Ruling class

On September 18, 2017 Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) delivered the address at Hillsdale College’s Eighth Annual Constitution Day Celebration. His address “Immigration in the National Interest” is one of the most powerful analyses we have seen of why President Trump won the election and the power of economic nationalism.

The MAGA Coalition mission statement says it will reach out to everyday Americans and build an unprecedented model of grassroots activism. If they succeed, and we hope they do, no longer will we have to stand by and let the entrenched powers that be in the establishment dictate our future with apathy and inaction.

Shak Hill in VA-10 and State Representative Barry Moore in AL-2 are getting the attention of conservative handicappers in their campaigns against establishment congressional incumbents and we look forward to more principled limited government constitutional conservative candidates taking the fight to other “white flag” incumbents in other House districts.

More than 98% agreed that the establishment should be blacklisted by Trump, given their lack of loyalty and the probability that they would become part of the army of anti-Trump leakers in the government.

The problem with all of this establishment Republican virtue-signaling and the establishment media calls for civility is that they only go one way. Neither before nor after President Trump hit Brzezinski and Scarborough like a ton of bricks did anyone in the establishment call for civility to the President.

Trump ran in 2016 not simply as the Republican alternative. He presented his candidacy as a rejection, a repudiation of the failed elites, political and media, of both parties. Americans voted in 2016 not just for a change in leaders but for a revolution to overthrow a ruling regime. Thus this city has never reconciled itself to Trump’s victory, and the president daily rubs their noses in their defeat with his tweets.

The great irony here is that this has left Democrats increasingly choosing undemocratic means to get what they want. From President Obama’s boast that he would use his pen and phone to bypass Congress to the progressive use of the Supreme Court as its preferred legislature to the Iran and climate deals that made end runs around the Constitution, it all underscores one thing: The modern American progressive has no faith in the democratic process because he has no trust in the American people.

The “threat” that has Washington quaking is the first serious effort in a long time to curb federal regulatory power, wasteful spending, and a propensity to run up mountainous budget deficits and debt. That’s presumably what the voters wanted when they elected Donald Trump. Democrats—accurately regarded as the party of government—seem to fear that Mr. Trump might actually, against all odds, pull it off.

There is a deep divide in the United States, and it isn’t blue-red or liberal-conservative. It’s between those who believe in applying the law as it exists and those who think they have the right — through various government authorities — to ignore laws they don’t like. Once the law is whatever any authority says it is, the result is chaos. Let’s stick with the Constitution. It has worked since 1789.

The public no longer believes that privilege and influence should be predicated on titles, brands, and buzz, rather than on demonstrable knowledge and proven character. The idea that brilliance can be manifested in trade skills or retail sales, or courage expressed by dealing with the hardship of factory work, or character found on an Indiana farm, is foreign to the Washington Beltway, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley.

What upsets the ruling class about Trump is not his “indecent” past but his infidelity to it. They liked him better when he was supporting abortion and appearing on the Howard Stern show. Now that he is undoing the Mexico City policy and appearing in the company of Christian pastors, he is intolerable. How dare his press secretary call on the Christian Broadcasting Network before CNN, pundits pouted on Monday.

Many in the liberal intelligentsia penned morose letters to the future about what a Trump victory might mean and a few, such as National Public Radio personality Garrison Keillor, delivered vitriolic attacks on their fellow Americans for electing Trump. However, a few, such as Michael Wolff and Glenn Greenwald, seem to get the meaning of the Trump movement and victory.

Prognostication and punditry are a business in which the blind lead the blind and they usually fail upward. Trump defied the elite’s assumptions at almost every turn and won not so much in spite of that scorn but because of it.

Jamie Weinstein a “senior writer” at The Daily Caller proposes another #NeverTrump fraternity house prank: Republicans simply "surrendering" our country to Hillary Clinton.

The sense that people like this—a mix of knaves and fools—are running both parties has a lot to do with the anger that fueled both the Sanders and the Trump campaigns. There’s a spiritual disease at work in this, and over time it has the ability to wreck not just individual souls, but our free institutions and the rule of law itself.

Political elites have convinced us to settle for less, but the GOP should be about striving for more.