As I write this, Super Tuesday is ongoing, and we don’t know the results yet, but whatever. Whatever the elections, there is one thing we have already learned: Donald Trump wins, if the system lets him.
There is a sense of boredom among the electorate in the face of the infective Haley–Trump battle, and the public is dying for the former president to concentrate all his efforts on getting rid of the lame duck in the White House who is ruining the United States. I reckon all Nikki Haley will get this Tuesday is an L so that she can finally become Halley’s Comet and leave as she came, soaring through the skies of oblivion.
In spite of Joe Biden’s obvious weakness, we should be cautious about the political preferences and intellectual capacity of the majority of voters in the run-up to the November elections. I never tire of recovering quotes from H.L. Mencken’s Notes on Democracy: “Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.” He may strike you as a cynic, but I dare you to prove him wrong.
Let’s put it all in context. Trump is fighting not against Haley, nor against Biden, nor against the judicial hurdles that so amuse the Democratic Party (Democratic, you know, but only in name, because for the benefit of democracy they want to eliminate the only candidate who can actually beat them). Trump is fighting against everything and everyone.
The big question is also the big answer. The quote is mine, but you would be more impressed if I lied and told you it is from Socrates. The big question is: What moves Trump to fight against everything? The big answer could be wonderful — if he is moved by shared ideals — or terrible — if he is driven by a humanly understandable desire for personal revenge. In my opinion, more than once he has proven to be much smarter than that — if he simply wanted revenge on Biden, he would go to his outdoor rallies armed with a little mirror to dazzle the zombie president as soon as he starts babbling.
The current Trump is, and should be, the Trump of MAGA; the one of freedom and national sovereignty; the one of war on wokeism and the return to the values that made the nation great; the one for the middle classes and families; the one for international diplomacy to avoid war and its costs; the one of the face-to-face fight against progressive sectarianism, fearless, unashamed; the one we saw, in short, the other day at CPAC. (RELATED from Itxu Díaz: We Are the Conservatives (An Alternative Rhetoric for CPAC))
A double Republican plan needs to arise from this Super Tuesday: to guarantee Biden sinks for good and to build a new political project for the United States. Yes, new, because the world of 2024 no longer has anything to do with the one in which Trump found himself in January 2017. And if the world is not the same, surely the political recipe cannot be the same.
Something we have learned and that, in a way, is new: The Left no longer respects anything. The best proof is Trump himself, as he assesses the unprecedented harassment he is being subjected to. Another novelty: Cancellation is well regarded. Until Trump’s first presidency, to speak of cancellation was to speak of censorship, and even the Left saw it as something typical of terrible dictatorships. But the postmodern Left — indeed, the post-pandemic Left — is more totalitarian than ever, and it firmly believes that the end justifies the means. If the end is to prevent conservatives from convincing others, it will have no problem expelling them from their jobs or university professorships, even unfairly and dictatorially, if that will shut them up. The same goes with social networks: The discourse of the networks is controlled by dark interests, and the Left is capable of prohibiting the publication or dissemination of a decisive exclusive if it believes that it could harm its candidate.
The list of things that have changed is immense. But perhaps the most painful of all is that, year after year, the West is rapidly losing its old identity. And, in particular, under Biden, the United States occupies an almost irrelevant place in the international arena. And that is a gratuitous embarrassment we owe exclusively to the Democratic Party.
It is urgent to stop our identity and our values from bleeding out. That is why the new Trump plan to resuscitate America must be forceful, practical, precise, and swift. In other words, it must be the opposite of Joe Biden.
Translated by Joel Dalmau.
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