Some semi-mythical orange giant with a combover, and other visions for 2020 and beyond

Addendum, November 30: Non-evidence of non-criminal non-wrongdoing in a baseless, pointless impeachment

After two months of baseless, pointless impeachment, Trump's worst enemy can't claim that he denied Ukraine its aid or that Ukraine did a thing for him in return, and neither can they claim that Trump ever said or otherwise directed that there should be any such quid pro quo; the case against Trump amounts to one man's baseless presumption and the griping and gossiping of several unelected and unknown, malicious and pretentious bureaucrats on the strength of that baseless presumption; and the only hard evidence in the case is exculpatory, namely Trump's express direction that there was to be no quid pro quo, the innocuous transcripts of every grunt uttered between Trump and the Ukrainian president Zelensky, the testimony of Zelensky and his foreign minister that there was no quid pro quo and more than that, there couldn't have been, inasmuch as no-one let on to them about the imaginary "quid", and the testimony of two U.S. senators who independent of one another spoke to Trump at this time and on this question and swear that Trump's hold on aid to Ukraine of two months had nothing to do with Joe Biden and everything to do with Trump's well-established contempt for the racket whereby America pays the freight and Europe freeloads.


So after two months wherein for the first time an impeachment repudiated the standards of eight centuries of English-speaking justice -- the rights to a public trial, to legal counsel, to confront one's accuser, to cross-examine witnesses and call witnesses, and to present evidence -- the Democrat House advance to their ad-hoc impeachment Phase Three, wherein the Judiciary Committee is meant to put the case that the non-evidence for the non-criminal non-wrongdoing amounts to high crimes demanding the overturning of a national election ten months before the re-election. Then the plan as near as I can tell is to approve articles of impeachment by partisan simple majority over a bipartisan minority before the Christmas recess, and leave the baseless, pointless business to the Republican Senate in the new year. Merry Christmas, America.

Addendum, October 7: The half-assed impeachment

The post below I wrote a day or two before the breaking of the Great Ukraine Nonstory of '19, which a week thereafter would precipitate the Half-Assed Impeachment of '19: for only the fifth time in the history of the Republic, the House of Representatives undertook to overturn a presidential election, and for the first time the House dispensed with its rules on impeachment, the fair hearing and public proceeding wherein the minority and the president may call witnesses and argue the defense, with the object of arriving at something resembling the truth. The premise of my post was that the Democrat House were disposed to impeachment, and thence to disaster; a day or two later they had their pretext, and a week after that they had their impeachment, or rather their semi-quasi-pseudo, half-assed impeachment.

The story these couple weeks has developed practically every few hours so I'll restrict myself here to some bigger and more durable questions, beginning with the beginning. Speaker Pelosi pronounced Trump's guilt and announced his impeachment about 5 PM on September 24, before the transcript of the phonecall at issue was published for the world to judge about 10 AM September 25; i.e., Pelosi consigned her party and House and country to the crisis of impeachment a matter of hours before she and the world saw the evidence for impeachment, and knowing from the lips of the president himself that the transcript was to be published in a matter of hours and that there was nothing impeachable to be found in it. The Mark Levin postulate (modified marginally by me) is that Pelosi had been sold a bill of goods by her Intelligence Committee chairman Schiff, rumors on baseless claims on gossip, and when on the morning after she discovered that the transcript was not as (presumably) Schiff had promised, there was no turning back, and all that was left was to ride the tiger and hope for the best.

And so the Democrat House commenced the search for facts and law to justify their presumption of guilt and declaration of impeachment. But extraordinarily they jettisoned three years of claims against Trump, in favor of their Great Ukrainian Hope, conceding implicitly that those less-novel claims had come to nothing. And assuming as I do that this Ukraine business goes the way of every blessed other Democrat claim against Trump these three years, the Democrats will be hard put to take up again their old hobby-horses: on the morning after, the people will be less than patient for another cry from the Democrats of "What about those tax filings from 1996!"

As to Pelosi's schedule for impeachment-by-Thanksgiving, or two months after the Impeachment Declaration, revised already to impeachment-by-Christmas, I make no claim to see the calendar in my crystal ball but I remember well enough the last big, unwanted thing Pelosi jammed through the House of Representatives: that big, unwanted thing was Obamacare, in 2009-'10, and passage took longer than hoped by maybe half a year; in the event it was enacted only by parliamentary maneuver to circumvent the rules of the Senate, which bears the uncanniest resemblance to impeachment in the House in 2019; and Obamacare was the single-greatest cause for the electoral bloodbath months later in November, wherein Pelosi's supermajority was reduced to powerless minority, the Senate Democrat supermajority was reduced to simple majority, and on the state level Democrats were purged in maybe the greatest partisan turnover in the electoral history of the Republic. And the story is that it was Nancy Pelosi, in that huddle which decided that the polls and elections would be defied and Obamacare would be the law of the land, who made the difference in darning the torpedoes.

I'll supplement this addendum as need be, and meantime the post below from before the Impeachment Declaration stands up well enough.
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When in 1998 the Republican House of Representatives approved articles of impeachment against President Clinton, it was on the strength of eleven counts of criminality. The Constitution demands high crimes or high misdemeanors as in treason or bribery, as grounds for impeachment, and the Supreme Court expounded in the 19th Century that a president may not be impeached on charges from that time before he was president. But even the Mueller Report concluded (and I quote from remote memory), "This report does not find that the President committed a crime," even on the nebulous sub-secondary question of "obstructive behavior" short of obstruction of justice, and on the most malicious construction of half the story, the doing of vicious Democrat operators acting in the name of the special counsel Robert Mueller but quite independent of him. So the Democrat House has the will to impeach the president but not the law or the facts.

Then there is the promise implicit in the Democrat campaign of '18 that a Democrat Congress would not pursue impeachment: Democrats standing for Senate as well as House were under orders from the very top that they were not so much as to utter the I-word; when one Democrat Congresswoman did invoke that dread I-word, campaigning in Los Angeles in maybe the safest district for Democrats in these United States, she came in for a spanking by the Democrat leaders of the House and Senate both, rebuked and repudiated for all the world to see, making an example of the Congresswoman and making plain to the country as much as the party that impeachment was not on.

That the Democrats would not chase vendettas into the paralysis and crisis that is impeachment was effectively a condition of their majority in the House, and yet the very month after they claimed that majority they inaugurated their impeachment, scheduled deliberately to dissect Trump's summit with Kim Jong Un for the nuclear pacification of the Korean peninsula; Day 1 of the summit was a great success, then came nine hours of impeachment televised live 'round the world, and on Day 2 Rocket Man let it be known he'd be keeping those rockets of his, and the bomb. And it's worse than a fraudulent campaign and worse even than a House of Representatives burning days and weeks and months on phantoms and fantasies: a House of Congress seized by the impulse to impeachment, chasing a bitter vendetta against a president, can only be disinclined to working constructively with that president, and with three months left of their first year the Democrat House has accomplished a fat lot of nothing. 

But all that is preamble, to the true trouble for Democrats in pursuing impeachment: if Trump is re-elected then it's less than likely that those people voting Trump for president will vote Democrat for House much less Senate, inasmuch as the people are indisposed to vote for Congress as a veto of their vote for president, on the same ballot. If on Election Day 2020 the Democrat House has burned two years in the vain pursuit of an impossible impeachment, then it's something less than likely that any American voting Trump for president will return those same Democrats to a majority in the House much less to reward their party with complete control of Congress, so that Congressional Democrats can occupy themselves for the next two years or four in overturning the presidential election. And the numbers are 18 and 31, 31 Democrat Congressmen defending in districts carried by Trump in '16, in a Democrat majority that stands now at 18. So unless the people vote Democrat for president they'll be less than likely to vote Democrat also for Congress, and to lose the presidency for the Democrats will be to lose the works.

Which brings us to the question of the vote for president. I said in 2016 that if Trump is elected then he's re-elected: the threshold for re-electing a president is considerably lower than for his election, for reasons I'll come to just below, and for Trump's election the threshold was never higher, so if they couldn't keep him out then they'll never kick him out. It's the 22nd Amendment codifying the convention observed by every president but Franklin Roosevelt, in limiting a president of the United States to two terms, that assures an incumbent's re-election as much as anything: because every voter appreciates that good or bad this sitting president will walk out of the White House for the last time in just four years, the commitment, the investment and the risk, are manageable; and unless that incumbent has presided over disasters in the economy or foreign affairs or both, or repudiated the campaign promises that were the terms of his election, the people know from experience that he can manage the job of president and that he'll honor his mandate. Hence that tendency of history whereby a president of the United States wins his re-election.

At home Trump has brought a renaissance in the economy and the national power, maybe the greatest boom in the overall for half a century, complete with the first revival of manufacturing since before free trade and the first independence from foreign energy since the '50s. Then on foreign policy Trump has neutered North Korea, in short order he won the war on ISIS in Iraq and decided the war on ISIS in Syria, he has Iran in a desperate way like hasn't been seen since maybe the Iran-Iraq War of the '80s, and he's brought the second power in the world to its knees, choking China's growth for the first time in better than a quarter-century -- all without the bodybags returned to Andrews. And Trump has been practically tedious in the best way possible, in copying-and-pasting verbatim from his campaign promises over to his executive orders and appointments and legislative initiatives; no-one friend or foe could claim Trump hasn't done all in his power to keep his promises and honor his mandate.

Then any full and fair accounting of Trump's prospects must concede that no winning campaign for president in memory overcame hurdles so towering as Make America Great Again did: Trump became the first candidate since the founding of the republic to win the presidency as his first civil or military office; the totality of the press and popular culture save for Fox News and The Wall Street Journal moved heaven and earth day and night to ruin Trump and crown Clinton; the Never Trump faction in Trump's own party which counts the last Republican president and last Republican nominee for president, sabotaged Trump all the way through election day, with the Republican speaker of the House encouraging the disowning of the man at the top of the ticket just weeks before the vote, and third-party conservative-alternative spoiler candidates draining votes from Trump by the millions; even the pope of Rome ordained that thou shalt not vote Trump. And for all that, Trump won going away: he needed 270 electoral votes and he won 306. Who can say what 2020 will bring, but can it be worse for Trump than 2016 when he scooped electoral votes like a steam-shovel?

So without counting any chickens, I can only conclude that Trump is well-placed for a second term. And don't take my world for it: no less a leftist than Michael Moore has concluded Trump is on course for re-election and the two-dozen would-be Democrat nominees for president are losers to a man.

It's my sense that figures like Donald J. Trump come few and far between -- there are all of two presidents in 44 (not 45: it's a long and pedantic story) who offer parallels to Trump, namely Teddy Roosevelt in the 19-aughts and Andrew Jackson in the 1830s -- and that they're genies out of bottles, not easily re-bottled. When a Trump materializes, and manages the impossible, then again he manages the impossible, and still again until the impossible comes to be blase, he's not likely to be turfed out on his ear. A figure like Trump who joins a vision for national renaissance and national greatness, to a drive like a force of nature, is not likely to shrink away in defeat, not in the face of titans much less the class of pygmies that is the 2020 Democrat presidential field. It's my sense that the Age of Trump has only begun, my guess that Trump's lame-duck chapter will be not so lame as is usual, and my expectation that Trump will move mountains in his second term as in his first. And if I were to venture all the way out onto the limb then I'd guess they'll miss him when he's gone, and that Donald J. Trump will lumber around the American psyche for a good while, and around the psyche of the world to the extent it bears on America, like some semi-mythical orange giant with a combover.

The best of times, where elections determine the times, and what's to be done about the miserable rest

The best of times, the worst of times. A renaissance in the economy and the national power, where a new, reactionary, and militant American conservatism is asserted: after two years of the vigorous Trumpian policy of "energy dominance" America had ascended to world's foremost producer of oil and natural gas, and for the first time since the glorious '50s exports more energy than it imports, to invoke just one measure of the American renaissance that is the Age of Trump.

But in the institutions and the culture whose powers-that-be don't stand for election the New Dark Age turns ever bleaker, as in the unremitting politicization of all things -- banking, professional sports and amateur, the back panels on bags of chips -- as in the infantilization of the society -- "She achieves her dreams, because she can," to cite a current ad for a pharmacy hawking adhesive bandages -- as in the repudiation of nature -- men emasculated and women cast as boxers and bodybuilders and combat forces -- as in the determined inversion of the reality -- black folks who account for a dozen Americans out of a hundred, represented in the national advertising as something closer to half the country. (And before the thought-police are called down on my head for that last illustrative point above, and my life and work and family name ruined, please do read my elaboration as follows: I adore black folks and always have, I was raised by folks who adored black folks, but objectively and statistically black folks are nothing like half the country, and to present them as anything like half the country is madness. No-one and no group is bettered by a turning upside-down of the facts.)

And on that last point of race, race, race: 2008 already is long ago and far away. In that presidential election year we were assured by the Left and the press that if only we'd elect The First Black President, the "racial divide would be bridged" for good and all, that the question of race would be resolved and retired if only America would vote black for president, never mind that this "first black president" was half-white and his ancestral association with slavery was to be found on the side of the slave-master. Even I imagined Rush Limbaugh had gone too far, all those years ago in '08, but Limbaugh alone prophesied and Limbaugh alone was borne out, that a first black president who happened also to be a Democrat president would have the effect of reducing every question in the national politics to race, to where demurring from that first black president on the capital gains tax rate might be damned as "racism".

A decade later half the political class and the whole of the elite, in the least-racist society in history in its least-racist age, are more hysterical than ever they were on the question of race. Only last week a Republican senator addressed a conservative conference with a weighty keynote applying the innocuous term "cosmopolitan" to our globalist elite, for no reason other than that it's apt, and extraordinarily he was damned from the Left for some imaginary "antisemitism" in his choice of words, never mind that it's leftists anymore who are the Jew-haters, and 21st Century American conservatism is if anything philosemitic. Race indisputably is the principal preoccupation of the elite in 2019, but it's one of a clutch of preoccupations which seize the powers-that-be and which they project with the manifold means available to them onto 330 million American consciousnesses, to indict the nation and to divide and debilitate it, and generally to make us miserable. So what's to be done, beyond winning elections which Republicans and conservatives manage miraculously to do more often than not, but which doesn't and can't penetrate the elite and their institutions.

My old joke about America's institutions -- that it's a shorter job to count the institutions in this country that aren't leftist and Democrat, namely the churches and the United States Armed Forces -- never was a knee-slapper and it's less funny with the passing years, but not the less for that it's true enough, and worse than that there's precious little conservatives can do to alter the fact, inasmuch as institutions in America are of course independent of government and invariably they enforce their own prejudices and preoccupations: a leftist dean in a leftist university is most unlikely to hire a class of conservative departmental leadership who offend his impeccable sensibilities, for instance, so an institution once seized by the Left, enforces and reinforces its leftism. In that special case of the universities conservatives may find a tool in the toolbox, inasmuch as a great many universities are subsidized by the state governments, and state governments are of course elected, and it'd be no more than democratic for any Republican state government to insist that any university suckling at the taxpayer's teat abolish any campus prohibition on political expression disagreeable to the Left.

But any great undertaking to yank the culture of this country from the infinitesimal and alien class that is the elite, must necessarily be directed first and most at the press and popular culture, those twin walls which surround us and blare at us daily and nightly, to invoke the imagery of Victor Davis Hanson. Take for a case-study cable news, where the monopoly of the Democrats and the Left and the elite is smashed, with just two news channels of the three in their service: the most-watched show in cable news is not coincidentally the most take-no-prisoners conservative and Republican, namely Hannity on Fox News' primetime, where CNN's most-watched show rates 36th -- not 36th on television or in cable, but 36th in cable news. Or look over the "Popular" titles at a world-beating streaming service which will go unnamed: Old Hollywood and Westerns and war movies, apolitical movies, expressly Christian and expressly conservative movies, not to mention Red Dawn which is maybe the most militant reactionary-rightist feature film of the last four decades -- all represented disproportionately, by my unscientific but sustained survey. So it strikes me that to break the leftist press and popular culture we need only break the monopoly, that if the people of this country are given a choice they'll take it.

Do as Jeff Bezos did, I say, in buying the Washington Post and converting it from Democrat Party news to Democrat Party activism: we needn't conceive a new medium or even to build a new business, only to buy out a newspaper here and a magazine there, a channel here and a studio there. And we needn't necessarily redirect those properties either from Left to Right: it's my sense that the people of this country are starved for a great and grand, neutral, national culture as in the Midcentury or The Last Golden Age, namely the '80s; a culture which doesn't hold its country in contempt, doesn't take sides on partisan questions, doesn't arrogate the function of politics and politicians, and forget and forfeit its art. The object is not to substitute one ideological instruction for another, so much as to liberate the people from the conditioning and hectoring into leftism which is unremitting anymore in the culture of this country.

And it strikes me too that this great undertaking may be a job for President Trump, in his retirement from the presidency which I'm confident will come in 2025 and not '21, an undertaking in its way as grand and as far-reaching as any triumph of Trump's presidency. Trump is placed quite singularly for a job of this sort and scale, with his singular comprehension of the mass media and his demonstrable mastery of it, from the hit reality show to the 160 million pairs of eyeballs on his "tweets", and with his singular capacity as an executive for producing prodigious and prompt results, and it doesn't hurt either that he's a multi-billionaire business emperor and seems to count as acquaintances half the mover-and-shaker class, or that he's inventive and indefatigable as a promoter. I'm a believer in the law of supply-and-demand, and a believer too that the unsupplied demand is there, for a great American culture, and that to smash the cultural monopoly may be to win the culture war.

The last elections and the next, and a word on afros

2016 and 2018

Inasmuch as the Republican president with his Republican Congress by Election 2018 had delivered what may be the greatest prosperity and peace since before Vietnam, and inasmuch as the popular approval for Congress since the Democrat capture of the House of Representatives, the last I looked in on it, was drawing near to single digits, I can't but wonder whether the Democrat majority in the House owes in some part to a critical mass of impressionable voters who after two years of investigations and of hysterical reportage on those investigations imagined that their Republican president had somehow "stolen" his election and was somehow an "agent" of a hostile foreign power, and thus demanded countering by a hostile House. I can't but wonder whether, had the special counsel proclaimed Trump exonerated on the fantastical charge against him of conspiracy with Russia, in time for Election Day, Trump's Republican Party might've held the House. I can't but wonder whether the investigation into interference in the election of 2016 -- which concluded that Russia never flipped a vote and Trump and his campaign never touched Russia with a pole -- might itself have interfered in the election of 2018.

2018 and 2020  

Counting every heartbreaker -- all those narrow margins decided days and weeks after the vote or decided by those "provisional ballots" so conspicuous in their usefulness to Democrats -- the Democrat majority in the House amounts to 18 seats, and no fewer than 31 of that majority represent districts which voted in 2016 to make a president of Donald Trump. Take as a case-study the fifth of Oklahoma's five Congressional districts, the most metropolitan in OK, taking in most of Oklahoma City and a couple outlying counties. OK-5 flipped on November 6 from R to D, but by 50.7 to 49.3%, 3,500 votes of 239,000. The district had voted Republican for better than four decades, and the balance of OK's delegation is Republican, those Republicans having won between 59 and 74% in their districts, in a "bad year" for House Republicans. So surely it's within the realm of possibility that in a presidential cycle, with Donald Trump at the top of the ticket to draw out that Trump voter and in a state that voted Trump in '16 by 66 to 29%, the turnout and the dynamic will suffice to tip OK-5 back to Republican red. And surely there are more OK-5s than one in this republic of 435 Congressional districts.

There are of course items on Trump's agenda which might on paper pass a Republican Senate and Democrat House, particularly the renewal of American infrastructure and the mitigation of prescription costs, but in light of the first hundred days of the Democrat House and Pelosi speakership it would be no more than objective observation to pronounce that the prospect of constructive, compromise legislation proceeding from the House of Representatives in the coming year-and-a-half before Election 2020, is bleak. Only so much of Trump's first-principles, American-renaissance program may be enacted by executive order or Senate confirmation. And owing to the physics of American politics and government, a re-elected President Trump may hold a Republican House in 2022 but could never expect to hold in '22 what he hadn't won in 2020, on his presidential coattails.

And so it's not enough that Trump win his re-election on November 3 of '20: he must carry with him no fewer than 18 Republicans in House districts represented today by Pelosi Democrats. Trump might appeal in so many words that "If you want me for your president then vote Republican for your Congressman, because so long as Nancy Pelosi is speaker of the House there'll be no fixing what's broken," but more substantial would be the joining of Trump's presidential campaign to a nationalized Republican Congressional campaign, along the lines of the Contract with America which delivered both houses to Republicans in 1994 after four decades of frustration.

There is as of today just the one principal vulnerability for Trump and Republicans in 2020, namely healthcare, which is an injustice inasmuch as it's the Democrats alone who decreed the healthcare monstrosity that is Obamacare, but what is not unfair is the expectation of particulars, in a campaign and on healthcare most of all. It's this nobody-with-a-blog's plea that Trump and every Republican standing for Congress, before September of next year, agree to a simplified and nationalized joint platform, covering especially healthcare, as in "President Trump and a Republican Congress will in the next two years enact legislation on healthcare which affirms the guarantees for pre-existing conditions, provides for those truly needy Americans ineligible for Medicare or Medicaid and uncovered by insurance through employers, and for the first time cuts the cost of healthcare in America, by instituting subsidized 'high-risk pools', and by abolishing the prohibition on barebones, emergency-only insurance policies, and by opening insurance to competition from out-of-state." Joining the Trump campaign to a nationalized Republican campaign for Congress, committing president and Congress both to action and to particulars, may well assuage those mostly-female voters swayed in 2018 by the cynical Democrat campaign reduced to "pre-existing conditions", and at the same time make a down-the-line-Republican of the Trump voter, delivering to Trump the presidency and the Congress and the future.

A word on afros

Afros are outlandish and surely they can only be impractical -- 45 minutes every morning in the mirror -- and history teaches us that impractical styles are fleeting, and that outlandish styles look the most dated and comic to posterity.

The King of the Mormons explained

When at their fag-end the Republican presidential primaries of 2012 degenerated to Mitt Romney versus Rick Santorum, who as near as I could tell was running for the United States presidential nomination of the Vatican, I suspended my judgment of Romney. I threw in with Mitt, accepted the assurance of Jim DeMint that he had "learned conservatism as a second language", never wrote peep against him, and on Election Night 2012 when he lost probably the winnable-est challenge to an incumbent president since 1992, I was devastated. But when I last affirmatively hated a human being, in 2011, the human being in question was Willard Mitt Romney. And half a decade later in 2016 that suspended judgment of mine was affirmed: I had it right the first time, I had the measure of the man; Mitt Romney is that vilest of creatures, the cynical politician with boundless ambition for nothing but his power and glory, who believes in nothing but his entitlement to power and glory, and who is perfectly prepared to say and do absolutely anything in the service of that power and glory.

Pardon the brutality of this honesty, brutality to Mormons and the Mormon state, but it must be said. Mormonism is ascriptural heresy and kookery, the indulgent invention of an early-19th Century madman who might conceivably be a distant cousin to me and who in some portraiture bears a resemblance, but I esteem Mormons as Americans and businessmen and genealogists and showmen, and I came by that esteem honestly, my father being an admirer of Mormon businessmen if not of their lunatic theology. And the brutal facts are these: Mitt Romney is a United States senator today for no reason other than that he's King of the Mormons, and among the 50 states is counted a Mormon state.

There was precisely one state of the 50 where Romney might expect not to be received with a hail of putrefied vegetables, so it was that state where Romney ran for Senate. Romney was born in Michigan and he worked and entered politics in Massachusetts, and so long as he had prospects other than Utah, he took 'em. But in 2018 Mitt Romney determined that he must be a United States senator, and he appreciated that if he appealed to the Mormon state for his Senate seat, as King of the Mormons, he could not be denied. In the event he nearly was denied -- Romney narrowly lost the first round of the nomination for U.S. Senate, in the party he had represented at the level of president not six years prior, and in the state which is his fiefdom -- but it's as one of Utah's finer representatives Jason Chaffetz observed on the news of Romney's Senate ambitions, "If Romney runs in Utah, he wins."

And so it was that the King of the Mormons was anointed United States senator from the Mormon state. And Mitt Romney's first effort as junior U.S. senator-elect from maybe the most Republican state in the Union, was not to offer a settlement to the crisis of the shuttered federal agencies and the unsecured southern border, but to submit an op-ed to the Democrat-activist Washington Post and to give a follow-on interview to the Democrat-activist CNN, damning his Republican president Donald Trump, principally on grounds of "character", whatever that may mean in this debased century and whatever it counts for in the existential struggle which is the politics of this age. Not to mention, this country oughtn't abide hectoring on "character" out of a cynical, self-seeking saboteur. I'll hope to be mistaken in this judgment but I find my judgment where Romney is concerned to be depressingly precise and prescient: Mitt Romney doesn't care a tinker's darn for the will and wishes of the people of Utah, or for the United States Senate or the legislation before it, or come to that for the Republic and the state of it; Romney is U.S. senator from Utah for no purpose other than that he has determined the office to be needful to his ambitions for president; and Romney's principle -- not "principles", plural, because he has just the one true principle -- is that Mitt Romney must be and shall be president of the United States, that greatest figure on God's earth.

It was only to be expected that Mitt Romney would be numbered among the Never Trumpers, those elements of the Republican elite who imagine that the enemy is not the America-hating leftism which means to tear it down and watch it burn and which today monopolizes the Democrat Party, but the force-of-nature conservative populist who means to save the Republic and build it up, namely Donald J. Trump. Romney is a cartoon of the Republican elite, and maybe the greatest living exponent of the your-father's-Oldsmobile, go-along-to-get-along Republican, those old hands who lead us to electoral defeat and who mark time in the way of policy when occasionally they do manage not to lose a vote of the people. The trouble with Romney's reaction to the Trump ascendancy was that his declaration of war on Trump in a set-piece speech, much promoted, came the day after Trump had effectively clinched the Republican nomination for president, in a primary campaign wherein Trump won more votes than any Republican for president since the advent of the presidential primary, and wherein more Americans voted on the Republican side than in any primaries since there's been such a thing. But it was so very much worse than even that.

Romney went well past the set-piece speechifying damning his successor as Republican nominee for president: he opened the Romney Rolodex of wealthy benefactors to the third-party, conservative-alternative spoiler candidate for president in Utah, at a time when the consensus was that any Trump triumph in the general election would be a close-run, that Trump couldn't hope to carry anything like the 306 electoral votes that fell to him on election night but might at best scrape over the finish-line with the modicum of 270, and that to yank out from under Trump a gimme-state for any Republican for president, by tipping just enough Republican votes to that conservative spoiler in Utah, would assure Trump's defeat and repudiation. That's to say, Romney quietly and practically sabotaged Trump's campaign in the general election with the purpose of handing the presidency to Hillary Clinton and thus placing himself for a second kick at the presidential can in 2020, as the I-told-you-so candidate. It was the news of that conspiracy that compelled me to conclude at last that I had it right the first time, that Mitt Romney was at least as despicable as my least charitable judgment of the man.

Now to the future, and if these prophesies of mine turn out to be mistaken then I'll duly enter the error in the accounting of my causes for humility. Mitt Romney plainly is delusional, as deluded as a Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton fantasizing of walking again triumphal into the Oval Office, but he's not a perfect fool, and I can only assume he appreciates that no man can win the presidency of the United States as a third-party nominee, not to say there's a statistically-significant contingent of Americans in any event clamoring for Mitt Romney at the top of some novel Romneyan Third Way ticket. Romney may be content to sponsor some loser also-ran candidate to siphon just enough Republican votes in a close contest to deny Trump the presidency, but Romney himself would never play the kamikaze, humiliated in a second presidential election and with three-point-something percent of the vote. And if "independents and moderates" wanted Mitt Romney for their president then surely he'd have been president since January 2013. And much as Democrats and the press adore Romney so long as he's damning Trump, he can't have forgotten already the savaging he took from those self-same individuals and institutions only half a decade past, once he had claimed the Republican nomination for president: any Democrat in America rejoicing today in Romney's every utterance, at the same time hates Romney's ever-living guts.

Obviously the estimation of Romney among Republicans and conservatives is that he's no conservative and no Republican, a liar and a loser, and very possibly the most self-seeking and traitorous figure in America today who's not a Democrat. So Mitt Romney is a man without a constituency; he'd be a man without a state but for the cult-with-a-state he happens to have been born into. But whatever his appreciation of those facts, I can only suppose that Romney imagines the facts to be passing: the great hope of Mitt Romney is the catastrophic collapse of Donald Trump, as in some impeachment proceeding, which in the Romney fantasy will alter the considerations unrecognizably, leaving Republicans to crawl chastened the the feet of the Mormon King, pleading "Wayward wretches were we, scorning your light, o Romney, for our Trumpian darkness! Pity us, o Romney; pity us and pardon us, and lead us to the power and the glory that is yours alone!"

That Mitt Romney means to run again for president is at this point past disputation, but the timing, the presidential cycle, is yet unknown even to Romney, dependent as it is on the demise one way or another of the Trump presidency, which I'm here to say will come only after eight years of American renaissance.

It's no more than is true and fair to pronounce Donald Trump vain and ambitious, like Mitt Romney is vain and ambitious, and there are the superficial parallels -- billionaire businessmen and Republican nominees for president, etc. -- but where Romney is a soulless calculator pristine of principles, Trump is a true-believer; where Romney will stop at nothing in the cause of Mitt Romney, Trump is an irresistible force of nature for the cause of saving the Republic and building it up; where Romney is driven, Trump is driven like no man on earth, easily the most energetic executive since Teddy Roosevelt more than a century ago; and where America is the great love of Trump's life, the great love of Mitt Romney's life is Mitt Romney.