Last Christmas I bet Captain Walrus $100 that Trump was going to be President, and that he would beat Hillary “like a baby seal”, to steal a phrase from a southern Democrat political operative. Captain Walrus gleefully reminds me of the bet and looks forward to taking a crisp $100 from me, as I look forward to eating steak and wine on his money. People tend to become convinced of their views.
I have been watching the National Post in this regard with some wry amusement. Kelly McParland has been raving about Trump as a buffoon bigot anti-Christ. I used to concern myself with his views until I realized that he had abandoned being a journalist – a recorder of facts and analyzer of reality – and was acting under the influence of Trump Derangement Syndrome, as I am sure many other liberals and high minded people are.
Thus Michael Den Tandt’s column this morning was of considerable interest, for its evidence that the ideological ship of the National Post was beginning to make a slow course correction.
The day Donald J. Trump is sworn in as president of the United States, the received wisdom holds, pigs will fly and snowballs freeze in hell. But consider this: The received wisdom about The Donald has been wrong, dead wrong, at every previous turn. It may be wrong now.
If I were appraising these two men as military intelligence officers, I would have had McParland sent to the infantry for complete failure, and Den Tandt dressed down for failing to appreciate the correlation of forces soon enough.
- Trump is sweeping US primaries, pulling in two million more votes than Romney did in the previous series.
- Positions that he took six months ago, such as paying to keep Syrian refugees in Turkey, were ridiculed at the time and constitute Angela Merkel’s policy today.
- Democrats are worried about Hillary both as a candidate and for her vulnerability to indictment on the keeping of official emails on a private server. (Only in the US, you say).
It is, to my mind, absolutely obvious that Trump will be the next US President. As Mudcat Saunders, the aforementioned southern Democrat operative, says:
“Working class whites in the South have already departed the Democratic Party for cultural reasons. Well the working class whites in the North are now deserting the Democrats because of economic reasons,” Mudcat told TheDC. He added, “this is the new age of economic populism, man. This is about survival for a lot of people.”
He added, “Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have very similar messages; they’re just dressed in different clothes. I think you’re going to see a lot of Sanders people jump to Trump.”