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A Trumpocalypse? Oh do grow up It is the anti-Trump set that is trading reason for emotionalism. Brendan O’Neill

There’s a dark irony to the somewhat swirling media response to Trump’s victory. For months now, observers have been telling us that Trump’s army is motored more by feeling than reason. Trumpism is a movement based on ‘untrammelled emotion’ over ‘reason [and] empiricism’, said Andrew Sullivan. Trump makes ‘sly appeals to… human irrationality’, said Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert cartoon. Like all of history’s demagogues, Trump conjures ‘vivid images and intense emotions’, said a writer for the Conversation. Especially in relation to security: apparently he plays on people’s feelings of ‘uncertainty or instability’.

Yet now, as Trump’s victory shocks the world, or at least that portion of it that lives in its own echo chamber, who is it that’s exhibiting ‘untrammelled emotion’? Who’s conjuring up ‘vivid images’ and ‘intense emotions’, particularly with regard to security? It isn’t Trump’s supporters, most of whom went from the ballot box back to their everyday lives. It’s the anti-Trump set. It’s those who spent months claiming Trump supporters lack the mental and moral equipment necessary for ‘reasoned deliberation’. Many of these rather elitist politicos and observers are behaving in a way that makes even the most hot-headed Trump cheerer look perfectly rational in comparison.

The emotionalism of their response has been intense. ‘“I feel hated”, I tell my husband, sobbing in front of the TV in my yoga pants and Hillary sweatshirt’, said an American columnist in the Guardian. Former UK foreign secretary Margaret Beckett says Trump’s victory feels like ‘the end of the world’ (bit rich coming from a woman who voted for the Iraq War in 2003). Emotion over reason is widespread: the Washington Post reports that ‘mobs of tearful students’ are protesting against Trump’s win; some American universities are providing counselling for those ‘traumatised’ by Trump; celebs including Miley Cyrus and Perez Hilton have issued videos of themselves weeping over Trump’s victory, which have been shared hundreds of thousands of times by similarly frazzled Hillary backers.

Even worse than the emotionalism is the apocalypticism. Trump conjures up ‘vivid images’ to exploit people’s feelings of ‘uncertainty’? Yes, he does, but not as intensively as anti-Trump observers have been doing. British historian Simon Schama said Trump’s victory will ‘hearten fascists all over the world’ and is reminiscent of Hitler’s rise. Trump’s victory is the ‘greatest calamity to befall the West since World War II’, says Guardian columnist Owen Jones, clearly having never experienced the deprivations of 1970s recession or 1980s class conflict. Cheap, history-exploiting Hitler comparisons are rife: protesters hold up pictures of Trump with a Hitler moustache while celebs cry over America becoming like ‘Germany in the 1930s’.

The Pendulum Swings Leftward for the Democrats – And That’s Good News for Donald Trump

1. The Parties and the Pendulum

For the Democrats, the news is bad—and it’s about to get worse. Why? Because the ideological pendulum is swinging the Democrats to a far-left place, and a political party doesn’t win from the wings.

To be sure, no ideological swing is permanent, but for the next four years, it seems likely that the Democrats will push themselves leftward, to un-electability at the presidential level.

I’ll get to this pendulum-swinging in a moment, but first, let’s establish the current partisan baseline: In addition to Donald Trump winning the White House, the House Republicans will have 238 seats in the next Congress, and Senate Republicans will have 51. Meanwhile, out in the states, the GOP will control 33 governorships and 67 legislative chambers.

To further illustrate the hole that the Democrats find themselves in, here’s a chart from The Washington Post, which shows that in the last eight years, Democrats have lost 10.2 percent of their Senate seats, 19.3 percent of their House seats, 20.3 percent of their legislatures, and 35.7 percent of their governorships. We can add: These are the lowest Democratic numbers since 1928.

In the caustic words of Post reporter Philip Bump, “That whistling sound you hear is the party Thelma-and-Louise-ing.” Movie fans will recognize that as a reference to the ending scene in the 1991 movie Thelma and Louise, in which the title characters drive off a cliff, plunging to their death.

So what happened? It seemed like only yesterday that the MSM, and the chattering classes overall, were certain that Hillary Clinton was destined for a decisive victory, possibly even a landslide. Yet now, not so much.

So today, the Democrats have something they didn’t particularly wish for: the opportunity for an “agonizing reassessment.” The problem is that such reassessments don’t always end up improving the situation—sometimes they make things worse.

As former CNN pundit Bill Schneider liked to say, an election defeat gives the losing party a chance to “fix” whatever went wrong. The big question, of course, is, “What needs fixing?” And now the post-mortem “autopsy” reports as to the needed fix are coming, one might say, fast and furious.

To be sure, a few Hillary loyalists declare that their woman lost because of “sexism,” or some other retrograde “-ism.” Many more Clintonites blame FBI Director James Comey; shadowy Clinton operative Sidney Blumenthal has gone so far as to claim that the election was a “coup d’etat” staged by “a cabal of right-wing agents of the FBI in the New York office attached to Rudy Giuliani.” Okay, so that’s the thinking of a few Clintonite dead-enders.

Meanwhile, most Democrats, and their barely-undercover allies in the MSM, are coming around to the view that Hillary was a deeply flawed candidate. Here, for example, is the analysis of Politico’s Glenn Thrush, writing that the failure of Clinton’s campaign was:

…proof that a conventional candidate can do practically everything by the numbers (win debates, raise the most cash, assemble the greatest data and voter outreach effort in history) and still fall to a movement impelled by raw emotion, not calculation.

Hillary Clinton Won the Illegal Vote Written by: Diana West

About that popular vote victory the Left is claiming over Donald Trump.

The latest tallies show that after millions of Americans citizens, fraudsters and non-citizens voted for president, Donald Trump won 59,704,886 votes and Hillary Clinton won 59,938,290.

That’s 233,304 more votes in Hillary’s column. But is this margin of popular victory the will of legally registered American voters?

In 2014, three political scientists from Old Dominion University and George Mason University looked back at earlier elections to study whether any of an estimated 19.4 million adult non-citizens in the US voted in the 2008 election. After much surveying, sampling and extrapolating, their best guess — the “adjusted estimate” — was to suggest that a whopping 1.2 million non-citizens cast ballots, and cast mainly Democrat ballots, in the 2008 election that brought Barack Obama into the White House.

The impact of such fraud, they write, included the following:

We find that there is reason to believe non-citizen voting changed one state’s Electoral College votes in 2008, delivering North Carolina to Obama, and that non-citizen votes have also led to Democratic victories in congressional races including a critical 2008 Senate race [Al Franken’s] that delivered for Democrats a 60-vote filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

No doubt there remains number-crunching to do on the 2016 election, especially when it comes to states and districts that were won by narrow margins of victory. It seems eminently fair, however, to deduce that Clinton’s margin of popular victory, typically and fittingly, was illegal.

When the Trump Team Comes Looking for the Secrets of Obama’s Iran File By Claudia Rosett

Thursday’s cordial meeting between President-elect Donald Trump and President Barack Obama was a reassuring ritual of democracy. But Obama was far from convincing when he told Trump “we are now going to do everything we can to help you succeed.” There are some highly disparate ideas here about what constitutes success, both foreign and domestic. There are also big areas in which one might reasonably wonder if Obama and his team are in a quandary over the prospect of a Trump administration inheriting the internal records of the most transparent administration ever.

Take, for instance, the Iran nuclear deal, Obama’s signature foreign policy legacy, the chief accomplishment of his second term. The Obama administration’s Iran file has been a realm of murk, crammed with dangerous concessions and secret side deals for terror-sponsoring Tehran — to a degree that has left some critics wondering if Obama’s real aim was to empower Iran as the hegemon of the Middle East (equipped with ballistic missiles to complement its “exclusively peaceful” nuclear program).

The cherry on top — officially separate from the nuclear deal, but highly coincident — was the Obama administration’s secret conveyance to Iran early this year of cash totaling $1.7 billion for the settlement of an old claim against the United States.

Like Obama’s other legacy achievement, the unaffordable Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, these Iran dealings were so intricate, extensive and opaque that we are still discovering just how duplicitous the official narratives were. Obama never submitted the Iran nuclear deal as a treaty for ratification by the Senate. Instead, he rushed the deal to the United Nations Security Council for approval less than a week after the final text was announced, and left Congress wrestling through the ensuing weeks, during the summer of 2015, to try to extract vital details from the elusive Obama and his team, subject to a legislative bargain so convoluted that the process, and the deal, never came to a vote.

Effective Immigration Law Enforcement Under Trump Leaders must follow Trump’s lead or risk alienating their constituents. Michael Cutler

Now that the 2016 Presidential election is literally and figuratively in the history books, candidate Trump must begin the process of transforming into President Trump so that he can implement his goals to “Make America great again.”

Donald Trump has also promised to “Make America safe again” and “Make America wealthy again.”

Trump’s historic rise to power was, in no small measure, the direct result of those promises in addition to the promise to construct a wall along the border that is supposed to separate the United States from Mexico to keep out rapists, murderers and narcotics.

From the beginning of his effort to become America’s 45th President, Donald Trump, the highly successful billionaire, quickly realized that the key to resolving most of the threats and challenges we face was effective immigration law enforcement.

Trump was highly critical of the H-1b Visa Program that enables tens of thousands of foreign high-tech workers to displace American workers and also promised to use “Extreme vetting” to make certain that no aliens, especially those who are citizens of countries that sponsor terrorism would not be admitted into the United States unless our government could be certain as to their identities and the fact that they did not pose a threat to our safety.

Trump Blows Up Received Political Wisdom But political roadblocks may be ahead. November 11, 2016 Bruce Thornton

Donald Trump’s improbable victory on June 8 exploded much of the received political wisdom, especially political correctness, that many Republicans had considered an immutable inhibitor of policy reform. Now we will see if the deeper structural changes of the past decades created by political correctness can be corrected.

As the rhetoric of the NeverTrumpers revealed, identity politics ideology about various subgroups in America had been accepted as truth. Many so-called conservatives endorsed dubious victim-narratives and group identities as realities that Republicans had to accept and adapt to. “Hispanics,” we were told, are the fastest growing minority, a demographic time-bomb that will shatter the Republican party unless it acknowledged their grievances and proposed remedies. Rhetoric criticizing illegal aliens was counterproductive and “insensitive,” if not racist. Hence in 2013 the bipartisan “Gang of Eight” put forth a “comprehensive” immigration bill that set a low bar for illegal aliens to become citizens, without first ensuring that the border be controlled or putting in place stringent mechanism for vetting applicants. Yet despite those drawbacks, many Republicans, believed that such legislation would create good will and future votes among “Hispanics.”

For obvious reasons, these efforts did nothing to increase the Republican share of these voters in 2014 and help Mitt Romney. The first problem is that “Hispanics” don’t exist. In reality there is a complex diversity of peoples from various ethnicities and national cultures. A recent Mexican-Indian immigrant from Oaxaca who picks grapes has little in common with a third-generation Mexican-American who speaks little if any Spanish and works for the DMV. A Honduran Indian dishwasher has no solidarity with a Caucasian Cuban lawyer.

Like everybody else, these groups have diverse interests that may overlap, such as wanting government to provide more social welfare transfers, and give them a similar interest in voting for Democrats. But, as the cliché goes, thinking that bringing illegal aliens “out of the shadows” was the prime concern of these diverse millions was dubious at best, and contrary to most polling data that put this issue low on the list of concern for Hispanics. That may be why for all Trump’s allegedly “racist” and “xenophobic” rhetoric about illegal aliens, he did slightly better among Hispanic voters than did Mitt Romney.

ELIZABETH WARREN EMERGES FROM HER TEEPEE TO WARN AMERICA

Warren welcomes us to the Republic of Fear By James G. Wiles

As the dark night of Fascism descends across America, Fauxahontas yesterday addressed the barons of the AFL-CIO. She said:

“This wasn’t a pretty election. In fact, it was ugly, and we should not sugarcoat the reason why. Donald Trump ran a campaign that started with racial attacks and then rode the escalator down. He encouraged a toxic stew of hatred and fear. He attacked millions of Americans. And he regularly made statements that undermined core values of our democracy.

“And he won. He won — and now Latino and Muslim-American children are worried about what will happen to their families. LGBT couples are worried that their marriages could be dissolved by a Trump-Pence Supreme Court. Women are worried that their access to desperately needed health services will disappear. Millions of people in this country are worried, deeply worried. And they are right to be worried.”…

“We will stand up to bigotry. There is no compromise here,” she said. “In all its forms, we will fight back against attacks on Latinos, African Americans, women, Muslims, immigrants, disabled Americans-on anyone. Whether Donald Trump sits in a glass tower or sits in the White House, we will not give an inch on this, not now, not ever.”

The message is clear.

The Borking of Donald J. Trump has begun.

5 Ways Trump Shows How to Win Elections The future belongs to Republicans who care more about their voters than the media. Daniel Greenfield

What can Republicans learn from Trump’s victory? The biggest lesson is that the old way of politics is dead. McCain and Romney showed that twice. Now Trump has shown how Republicans can actually win.

1. Find Your Natural Base

The GOP is ashamed of its base. It doesn’t like being associated with the very voters who made 2016 happen. Its autopsy last time around searched for ways to leave the white working class behind.

There’s a party that did that. Their symbol is a jackass. They just lost big because they ran out of working class white voters.

The Democrats have tried to manufacture their base using immigration, victimhood politics and identity politics. The GOP has wasted far too much time trying to compete on the same playing field while neglecting its base. Trump won by doing what the GOP could have done all along if its leadership hadn’t been too ashamed to talk to people it considered low class because they shop at WalMart.

The GOP wanted a better image. It cringed at Trump’s red caps and his rallies. And they worked.

Trump won because he found the neglected base of working class white voters who had been left behind. He didn’t care about looking uncool by courting them. Instead he threw himself into it.

That’s why McCain and Romney lost. It’s why Bush and Trump won.

The GOP is not the cool party. It’s never going to be. It’s the party of the people who have been shut out, stepped on and kicked around by the cool people. Trump understood that. The GOP didn’t.

The GOP’s urban elites would like to create an imaginary cool party that would be just like the Democrats, but with fiscally conservative principles. That party can’t and won’t exist.

You can run with the base you have. Or you can lose.

2. Media and Celebrities Don’t Matter

The first rule of Republican politics is to look in the mirror and ask, “Are we trying to be Democrats?”

Twice Obama’s big glittering machine of celebrities, media and memes rolled over hapless Republicans. Republican operatives desperately wondered how they could run against Oprah, Beyonce and BuzzFeed. How were they supposed to survive being mocked by Saturday Night Live and attacked by the media?

The answer was to find voters who weren’t making their decisions based on any of those things.

The GOP’s approach in the last few elections was to try and duplicate the Obama machine. These efforts were clumsy, awkward, expensive and stupid. The Obama machine was great at influencing its target electorate of urban and suburban millennial college grads because that’s who ran it and directed it. But that’s not the Republican base. And chasing it was a waste of time, money and energy.

Instead of trying to duplicate the Obama machine, the Trump campaign targeted a class of voters who didn’t care about those things. The white working class that turned out for Trump was a world away from the cultural obsessions of the urban elites who had traditionally shaped both sets of campaigns.

Romney wanted everyone to like him. Being rejected hurt him so much because he wanted to be accepted. Trump ran as an outsider. Being rejected by the establishment was a badge of pride. He couldn’t be humiliated by being mocked by the cool kids because he wasn’t trying to be accepted.

Asking, “Are we trying to be Democrats?” isn’t just for policy. It’s also something for Republicans to remember when Election Day comes around. The Republican base isn’t the Democrat base. When Republicans commit to pursuing their base, they can stop worrying about what Saturday Night Live, Samantha Bee and random celebrities think of them. And they can just be themselves.

Out-Rigging the Vote Never Underestimate the inexplicable. By David Solway

There can be no doubt that the voting process was rigged against Donald Trump in more ways than one. According to reports, fiscal criminal and youthful Nazi collaborator George Soros’ vast fortune was in play to swing the election Hillary’s way, including fomenting violence at Trump’s rallies (for which Trump himself was blamed). Clinton cash, illegally gained, bankrolled a promotional campaign that blitzed the nation. Dead voters, multiple voters, illegal voters, and opportunely-pardoned felons, loyal Democrats all, were evident at the polls in considerable force, like the zombies swarming the last bastion of civilization in the 2016 film Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. “Today’s voter lists,” writes former into-tech management consultant Paul Murphy, “are generally thought to include something like 1.8 million dead voters, 6.4 million illegals, 1.8 million ineligible felons, and perhaps 2.7 million people registered to vote in more than one state.” And of course the polls were skewed in Hillary’s favor through selective sampling techniques in what is known as a psyops strategy to influence the behavior of voters, creating the impression that Clinton was gathering momentum.

And yet Trump won against the odds, prompting the question: Were there really enough votes in flyover country and leftover country to offset the oleaginous corruption greasing Hillary’s route to the White House and to discount the vote-rich conurbations and coastal corridors, the mentally vacant celebrity class, the entire left-liberal elite, the fraudulent pollsters, the lying media, the deceased, the duped, the traumatic feminists, the compromised academics, the blizzard of snowflake students blanketing the eduscape, the Muslim fifth column, the disaffected Libertarians voting for nonsense candidates, and the turncoat Republicans who may as well have registered as Democratic operatives? This seems a rather implausible assumption.

I have a theory, which I will share with bemused readers. I believe the key factor in producing so improbable an electoral outcome was, frankly speaking, Israel, not the country itself but the all-powerful Cosmocrator who rules the universe, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. For the Lord knew that the policies of Barack Obama’s administration had put Israel at critical risk in the most volatile region in the world, and that the leaders of Iran, taking a page from their ancestor Haman the Agagite, were plotting the wholesale destruction of the Jewish state. The Lord also knew that Hillary Clinton and the crime syndicate known as the Democratic Party would advance Iran’s genocidal project.

Neither did He forget the plight of the American people under a venal and iniquitous regime nor America’s covenantal vocation. Did not the Pilgrims see themselves as Israelites in the wilderness—“We shall find that the God of Israel is among us” John Winthrop preached in his 1630 sermon A Modell of Christian Charity—and did not the Declaration of Independence echo the Sinai covenant? Did not John Adams write in a letter to Thomas Jefferson “I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize man than any other nation” and did not Lincoln at Independence Hall in Philadelphia quote from the imprecatory Psalm 137? Were not Jerusalem and the New Jerusalem bound together? CONTINUE AT SITE

The Unbearable Lightness of Anti-Trump Hysterics By Patricia McCarthy

Donald Trump’s victory on November 8 was a shock to liberals all over the country, all over the world. So confident of their own brilliance, superiority and their own rightness in all things, his win was a major shock to their tender but blinkered sensibilities. It had apparently not occurred to them that he could actually win. So out of touch with the American people outside of their personal space, they were completely taken by surprise by his electoral success.

Hillary and her inner circle were shocked as well. It never occurred to them that her many crimes, her foundation schemes to enrich herself, her lifetime of lying and her carelessness about national security would filter down to voters. They assumed regular people, those stupid people Jonathan Gruber counted on to accept the nonsense that is Obamacare, would not know about or read the thousands of leaked Podesta emails that expose the totally self-serving nature of the Clintons and their staff. The emails prove that they care nothing about the country, the shrinking middle class, ISIS, or Iran’s nuclear ambitions. They care only about winning, keeping power and staying rich. Liberals routinely and mistakenly view the American people as beneath them, as ignorant. To their great shock, the deplorables are more informed than Clinton and the DNC ever thought possible.

Van Jones on CNN of course blamed the defeat of HRC on racism. He called it a “whitelash.” Clever? Not so much. He is among the most racist pundits we have had to endure these past eight years. His hatred of white people oozes out of every pore. He has no clue about the country he is so in the habit of vilifying. He is an Al Sharpton, a typical race hustler, in a fancy suit and expensive glasses.

Cokie Roberts reliably blamed sexism. Hillary lost because she is a woman. Men just don’t want to see a woman in the White House! Nonsense. It curiously has not occurred to her that it might be Hillary’s record abent of any achievement, her criminal history, her pathological lying, or her abuse of victimized women in the furtherance of her husband’s career that turned voters against her.

The worst example of mind-numbed bias was Martha Raddatz, a long-time progressive who was inexplicably allowed to “moderate” one of the debates. Fighting back tears, not only did she describe Trump’s victory as a victory for racism, sexism, Islamophobia, homophobia — all the usual accusations that spill so easily off the tongues of liberals when describing conservatives — she claimed no military servicemen would be safe under a Trump administration because he so clearly knows nothing about the military or foreign policy.

Excuse me! Barack Obama has done such terrible damage to our men and women who serve that he should be in the brig. He tied the hands of his generals who stayed. He fired those, hundreds of them, who refused to do his anti-military bidding. Obama’s ridiculous rules of engagement have been the cause of hundreds, maybe even thousands of American deaths in Afghanistan. Our guys are hardly allowed to defend themselves. Trump will change that. Raddatz is sadly typical of the uninformed left. So oblivious to facts that do not fit with her own ideology, she has become as ignorant as she thinks Trump’s irredeemable voters are.