Idea of Trump Rerun is Better Than Reality

Putin correctly likens woke and transgender extremism in USA to Bolshevism

I asked Russian President Vladimir Putin what he thought of the idea of a second Trump presidency and he turned the question around on me: “Would you vote for him?” I said I’d vote for him against a Democrat, but preferred that other conservatives step up among Republicans so that the matter is moot. Even among those of us who admired Trump, I’ll bet I’m in good company in this opinion. (More on Putin later.)

Thursday brought news that Trump has finally decided to make his media play. A SPAC or special purpose acquisition vehicle—a mechanism of accessing public equity markets without normal disclosures or the rigorous IPO process—named Digital World Acquisition Corp. invested in the new Trump Media & Technology Group, which apparently will provide conservative social media and video.

No Trump venture would be complete without what charitably would be called puffery, and his press release boasted that the deal valued Trump Media at $875 million with the possibility of an additional earn-out of $875 million, whatever that means. The capital invested in Digital World Acquisition is currently $293 million and since the companies are combining, it’s unclear to me how the acquirer could take only a minority stake in Trump that would result in that $293 million reflecting an actual valuation of $875 million or twice that. But whatever.

It’s also odd that Trump would become involved in a publicly traded company in which misleading investors can rapidly bring the regulatory and law-enforcement ire of the Securities and Exchange Commission, not to mention the world’s most aggressive and well-paid plaintiffs’ attorneys. But again, whatever.

Consistent with our times of radically overvalued equity thanks to the glut of money the Federal Reserve has created, the market value of Digital World shot up to around $4 billion by midday Friday before declining later, a thirteen-fold increase from where the company was valued before the Trump investment. (For comparison, sprawling News Corp, which has $9 billion in revenue and this thing called profits is valued by the market at $14 billion.) Meme investors helped drive the shares higher.

The real question will be whether Trump will turn this into a desperately needed platform for conservative media and culture that will launch a new generation of videographers, writers, animators, actors, producers, etc. on the Right who are ignored by the progressive bigots of Hollywood, or whether it will be all about Donald Trump, mostly phoning it in from retirement. My bet is on the latter.

Like Glenn Beck’s network The Blaze, Trump’s media company will likely be about Trump. While other personalities will no doubt be involved, Trump even more than Beck lacks the organizational skills, ability to choose good people, and willingness to mentor talent like the late Roger Ailes did to build up Fox, all of which would be necessary to launch a serious and durable media platform. While Trump’s pre-presidential show “The Apprentice” was a success, it would not have been so without NBC’s production and distribution capabilities.

While just a prediction about Trump’s media venture, this brings me back to why a second Trump presidency and the quest for it would be lackluster. Trump in retirement has displayed nothing to suggest he has become any more disciplined, strategic, or good at choosing staff and allies to implement his vision. Quite the opposite: his endorsements and denunciations seem to be impetuous and he is doing little of practical value to help Republicans take Congress next year. His focus remains on the questionable outcome of the 2020 campaign, but here again, he lacks focus. There should be no doubt that as in 2016 and 2020, Trump would have no ground game in 2024. In addition to failing at get-out-the-vote efforts, that means he would again have no national mechanism in place to monitor and litigate the 2024 contest and fraud before and after voting takes place.

Voters have a strong interest in ensuring accurate elections, but no interest in soothing Trump’s ego. The opportunity the Right has in 2022 and 2024 is shaping up to be the best since Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980. Why waste this opportunity on someone who is likely to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? At the beginning of an improbable second term, Trump would be a 78-year-old lame duck. From the day of his nomination, there would be endless intrigue about which Republican would succeed him as party leader. Would a GOP star like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis gamble his reputation to be Trump’s vice president to position himself for this succession? Presumably that would fall to a lesser light.

With two years to go until the GOP primary contest reaches full speed, pro-Trump Republicans will hopefully come to the view that Trumpism—the watershed New Right that Trump created and its associated aggressive style—will paradoxically be best advanced by someone other than Trump.

Putin

My dialogue with Putin occurred at the end of the annual Valdai Discussion Club in Sochi. I didn’t attend in person but joined by video. Putin gave a remarkable speech in which he compared woke and transgender radicalism and associated cultural destruction to Bolshevism.

Below is the dialogue he had with me. There is an awkward delay because I was listening through the translator and it was unclear through the earpiece if Putin was asking the question of the host on stage or me. But we figured it out. He declined to answer…sort of, but, as he noted, did help me avoid becoming a foreign agent.

It’s worth rewinding to the beginning of the session and watching Putin’s full speech. There’s no denying that Russia does many wicked things and challenging Putin politically is a perilous undertaking. But his cultural points and his definition of “healthy conservatism” have strong appeal as the feckless fools who run the West push their countries to cultural suicide. Some key points he made:

The discussion about the rights of men and women has turned into a total phantasmagoria in a number of Western countries. Those who risk saying that men and women still exist, and that this is a biological fact, are virtually ostracized.

And this is not new. In the 1920s, Soviet culture-warriors invented a so-called ‘newspeak,’ believing that in this way they would create a new sense of consciousness and redefine people’s values.

This is not to mention things that are simply monstrous, like when children are taught from an early age that a boy can easily become a girl and vice versa. In fact, they are indoctrinating them into the alleged choices that are supposedly available to everyone – removing parents from the equation and forcing the child to make decisions that can ruin their lives.

The other remarkable feature of the session is that Putin gave a speech and then held his own in dialogue with the moderator and Q&A for three-and-a-half hours. We are at a point at which our adversaries’ leaders are at the top of their game while our own leadership is the worst we have had since before the Civil War. (Quinnipiac now has Biden at 38% approval.) Putin gave the speech a day after the State Department issued an obnoxious, Orwellian missive about pronouns, in which we are all encouraged to lie and abuse grammar:

Our leadership in both parties seems unwilling even to contemplate a new look at Russia. Dimitri K. Simes of the Center for the National Interest sums up the stakes:

The enhancement of alliances, in other words, must not become a paramount foreign policy objective that comes at the expense of larger U.S. strategic interests, such as the preclusion of a Chinese-Russian condominium. No help from Ukraine or Georgia can compensate for America being confronted with a new, most dangerous alliance dominating Eurasia.

Conservatives ought to realize that despite Russia’s hazardous activities around the globe, we do have some common ground with Russia and Putin, especially when it comes to defending our history and freedom against the postmodern, woke mob. The neoliberal, postmodern dream some in the West had for Russia is dead. It is actually still losing ground in death considering the self-deluding, self-hating turn that neoliberalism has taken in English-speaking countries. But the dream was always overrated and divorced from our vital national interests in Russia, which have little to do with Russia’s internal politics.

Even if a revised understanding of what we should and can reasonably expect from Russia is not the basis of a full warming of relations with Moscow, perhaps we can at least stop pushing Russia toward China. Here again, a pro-Trump Republican needs to emerge and do better than Trump at articulating and implementing a détente with Russia.

Economy Slowing?

While Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia gets more attention for holding up the most outlandish progressive dreams in Washington, the big news of the week was Arizona Democrat Kyrsten Sinema saying she opposed the major tax increases the Democrats had planned to pretend to pay for their just-for-fun spending bonanza. Not only that: Biden later acknowledged that he doesn’t have the votes to raise taxes significantly. Apparently Democrats will dispense with sending progressive activists into ladies’ rooms to harass Sinema to try to change her mind—an ineffective act Biden called “part of the process.”

This is great news for the economy, which seems to be slowing considerably. The Bureau of Economic Analysis reports next Thursday its advance estimate of GDP for the third quarter, which ended September 30. The consensus is 3.5% real growth, but the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank’s GDPNow model is predicting a freak number of just 0.5% growth. That calculation is based on quicker but less reliable economic data, and is historically off an average of 0.8%. But it is noteworthy that GDPNow in August projected the quarter would reflect 6% growth and no one now thinks that is achievable. There are increasing signs that the economy is sputtering and may head into recession once unsustainable fiscal and monetary stimulus is curbed.

Woke Windsors

Queen Elizabeth was briefly hospitalized for observation and hopefully gets better soon. The 95-year-old monarch, who has reigned for nearly 70 years, has remained popular in no small part because she has kept out of politics. Presumably, like most people, she has political beliefs, but has kept them to herself despite what must be a powerful temptation to use the huge public spotlight at her disposal.

Not so with her progeny and their “issue.” We’re used to woke Prince Harry and his hideous, self-pitying wife Meghan Markle, both of whom want to tell us uncouth colonials how to act better. But now we are also treated to progressive orthodoxy by Prince William, second in line to the throne and set to be king after Charles. William and Michael Bloomberg took to the pages of McPaper to talk about their religion, climate change alarmism. The duo wrote:

The race to put a man on the moon created new jobs, launched new companies and spurred technological innovations that have spread and improved lives all over the planet – long after the Moon Shot mission had been completed.

The race to defeat climate change and protect the environment will be no different. The same steps that advance technology and cut carbon pollution also create jobs in new industries, while protecting public health and the natural resources we all depend on – changes that will benefit generations to come.

There you have the Obama-Biden energy plan in a nutshell, now courtesy of the British elite, even though it failed in the 2010s and is failing again. Instead of actually improving the environment, we’ll raise energy costs (which in turn raises the cost of everything), but trust us, this is the first tax in history that will actually create jobs and economic activity.

What’s more telling is that the palace, which avoids politics as an act of self-preservation, evidently thinks that this issue isn’t political. It’s just what all smart people think or something. Expect to see this arrogance on display ad nauseam as the annual climate change hootenanny gets under way in Glasgow on November 1. Maybe William can go and talk about his new religion just as his countrymen are fresh off of waiting in long lines for gas, paying through the nose for home heating, and praying that winter isn’t too cold as it will expose the extreme risk of the establishment’s adventures in alternative energy.

Have a great weekend.