbones companies to curb offshoring and outsourcing. The current economic recovery and low consumer prices have uplifted millions of middle-class Americans who appreciate the upswing.

2. Trump does not exist in a vacuum. Many supporters turned off by some of his antics are still far more appalled by an emerging radical neo-socialist Democratic agenda. If the alternative to Trump is a disturbing tolerance among some Democrats for anti-Semitism, the Green New Deal, reparations, a permissive approach to abortion even very late in pregnancy, a wealth tax, a 70-90% top income tax rate, the abolition of ICE, open borders, and Medicare for all, Trump's record between 2017-20 will seem moderate and preferable. Progressives do not fully appreciate how the hysterics and media coverage of the Kavanaugh hearings, the Covington teenagers and the Jussie Smollett psychodrama turned off half the country. Such incidents and their reportage confirmed suspicions of cultural bias, media distortions, and an absence of fair play and reciprocity.

3.Trump can be uncouth and crass. But he has shown an empathy for the hollowed-out interior, lacking from prior Republican and Democratic candidates. His populist agenda explains why millions of once traditional Democratic voters defected in 2016 to him -- and may well again in 2020. Some polls counterintuitively suggest that Trump may well win more minority voters than prior Republican presidential candidates. 

4. Trump may come across as callous to some, but to others at least genuine. He does not modulate his accent to fit regional crowds, as did Barack Obama,Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. He does not adopt particular outfits at state fairs or visit bowling allies to seek authenticity. Like him or not, his Queens accent, formal attire, odd tan, and wild hair remain the same wherever he goes and speaks. Voters respect that he is at least unadulterated in a way untrue of most politicians. Big Macs convey earthiness in a way arugula does not.

5. Even when Trump has hit an impasse, his supporters mostly continue to believe that he at least keeps trying to meet his promises on taxes, the economy, energy, foreign policy, strict-constructionist judges, and the border. So far his supporters feel Trump has not suffered a "Read my lips" or "You can keep your doctor" moment. 

6. Voters are angry over the sustained effort to remove or delegitimize a sitting president. Many of the controversies over Trump result from the inability of Hillary Clinton supporters to accept his shocking victory. Instead they try any means possible to abort his presidency in a way not seen in recent history. Trump voters cringe at such serial but so far unsuccessful efforts to delegitimize the President: the immediate law suits challenging voting machines, the effort to warp the Electoral College voting, initial impeachment efforts, appeals to the Emoluments Clause, the 25th Amendment, and the calcified Logan Act, the Mueller investigation that far exceeded and yet may have not met its original mandate to find Russian "collusion," and the strange Andrew McCabe-Ron Rosenstein failed palace coup. All this comes in addition to a disturbing assassination "chic," as Madonna, Johnny Depp, Kathy Griffin, Robert DeNiro and dozens of others express openly thoughts of killing, blowing up, or beating up an elected president. The Shorenstein Center at Harvard University has found that mainstream media coverage of Trump's first 100 days in office ranged from 70-90% negative of Trump, depending on the week, an asymmetry never quite seen before seen but one that erodes confidence in the media. Voters are developing a grudging respect for the 72-year-old, less-than-fit Trump who each day weathers unprecedented vitriol and yet does not give up, in the Nietzschean sense of whatever does not kill him, seems to make him stronger.

7. Progressives seemingly do not appreciate historical contexts. By past presidential standards, Trump's behavior while in the White House has not been characterized by the personal indiscretions of a John F. Kennedy or Bill Clinton. His language has been blunt, but then so was Harry Truman's. He can be gross, but perhaps not so much as was Lyndon Johnson. The point is not to use such comparisons to excuse Trump's rough speech and tweets, but to remind that the present media climate and the electronic age of the Internet and social media, along with general historical ignorance about prior presidencies, have warped objective analysis of Trump, the first president without either prior political office or military service.

8. Globalization enriched the two coasts, while America's interior was hollowed out. Anywhere abroad muscular labor could be duplicated at cheaper rates, it often was -- especially in heavy industry and manufacturing. Trump alone sensed that and appealed to constituencies that heretofore had been libeled by presidents and presidential candidates as "crazies," "clingers," "deplorables" and "irredeemables." Fairly or not, half the country feels that elites, a deep state, or just "they" (call them whatever you will) are both condemnatory and yet ignorant of so-called fly-over country. Trump is seen as their payback.

9. For a thrice-married former raconteur, the Trump first family appears remarkably stable, and loyal. The first lady is winsome and gracious. Despite the negative publicity, daughter Ivanka remains poised and conciliatory. The appearance of stability suggests that if Trump may have often been a poor husband, he was nonetheless a good father.

10. Trump is a masterful impromptu speaker. Increasingly he can be self-deprecatory, and his performances are improving. Even his marathon rallies stay entertaining to about half the country. He handles crowds in the fashion of JFK, Bill Clinton, or Barack Obama rather than of a flat Bob Dole, Hillary Clinton or Mitt Romney. 

There's still more than a faint scent of excuse-making in this list, but for the most part, it's an objective analysis that even a leftist wouldn't be able to effectively refute.

And it was that "hollowed out interior" that turned out last night in Grand Rapids.

My concern is what it has been all along - that actual conservatism does not get the kind of airing it will have to have in order to truly prevail over the nightmarish leftist vision.

Case in point: I have a conservative friend who is truly conservative and not a Trumpist, although he is far more inclined to actually support Donald Trump due to the policy achievements of these first two years. He's far more impressed than I am. But he has not gone the full throne-sniffer measure. I don't think the Grand Rapids crowd is his people. But he runs into sticky situations in Facebook tangles because some leftist will bring up the federal debt and deficit which continue to worsen under Trump, and there's really no good retort. Trump is on record saying he thinks the economy could grow sufficiently to remedy that. Trump also still refuses to discuss changes to Social Security and Medicare that are going to have to happen.

So a person in my friend's position is left trying to defend Trump "policies" instead of conservative principles.

I realize there are gradations of conservative objection to Trump, and I want to once again distinguish myself from those such as Jennifer Rubin, George Will, Bill Kristol and Max Boot. They seem to have swallowed some kind of weird pill. They've jettisoned all embrace of the actual conservatism they just a few short years ago spoke of wanting to preserve. But they're a different breed from Erick Erickson, Susan Wright, Jonah Goldberg, Ben Shapiro, David French, Brad Thor, Joe Walsh, Peter Heck et al. These are the adults in the room. I consider myself in their camp.

And these gradations are real despite the efforts of the likes of Brian C. Joondeph and Kurt Schlichter to obscure them.

It's behind a paywall, so I can't excerpt from it, but, if you are a WSJ subscriber, I recommend Peggy Noonan's column today. It's entitled "The Two Americas Have Grown Much Fiercer." (I read it in soft focus, with the "subscribe now" box floating in the center of the screen as I scrolled along.) I will provide a couple of money lines from it: "People are proud of their bitterness now . . . Current America, with its moderation institutions (churches) and its dividing institutions (the Internet) rising, sees our polarization not as something to be healed, but a reason for being, something to get up for. There's a finality to it, a war-to-the-death quality."

Which brings us back to throne sniffers and Schlichter types (between whom I still make a distinction, at this point mainly on the basis of Schlichter's having once been a Trump opponent, although that line really is blurring). Their response to a piece like Noonan's would be, "Hell, yeah there's a war to the death in this country, and we don't intend to lose it."

The LITD response to that is this: I really get that, and it's an assessment I happen to share. The Democrat party, the media, the education world, the arts-and-entertainment world and even way too much of the corporate world and even institutional Christianity are the enemy. But your victory is going to be incomplete and susceptible to rollback if you view this blowhard with the blowdried hair as your general.

He's not what you really want him to be. You're better off arming yourself with actual conservatism.