I haven’t really followed the controversies over what’s going on at the Smithsonian or Kennedy Center, so I don’t pretend to be an authority on either. If you know less than I do, here’s a quick update on the Smithsonian…

The Trump administration is cracking down on the Smithsonian Institution ahead of America’s 250th anniversary celebration next year, requiring specific national museums and affiliated exhibits to “reflect the unity, progress, and enduring values that define the American story.”

In a letter penned to Smithsonian Institution Secretary Lonnie Bunch III, Trump administration officials laid out a review process that the institution will undergo in order to ensure alignment with President Donald Trump’s “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order.

“This initiative aims to ensure alignment with the President’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions,” the letter reads.

And at the Kennedy Center, there is this…

President Donald Trump ramped up his campaign to take over the Kennedy Center on Tuesday, Aug. 12, as he previewed the annual Kennedy Center Honors on social media.

“GREAT Nominees for the TRUMP/KENNEDY CENTER, whoops, I mean, KENNEDY CENTER, AWARDS. They will be announced Wednesday,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Tremendous work is being done, and money being spent, on bringing it back to the absolute TOP LEVEL of luxury, glamour, and entertainment.”

“It had fallen on hard times, physically, BUT WILL SOON BE MAKING A MAJOR COMEBACK!!!,” the president continued, seemingly speaking about the Kennedy Center building, which is located on the eastern bank of the Potomac River in Washington, D.C.

Trump then announced that this year’s Kennedy Center Honors would go to Gloria Gaynor, George Strait, Kiss, Michael Crawford (he’s the original Phantom of the Opera on Broadway), and Sylvester Stallone. That’s about as MAGA a group of honorees as you’ll find.

All of this has ruffled a very large number of feathers, to say the least. And not just on the Left.

Interestingly, this stuff is related to a lot of other things that are happening — like Trump’s federal takeover of law enforcement in Washington, D.C., and the redistricting controversy in Texas by the state’s GOP legislative majority. (RELATED: DC Has Had Its Chance to Self-Govern. It Failed. Enough Already.)

And more.

How are these seemingly disparate occurrences related?

Spoils.

Or, as Barack Obama famously said, in what was more or less the only truly substantive thing to come out of his mouth, “Elections have consequences.”

What we’ve been finding out in the 10 months since Trump’s election is that elections aren’t supposed to have consequences when Democrats lose them.

And to that, I say bullshit.

The November 2024 election needs to have been the most consequential election of this century, and for a very specific reason: Republicans must take from it a public mandate to remake America into something that actually works. We’ve spent a quarter-century, or maybe more, watching our culture, politics, and economics stagnate and decline, and because of that, we should be re-examining virtually every aspect of our national habits and institutions.

Why on earth would President Trump, elected in an electoral landslide, not remake the Smithsonian and Kennedy Center into institutions reflective of the tastes of the people who voted for him? As president, he has the power to do so. Certainly, the Democrats who preceded him in that office did exactly what Trump is doing, and more. (RELATED: Get Out Your Handkerchiefs for Kennedy Center Crybabies)

Was there any public appetite for the woke abuses of those institutions when committed? Of course not. Clinton, Obama, and Biden oversaw their commission anyway.

So did the Bushes, by the way. But Bush Republicanism is no longer an applicable standard in American politics, and good riddance to it. The Bush Republicans made a faux moral imperative out of betraying their supporters by accepting the premise of the radical Left at every turn.

Texas’s legislature, almost certainly to be followed by the legislatures of every other state in the South once the Supreme Court renders its decision in the Louisiana v. Callais case due to be released sometime after oral arguments on Oct. 15, will soon aggressively redistrict its congressional map. Texas did so after Harmeet Dhillon, who runs the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, sent a letter to state officials opining that the current congressional map is illegally racially gerrymandered. (RELATED: Five Quick Things: Correcting A Botched Census? I Voted For That!)

News flash: every state in the South has a racially gerrymandered congressional map. Democrat federal judges assured us of that — their appointments were spoils of Democrat victories, and their rulings in redistricting cases were similarly spoils of those victories. But the Callais case is expected to wipe away that status quo.

And allow for states like Texas and Louisiana to engage in the same sorts of spoils of electoral victory that Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, New York, New Mexico, and California have engaged in. (RELATED: The Democrats Are Messing With Texas. It’s Time to Shut Down the Fleebagger Circus.)

What Donald Trump has done for Republicans is show the party that it can wield and use political power for its own purposes just as Democrats do. Ultimately, in a less obnoxious way, of course, because the cultural, economic, and political tastes of conservatives will tend to be far more conventional than those of the radical Obamunist faction (and the even more radical Mamdanist faction) in control of the Democrat Party for the past two decades. (RELATED: The Madman Cometh — And There’s Apparently No Stopping Him)

Put Trump Republicans in charge of the public schools, and they’ll try to fire all the left-wing nuts who want to trans your kids without informing you. The horror! Put MAGA in charge of the libraries, and they’ll fire everybody responsible for gay porn in the teenage section. Put MAGA in charge of the district attorney’s office, and he’ll actually prosecute the carjackers and heroin addicts defecating in the subways.

The absurdity is in thinking that Republicans need to lay up rather than drive the green when they’ve got enough club to do it.

I’ve written before that Obamunism was built to obliterate flaccid Bush Republicanism. It did that. You saw the proof in the 2008 and 2012 election cycles. (RELATED: The Full Measure of Obamunism Is on Display in Chicago)

But MAGA was built to obliterate Obamunism. And it’s doing exactly that.

Let it.

Republicans must be willing and able to exercise the full scope of their constitutional power at the municipal, state, and federal levels, given the state this country was left in by Team Obama and their acolytes. When water no longer comes out of the taps, when the homeless — er, “unhoused” — control the train stations, when elections are brazenly, luridly rigged, when billions are spent on nonexistent rail lines, when borders are erased and millions of invaders invited in… restraint is weakness.

Let’s have restraint later. Scrub out the woke, set things right, and return America to a sustainable path of Judeo-Christian morality, entrepreneurial capitalism, and ordered liberty, and then it will be time for restraint.

Hopefully, by compact with a Democrat Party, which is so reformed through humiliation and disempowerment that it looks nothing like the collection of freaks, kleptocrats, and revolutionaries currently serving as its active ingredient.

The pendulum must be allowed to swing back the other way. It cannot reach equilibrium by any other means.

READ MORE from Scott McKay:

The Madman Cometh — And There’s Apparently No Stopping Him

The Spectacle Ep. 258: Democrats Don’t Want Donald Trump to Save DC

Five Quick Things: Correcting A Botched Census? I Voted For That!