It’s Now or Never

I was never a Trump guy. But Trump is who we have. And we’d better deal with it. We have a very narrow window to undo a tremendous catastrophic mess. We’ve been given a brief stay, a reprieve– not a pardon.

Trump gives us one short opportunity to attack the gigantic problems that are strangling America. If the Republicans do not deliver, if we do not work together, if we bicker and divide on level 3 issues, we’re finished.

We probably have less than one year to address the debt, a declining middle class, immigration, the administrative state, supreme court appointments, Obamacare, and these are for starters.

Anything can upset the very tenuous advantage that we have right now. If the stock market crashes, if the Iranians explode a bomb, if another 9/11 occurs, you name it, the fragile conditions that exist right now will dissolve away and everything, that allows us to indulge the hope that we can save our country will vanish instantly.

It is now or never.

The Republicans must work with Trump to hog-tie the administrative state, to return to a constitutional budgetary process, to get the right people on the courts, to lower taxes rates to spur economic growth, to stop the out of control spending and staunch the the flood of undocumented aliens into our country–all this must be done and it must be done fast.

I am doubtful that Trump can do what he has promised. But if he fails, it must not be for want of Republican allegiance.

Trump is a Nationalist. He is not a classic free-market, free trade conservative. And we’d better get used to that fact. Whether we like it or not, the new Republican Party, the party that includes the rust belt, must be protectionist to some degree. If we want to keep and develop a new Republican coalition we’d better understand that Trump and the Republicans MUST make good on promises to Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. I am a free trader. But we’d better let that go for very pragmatic reasons. There is no future for the Republican Party without this new Trump Coalition. To quibble, and I mean quibble, about whether he puts pressure of Carrier, or whether he is for child care or paid leave, seems to me to be discussing whether to save the china on the Titanic. Our country is in BIG, BIG, BIG trouble.

If Mitch McConnell is unwilling to exert the nuclear option in overcoming cloture, and that unwillingness stops the Trump agenda, it only means that the Republican Party has chosen suicide.

It is now or never.

There will be NO other time or opportunity to reverse the course we are on. If Trump fails, we fail. Because the issues are way beyond how much we spend or whether Trumps want to invest in “infrastructure.” The issue is whether we can get our Constitution back, whether Congress can reassert control of the Bureaucratic state, whether we can put jurists on the Court that will rule for and not against the Constitution–and all this must be done BEFORE the whole bloated, over-taxed, bankrupt mess collapses and leaves us a broken European castrate.

All other issues must yield to the resurrection and preservation of our Constitutional Order.

If we divide on anything that does not move us quickly toward dismantling the massive intrusiveness of the state, issues about leave and WIC and infrastructure will seem absurdly quaint in retrospect.

It’s now or never. We have a slender narrowing window. We must deliver. And it must be done immediately.