Losing the little guy
Obama ascended the presidency threatening America's trade arrangements, but in maybe the only transformation of his ideological life he walks out of the White House as the world's foremost exponent of free trade, for the same reason that a good part of the Right have turned skeptic on trade, or worse than skeptic: free trade as practiced in this 21st Century is a transfer of American wealth to the wide world, a racket where America's "trade partners" deliberately debase their currencies to well below whatever impoverished valuation the American dollar has sunk, to hijack American business and profits and jobs. That is free trade as it is in the here and now, not free trade as it was or ought to be, and that is the free trade championed by Obama and his Democrat Party.
Democrats only ever place their mad dogma of "anthropogenic climate change" ahead of jobs and liberties, and let a government scientist claim "endangered species" and a Democrat administration will institute a manmade drought in a farm community. And Democrats outlaw American fossil fuels as far as their writs carry, leaving the economy to cover the shortfall with imports in what amounts to another transfer of wealth from the United States to the wide world.
What the Democrat Party manifestly do not appreciate is that Candidate Trump snatched their proverbial "little guy", and if President Trump and his Republican Congress manage a fraction of what Trump has proposed and promised, they'll have converted that little guy to Republican and appropriated the claim to championing him.
The Obamian "imperator" presidency, and sauce for the gander
It was long ago and far away that Democrats were "the party of the little guy". Until 2016 and Donald Trump, Republicans had not seized that banner for themselves, but on November 8 of '16 the little guy voted "R". That little guy might rightly observe that it was the Democrat Party who left him, and as to how, let me count the ways:
The invasion and colonization of the United States by the Latin American Third World is by now a sacrament of the Democrat Party, and the Democrat purpose in the Latin conquest is to import a new American people, so the consequences to the American people of the here and now are of no account.
Illegal aliens measured in eight digits occupy whole subsectors of the economy, cramming natural-born Americans and lawful immigrants into other, cramped subsectors, and depressing wages and benefits for all but the more untouchable classes. Illegal aliens heap burdens on public services, the public schools and emergency rooms and police departments. Illegal aliens too often import with them lawlessness and violence. And illegal aliens displace American communities with Little Tijuanas, driving natural-born Americans from their neighborhoods and homes, but when an American revisits the neighborhood of his childhood to find the only English left is the "STOP" on the stopsign, a Democrat smiles.
The minorities who constitute the base of the Democrat Party are the most abused by it. Which is not to say that the minority "little guy" has yet abandoned the Democrat Party in anything like the numbers of the white flight from the Democrats, but Trump drew more votes from blacks and Hispanics than the Republican for president had managed four years before him, by a couple percent each, and given the margins that's more than a Democrat for president can afford to shed. A "chocolate city" like Detroit which was in living memory one of the great cities of the world, resembles something post-Apocalyptic, after a half-century of majority-minority, Republicans-need-not-apply, Democrat-machine politics, where the furthest-leftward candidate wins the Democrat nomination and the Democrat nominee is elected and re-elected and re-re-re-re-re-elected till he expires in office.
In the twilight of the Age of Obama a Chicagoan is shot every couple hours, Chicago being Obama's hometown, where the old Obama hand Rahm Emanuel is boss at city hall and the Second Amendment is a byword. Majority-minority one-party Democrat jurisdictions anymore are war zones, lawless and lethal, where the schools are jungles, retailers can't open shop for liability of theft and damage and violence, and "opportunity" amounts too much to professional sports or vice rackets.
In Obamacare the Democrats defied the people, drove up the average health insurance premium by 25% for 2017 alone, dispossessed average Americans of their plans and their doctors, strained Medicare and Medicaid, and restricted untold masses of American workers to 30 hours' work and wages weekly.
Democrats debase the dollar, by their wanton spending and the wanton printing of dollars to cover their uncoverable debt, which in an economy that imports very much more than it exports impoverishes the people. Obama in his eight years will have doubled the national debt, but he leaves the nation with $9.3 trillion in new debt and nothing to show for it, because anymore spending as directed by Democrats scarcely makes it past the suburbs surrounding Washington. Government spending under Democrats is spending on government, and the average "little guy" doesn't see so much as a T-shirt out of it.
Obama ascended the presidency threatening America's trade arrangements, but in maybe the only transformation of his ideological life he walks out of the White House as the world's foremost exponent of free trade, for the same reason that a good part of the Right have turned skeptic on trade, or worse than skeptic: free trade as practiced in this 21st Century is a transfer of American wealth to the wide world, a racket where America's "trade partners" deliberately debase their currencies to well below whatever impoverished valuation the American dollar has sunk, to hijack American business and profits and jobs. That is free trade as it is in the here and now, not free trade as it was or ought to be, and that is the free trade championed by Obama and his Democrat Party.
Democrats only ever place their mad dogma of "anthropogenic climate change" ahead of jobs and liberties, and let a government scientist claim "endangered species" and a Democrat administration will institute a manmade drought in a farm community. And Democrats outlaw American fossil fuels as far as their writs carry, leaving the economy to cover the shortfall with imports in what amounts to another transfer of wealth from the United States to the wide world.
What the Democrat Party manifestly do not appreciate is that Candidate Trump snatched their proverbial "little guy", and if President Trump and his Republican Congress manage a fraction of what Trump has proposed and promised, they'll have converted that little guy to Republican and appropriated the claim to championing him.
The 1994 Republican Revolution as realignment
Ten election cycles in twelve, since 1994 and at the level of U.S. House of Representatives, have gone Republican. The Republican margin in the House as of the general election just past stands at 47 seats, 241-194. In the 24 years from 1995 to 2019, the Democrat Party will have held the House for all of four years, and those four years may in light of the eight years thereafter be understood as aberrant. When in the midterm elections of '94 Congress went Republican for the first time in four decades, the talk was of a revolution, but as it turns out "realignment" may've been more the mark.
The Obamian "imperator" presidency, and sauce for the gander
Already Obama's expansion of executive power is turned against the Left. Not long before the Democrats were booted from their Senate majority, in 2013, they "went nuclear" and dropped the threshold for ratifying presidential appointments, from a vote to confirm of at least 60%, to fifty-plus-one, surrendering to the executive a good part of the institutional power of the legislature to influence nominations for administrative offices and federal courts.
To judge by Donald Trump's nominations as of November 18, all of a week and a half after the vote, Trump appreciates that his appointments may be ratified by just fifty-senators-plus-one, and assuredly he knows also that the party he leads holds at least that number, so that effectively Trump is at liberty to stock his administration with whomsoever he darn pleases. The Obama-Reid empowerment of the executive on appointments may produce the most conservative administration since the advent of conservatism as we conceive it. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and that gander is Donald Trump.
Orange jumpsuits vote Democrat
In time for Election Day, the old Clinton enforcer and now Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe availed himself of the gubernatorial "autopen", to stack the Virginia electorate with something like 60,000 convicts. It says something about the Left and the Democrat Party and the Clinton campaign, not that they'd stack the electorate with criminals who'd forfeited their right to vote, so much as that they stack the electorate with convicts on the understanding that criminal votes are Democrat votes. Republicans demand that the vote of every active-duty serviceman be counted, inasmuch as our fighting forces preserve our rights and liberties and our hearts-beating and breaths-drawing, but with the understanding also that active-duty military and veterans vote Republican overwhelmingly. That might make an evergreen campaign theme if not also campaign ad: "USAF-issue camouflage votes Republican; DOC-issue orange votes Democrat."
The mother country and the mother's country
Someplace on the long list of those ways in which Donald Trump is unusual among presidents-elect of the United States, is his being bound to Britain. The Founding Fathers and early presidents generally had been bound to the old country in ways great and small, but presidents of the United States since that founding generation have been more remote from the mother country. Barack Obama's paternal forebears in Kenya were British subjects, it must be said, but evidently not the pith-helmet-wearing and Earl-Grey-drinking kind, Obama's grandfather being a Mau-Mau who took up arms against Britain including in the second premiership of Winston Churchill.
Donald Trump for a start owns properties in Britain where he employs Britons and buys British and pays British taxes. But more than that, Trump's late mother came from Britain; Scotland, to be precise, which accounts surely for the forename of "Donald" and the orange-ish hair. America's mother country is Trump's mother's country. To say nothing of Trump's having been an object of debate in the Mother of Parliaments at Westminster, after a Scotch "journalist" got up a petition that his banishment from the United Kingdom be considered by the House of Commons. (As it turns out, it's handy that Parliament declined to outlaw Donald Trump, inasmuch as he is now president-elect and commander-in-chief-elect of Britain's greatest ally and friend.)
And more than even that, Donald Trump is very highly unusual in his hip-joining to the British cause which won the Brexit referendum in June of this same year. That campaign and its voters were parallel to Trump's campaign and voters, and Trump appreciated the parallel, landing in Scotland promptly after the earthquake that was Britain's vote to quit Europe for a rarefied appearance outside the United States, and importing to his campaign the principal champion of the Quit Europe cause, UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage, who campaigned with Trump, championed Trump on the talking-heads shows, and advised Trump in advance of the second debate, which incidentally Trump won convincingly.
