It's Yuge!

The campaign is over and the election has been won--nearly.  I write this the day before the Electoral College meets to finalize the results of the 2016 election of our next President.  Yes, it will be Donald Trump, a fact that is both a heartening victory and an enormous relief.  I sincerely doubt there will be more than a small handful of Electors who defect from their sworn obligation to vote for Donald Trump as the 45th President of our Republic; it would be their own political suicide as who would ever again trust them in any office.  Certainly not on the flimsy accusations and innuendo proferred without proof by the Progressivists.

I started out being open minded about Trump--I grew to maturity in New York City and was well aware of Trump long before he took to the national stage in The Apprentice.   He was glamorous, larger-than-life, brash, egotistical and yet undeniably effective in the field of building and real estate. I remember my beautiful late wife's quip to a visitor who saw from our apartment windows one of his towers rising.  "Oh, that's Donald Trump's latest erection."

I remember vividly the appalling debacle of the Wollman skating rink in Central Park that lay unused and un-repaired for six long years under a moribund (Democrat) city government until Trump fixed it in six months and under budget.  The Radio City rink is a small and expensive skating venue. Wollman was where everyday New Yorkers and their families skated.

So I started out skeptical but interested.  Uncontrolled immigration had me worried sick; an endless supply of new, cheap workers for business and the next several generations of Democrat voters in the

making is what I feared. Neither Democrat nor establishment Republican wanted it stopped.  The nattering classes at the myriad Conservative think tanks and idea magazines were utterly deaf to any nay saying about it (except Kevin Williamson at NRO who famously wished the white middle-class would die).  The end of America as a productive colossus and home to a thriving middle class was a vision that haunted me.


Democrats tout themselves as the party of the poor. They are correct.  Poor people are desperate, frightened and open to becoming addicted to government largess. Does it surprise anyone then that Democrats pursue policies that shackle job production at home and then champion the mass importation of poor from abroad?  They want as many Americans as they can to be poor and needy because they stand ready with other people's open wallets to fill those needs.

My hesitation to be a full-throated supporter of Trump early on was that I was unsure of his motives. I went into this election cycle with only two absolutes, both negative.  No to Marco Rubio, in return
for his Gang of Eight betrayal; and "Hell No" to Jeb! Bush, for his stance on immigration, but also because I detest the idea that politics in America become the preserve of a few elite families.  There is a word for government that becomes the hereditary occupation of a few families and it's "aristocracy." (That same logic applies to Hillary as well, but she had other and more copious negatives.)  Besides, the Bush family have supplied Republicans chiefly with disappointment in their last two times at bat. We owe them NOTHING.  And despite the Texas patina, they are really still Connecticut Yankee liberal Republicans and elitists in outlook.  I doubt they are on speaking terms with any individual with a net worth of less than $10 million except for servants.  Not exactly the best stewards of middle class American hopes.

I thought Trump's run might be simply a publicity stunt or an ego trip.  But there he was, articulating policies I found myself nodding in agreement with; echoing the doubts I've had this last decade about the future of this country I love.  The more I listened, the more convinced I was.  And he was attracting more and more people to his message; pragmatically, he might just have a shot.  He worked at it, tirelessly.

Rick Wilson accidentally reveals his favorite hobby.

And he took fearful hits from the Democrats, from their co-conspirators in the media and from what I called the Karl Rove Wing of the Republican Party, what has since been dubbed the "donor class." Those are the "right" enemies for someone who wants to revitalize America.  He took them, shrugged them off and kept going.  That impressed me.  This was no ego trip; no one works this hard for simple thrills.  When he began to lose real money from cancelled contracts because of his stated positions and still kept going, I was convinced.  Money and success obviously mean a lot to his view of himself; to give those up so willingly meant there was something else that was driving him.


So I began to defend him on Twitter and in the comment sections of articles.  When we went into primary season, he did well in Iowa, but Ted Cruz had staked out that heavily-religious state and worked it extremely well.  But Trump didn't do badly either.  The catfight between Cruz and Trump started getting really rough and so it was in the venues I mentioned.  The attacks and counter-punches were harsh and brutal, I won't rekindle those fires herein.  I gave as good as I got; maybe a little better.

That's not to say Trump didn't give me the occasional cringe with some of the things he said; he did.  I didn't agree with more than a few of his utterances.  But I'm from Queens like Donald; I get what he was doing maybe better than some others:  he was fighting a maneuver war.  He knew the media would be in the tank for Hillary and that they would want to hang some all-defining label on his policies and on him.  Hang it and then dismiss him, calling in left-wing yet putatively "objective" professional talking heads, clandestine Hillary allies, to "analyze" and then belittle the labels they had assigned him.  That's what has worked against establishment types like Romney and McCain and would really work on the Millennials coming of age for the first time who had been raised in the fact-free zone of modern education under the Obama regime's Education Department.  Labels define how they see others.  But Trump wouldn't co-operate.  You had to tune him in each day to find out what he was saying.  And in doing that, and using Twitter more than any other Republican would ever think to do, he talked right over the heads of the media and directly to America; and the media were so stunned they unwittingly helped him do it.

The rallies astonished and emboldened me.  He would address overflowing crowds of thousands
talking off the top of his head for 90 minutes, actively getting people on his side with the chants and even using hecklers to his advantage.  Openly belittling the enemy amongst them:  the media.  No teleprompter, no focus grouped scripts; when Hillary did that she came out with the phrase that may have knocked more undecideds into the Trump camp than anything:  "Basket of Deplorables" became the war cry of the forgotten electorate.


Well, they remember us now.  

(more later)