While we speak, a jealous age will have fled.
Seize the day! Trust as little as you can in tomorrow.
The Latin poet Horace’s advice of carpe diem— to seize the day and not worry about tomorrow — should be Trump’s transitional guide.
The attacks on Trump won’t even wait until he takes office; they begin now, well apart from rioting in the streets. And they will continue to be of several types.
Of the personal sort, expect more “investigative” reporting and “speaking truth to power” op-eds about his tax returns, his supposed theft of the election, his purported instigation of turbulence and mayhem, his locker-room talks about women, his business conflicts of interests in office, Trump University, and so on — perhaps written from the high moral ground by the WikiLeaks journalists of the Mark Leibovich, Dana Milbank, Glenn Thrush, Wolf Blitzer, or Donna Brazile sort.
The nexus of attack will not be a dramatic scandalous revelation — it will be intended to induce bleeding from a thousand tiny nicks and cuts, all designed to reduce his moral authority and thus his ability to ratchet back the progressive decade.
Another trope, as we are now witnessing, will be of the hysterical policy brand: Trump will cook the planet, put y’all back in chains, conduct war on women, traumatize students, destroy dreamers — all the boilerplate extremism designed to put Trump on the defensive so that he will settle for half an agenda and “reach out” to cement his respectability as a “listener” before the court of D.C. fixtures, the campuses, the foundations, the think tanks, the media, the social circles of Silicon Valley and Wall Street.
The Siren strategy of the Left will also be to point out that his future is already destabilizing America — Trump must therefore reach out right now to the “disaffected” in the streets who are “hurting.” Thereby, he will “heal” the nation, if only he backs off from “right-wing” and “extremist” ideas of selling coal overseas or building a wall and taxing billions of dollars in remittance from illegal aliens to pay for it.
In extremis, the Left will call on its Never Trump counterparts of like class to convince Trump to play by the accustomed Washington rules of decorum and judicious discourse. In carrot-and-stick fashion, they might even begin to talk of Trump’s “surprising flexibility” or his “unexpected reasonableness” in hopes of watering down his agenda and leaving him addicted to more backhanded praises from the cultural elite.
Also expect to hear in the next 90 days that the idea of executive orders (of the Obama type) are in retrospect dangerous to the republic and destabilizing. Filibusters will again become essential, and as hallowed a Senate tradition as Harry Reid’s nuclear option will now be denounced as disruptive and nihilistic.
We will hear that the Supreme Court, after some rethinking, actually works just fine with eight justices for a while. Court nominations will be smeared as extremists and nuts. Frequent Trump press conferences with plenty of back and forth will be demanded as essential to the republic, as will be interviews with opposition networks such as MSNBC or CNN.
Reckless debt limits cannot be raised (as Obama pressured the Congress to do in 2011). There should be no New York Trump cronies in the Oval Office (in the manner of a Valerie Jarrett). If need be, Trump will be trashed as a golf-course junkie, decked out in bright-colored leisure clothes befitting his plutocratic and detached status.
