1,176 words
Holy Hannah. This next election is shaping up to be a zoo. We have Biden, a veritable zombie dependent on his ambient ventriloquists and more Adderall than Cornell in exam week. There is Kamala, so close to nonexistent that we could send her home and just keep her nameplate. No one would notice. And then we have . . .
Oh, God.
Trump.
The man is an odd fish. He has the earmarks of a psychopath: glib, grandiose, risk-taker, arch manipulator, apparently lacking empathy. He is also the best pure political mechanic America has ever produced.
Think about it. He was almost unknown outside New York City except through a cheesy reality show on television. He had no governmental experience, no political backing. So he comes down the escalator and says he is running for President. Hoots of laughter from the usual suspects. He then campaigns against heated opposition of both parties, the media, and academia.
And wins.
You can’t do this. It is impossible. You need a vast political machine. Endorsements. Testimonials from half-educated narcissists in Hollywood. That sort of thing. You can’t just decide to be President, as if it were something amusing to do on a slow afternoon — and do it. You just can’t.
And, ye gods and little catfish, he may do it again. Multiply indicted, facing possible jail time, censored on the web, savagely attacked by the ruling establishment — yet maintaining a massive following. It’s genius. Evil genius, you may say, but genius.
So how did he pull it off? The answer seems to me obvious, but when I try to explain it to my rabidly liberal friends in Washington, I can’t. They always grow heated and rave about how horrible Trump is. Yeah, yeah, I say, horrible, no doubt about it, yeah, just like Hitler, eats children, but don’t you see what happened? No, they don’t. Which is why they may do it again.
Here you have to understand Washington, where I slaved for many years in the salt mines of journalism. First, it is homogeneous. In the federal bubble, those in the media all think the same things with the slight exception, sometimes, of FOX News. They talk to each other, drink together, read each other. Everyone they know agrees with them, so they must be right, and aren’t they the hypersophisticated national press corps?
Further, Washington is comfortably secure. It doesn’t know or care that most of America is not. Federal employment, unlike true love, is forever. Lobbyists, K Street lawyers, and so on live in mansions in Great Falls. They don’t have to choose between paying the cable bill and buying a new coat as winter comes. They don’t notice, or care, that many do. Unfortunately, they don’t have to worry that Congress might be off-shored to China, which Beijing would likely regard as an act of war. Might be worth a shot anyway.
Yet further, they are intensely snobbish without knowing it, not in person but in having a powerful sense of class superiority. Almost all are college grads, often with advanced degrees. They know important people, dine at elegant restaurants, and don’t know anyone who can’t. Of the many I have known of the Washington well-off, I doubt that even one knew an enlisted soldier, or a guy who drove an 18-wheeler for a living, or a policeman or anyone who ran a down-scale bar — that is, anyone who would vote for Trump. Hillary caught this contempt perfectly, calling these low-order Americans deplorables.
You can buy Greg Johnson’s The Year America Died here.
Add that Washington is socially isolated, sometimes being described as a federal enclave surrounded on all four sides by reality. There is a lot of America out there in America. No matter how many times you eat at a posh Turkish restaurant on the Hill, you still don’t know how things are in Flint or Wheeling, even if you have dessert.
Which brings us back to Trump. He either read the country astutely, or made an inspired guess, He seems to have sensed the hatred — not too strong a word — of the geographic middle for the coastal elites whose policies have devastated Flyover Land.
Permit me a digression. Long ago, I worked for Soldier of Fortune magazine, started by Bob Brown and purporting to be a magazine for mercenary soldiers. The nicenesses in Washington and New York boiled over. They denounced it furiously. With every denunciation, circulation went up. It was free advertising that Bob couldn’t have bought with ten million dollars. The reason was that the targeted readers were Vietnam vets who for various reasons hated the smug bastards, as they saw them, who had run the war.
When the media rail against Donald, as they do non-stop, they are campaigning for him but are too stupid to figure it out. So great is the loathing of deplorables for Washington, and all of its friends and allies, and days and works, that they would vote for Jack the Ripper over any of the city’s candidates. Me, too.
But I wander. This is a column about incomprehension. On a recent trip to the Potomac playpen, I found the talking heads gloating, cackling, and swooning with joy over Trump’s indictment because, wow! This will end his electoral prospects. They were shocked, appalled, horrified, and related participles when his numbers — went up!
This is a marvel. The inmates of America’s most political city don’t have a retarded gerbil’s understanding of the country they live in, and on. The Bidens are corrupt as three-day-old catfish in hot weather, and the media almost completely avoid noticing. They pile on Trump confirming everything the Deplorables think about the media. Trump’s numbers didn’t go up despite the indictments, but because of them.
Note that, before Trump, the Deplorables had no political representation. Republicans and Democrats, indistinguishable heads on a bicephalous body, prattled routine platitudes the Deplorables knew were empty air, but in a one-party state, what choice did they have?
No fools, they could see that none in Washington gave a starveling damn about things crucial to them. For example, the offshoring of factories and the jobs that fed their families. Or the encouragement of massive immigration of people who would work for five dollars an hour while the Deplorables had mortgagees to feed. Or the overwhelming preference for wars over expenditure on the United States. This latter, I promise, Trump will wield like a meat ax in the campaign, and what will Joe’s ventriloquists have him say?
Washington hasn’t figured this out or it would modify its cliché mix. The likes of MSNBC rail and rail and rail against Trump, talking to lawyer after lawyer, who all seem to know each other. Call Trump all the derogatory names you like. Many will be accurate. But he is the cause of the night horrors in Washington, a candidate not under control of the Two-Headed Monoparty. He might do any goddam thing, such as end the war. Do you know what that would do to share prices at Lockheed-Martin?
Anyway, like I say, the best pure political mechanic the country has produced.
* * *
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23 comments
Great take Fred. Welcome aboard. I’ve been reading you for years and always loved your perspective.
Good one! The bit about offshoring Congress to China was priceless 🙂
I always said that Fred Reed was the best writer Taki’s Mag ever had, myself included.
I remember him being a witty writer who provided somewhat of a counterbalance to the race realists like Sailer and Derbyshire.
Taki’s is a mess. I tried searching ‘Fred Reed’ on the site and got none of his articles. Then I searched, ‘Fred Reed Takimag’ into Google and of course, his articles are at the top of the page.
I’m glad you’re now writing for a competent site, Jim.
What exactly has Trump produced?
A ratings bonanza for network media.
It was a pleasant surprise to see your byline on Counter-Currents and I hope there will be more of it – you are certainly a colorful character and I enjoyed especially your appearance on Jared Taylor’s podcast
Fred Reed gave a talk at the 2008 American Renaissance conference.
With Trump, the ruling class forgot Napoleon’s dictum that you should never interupt your enemy when he is busy making a mistake.
After failing to get even a simple barrier wall built as President and then leading his supporters into an obvious trap on January 6th, Trump was on his way down. The Washington elite should have allowed him to fade into bloviating irrelevance.
But by their heavy-handed indictments and punishment of Trump and his followers, the ruling class has destroyed the rule of law and turned Trump and his fellows into political prisoners and martyrs, and has convinced the rest of the deplorables that “We’re next.”
These guys are brilliant: Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine . . . and now America.
Welcome aboard, Fred Reed!
As for Trump, the official Republicans, being a wholly owned subsidiary of DC, have the same effect; just by talking, they pump up his numbers. This just in:
Trump Lead Widens After Second GOP Presidential Debate: Poll
“63% of potential Republican primary voters support Donald Trump for the GOP’s 2024 presidential nomination, up from 58% in our survey released Monday ahead of the latest primary debate,” Morning Consult said in its survey released on Sept. 29. In comparison, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, seen as Mr. Trump’s biggest rival, saw his support dip from 15 percent to 12 percent after the second debate, though the Florida governor is still in second place.” https://www.zerohedge.com/political/trump-lead-widens-after-second-gop-presidential-debate-poll
Trump is so big, his very absence is a presence.
Fred lives. Great to see he’s still somewhere. I know he was chased away from Unz by ‘mean’ commenters and probably from Taki for the same reason when Miss Taki still allowed comments. Hopefully he sticks around here.
Fred left Taki after he was edited. They were warned that they shouldn’t edit him, but they didn’t listen.
You’re joking, right? No one’s beyond editing.
No, I’m not joking. Fred had no problem with grammar being corrected, but if you had any idea of how editorially clueless Taki’s daughter is, any editing for “taste” or suchlike was a crime against humanity.
Okay, okay. Point taken.
Ron Unz is an enemy of whites. Just an insane Libertarian who thinks demographics “do not matter” and just wants endless brown. foreign labor to make people like him more wealthy.
Why any white person pays any attention to Unz or even posts there is beyond me. Most of the posters there are fake Jews posing as blacks anyway.
He was almost unknown outside New York City except through a cheesy reality show on television.
He was?? I’ve never lived anywhere near NYC and I distinctly remember hearing about him, seeing him on talk shows, and hearing him discussed in everyday conversation by people I knew since at least the late 80s. In fact, he even discussed running for president in the late 80s or early 90s and made some comment about how confident he was that he would win.
The Hombre from Chapala lives? This is awesome. At some point I lost track and concluded that Frederico was either done or gone.
Glad to see he’s joined Doc Johnson’s wrecking crew.
This is the same Fred Reed who writes on Amren every once in awhile, right? Smoking the cigar?
I enjoyed the commentary about the “federal bubble” and how the anti-Trump people don’t realize that the more they fume about Trump the more they rile up his base. What the establishment media don’t get is that for a lot of people these four indictments appear to be a judicial junta. Trump’s presidency was largely subverted at virtually every angle with the now debunked Russia collusion conspiracy theory being chief among the subversion and artifice.
I don’t think the establishment realizes the hell they will unleash if they put Trump in jail. This is a Pandora’s box that is better left closed. Let the subversive judge in the New York fraud case us a legal sophistry and artifice strip Trump of his business license and force him out of New York City and we’ll call it even. Speaking of which, anyone know why there is a judge ruling in this case and not a jury?
The DC and liberal bubbles indeed have little concept of what lies outside their communities. Trump can definitely win again. The problem is, then what? He will probably have twice the opposition of his first term and will accomplish much less. The lockdowns, the mostly peaceful protests, etc, began in his years in office. He talks big like a bull about to go stud a valley of cows. But he will be so mired in lawsuits and protests he doesn’t realize he’s was neutered some time ago.
Genuinely curious. Do people here actually believe in elections and polls again? Have you forgotten 2016 and 2020 already? I can’t take any of it seriously ever again. There is zero chance they will let him win. Even if they did Biden would absolutely win outright fair and square this time because people have not forgotten the media circus that they themselves consumed to mental illness. They are voting against a return to their own personal vice. They don’t care what Biden is or isn’t because the corporate media has demonstrated it will not cover any Biden controversies, even to the point of losing revenue because we live in a late-stage neoliberal era now where profits are secondary.
I think that Trump is like an underdog. The media and other politicians are constantly abusing him and trying to destroy his political campaigns. Everyone loves an underdog. He understands ordinary people. He also has not worked all the time in politics. He has had other careers. I think that this gives him more insight into real life and ordinary people. He has used swear words but politics is about policy more than manners! He is a bit like Pauline Hanson in Australia. She understands ordinary people. I hope that he wins in 2024. Good luck Trump!!! No one else will stand up for the deplorables!
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