If Donald Trump regains the White House this will still be a different country than the one I was born into. That country ceased to exist after 2001. That was when the people who ran this country decided that they had the cover to take over everything in our lives and leave us nothing but the bills. And in 2009 when Obama entered the White House he stood over the corpse of our country and buried it once and for all.
So, whatever happens going forward we live in a different place. But some of the people who made up the Old America are still kicking around. You can tell when Donald Trump scores an enormous win in Iowa. It took 37 minutes to declare Trump the winner. With about 37% of the vote in he’s got 52% of the votes to something like 20% apiece for DeSantis and Haley. People know who’s on their side.
So, you can see the demographic outline of the Old America by the places where Trump is doing well; places like Iowa and the Midwest and the South. And so, we’ll recognize that the Old America is a layer submerged in the new. It’s like a layer of pebbles that is all made of one mineral but then another mineral dissolved in water leaches into the stratum and forms a matrix around the pebbles and encases them in a sediment. We’re still here but in new surroundings, a new reality.
The only question to ask then is what can be made of this new place. Will the elites who drove this replacement manage to destroy us? I suppose that’s what we’ll find out. They’ve done a pretty thorough job of lousing up most of the things that still worked in this country. They croaked about half of the small businesses around the cities during the pandemic they orchestrated. They’ve ignited inflation and made life awful for the working class. They’ve consigned the children of the middle-class to the under-class. And they’ve sent most of the manufacturing jobs to Asia. I won’t even bother with the forever wars because even the Millennials and Zoomers are hopping mad about those because they might be the ones to have to fight them. So, all of this is waiting in the wings to see who gets the White House in November.
And to keep us amused until then we get to watch the spectacle of the Republican donors and the RNC spending tens of millions of dollars to try to convince voters that Nikki Haley is one of them. Not since Hillary Clinton started speaking in tongues and tried to convince black voters that she was just a poor old cotton-picker from Arkansas have we witnessed phonier “aw-shucks, we’re just folks” play acting. Well, I know Nikki said that Hillary was her inspiration and template. I think she’s reached her goal. All she lacks is the cackle.
So, let’s see how these primaries go. New Hampshire is probably going to be Haley’s high-water mark. All the Dems will voter for her since there isn’t going to be a Democrat primary to speak of. It’ll be fun to listen to the various talking heads try to parse this thing and give Nikki all the hopeful coverage they can until Trump reaches the finish line on Super Tuesday, March 5th. That’s seven weeks. Forty-nine days of listening to halfwits explaining how Nikki Haley would bury Joe Biden but Donald Trump doesn’t stand a chance. I’m sure MSNBC, CNN and PBS will have graphs and power point presentations and even holograms to prove all this.
I hope there is plenty of entertainment value to all this. I could use a laugh. In fact, Old America could use a laugh. We haven’t had one in years.
Great essay
Thank you.