Remain calm

What, me Weimar?

Another day, another liberal journalist pretending that Donald Trump remains a “threat” to our “democracy.” The other day it was Robert Kagan, with “Our Constitutional Crisis is Already Here”; now it’s Philip Bump with “‘The coup didn’t work’ is not a reassuring argument.”

It’s amazing these people can make it through the day without fainting in terror from all the trucks whizzing past them on the street as they ride their “fixees” in their puny little bike lanes, and from the cops they’re scared might beat them up for protesting or being in the media. Of course there’s no question they’re still wearing masks and lining up to get booster shots. One hopes they have a safe space prepared for Halloween!

I won’t address every one of their talking points — that Trump refused to accept his defeat in 2020, that he worked with some perhaps intemperate individuals to have it declared invalid in the courts and in the legislatures, and that he could be said to have perhaps inadvertently encouraged the people who raised a ruckus at the Capitol nine long months ago and who are still being punished for their youthful hi-jinx by social-justice U.S. Attorneys.

For argument’s sake I will grant that all of these things may be true, and for the sake of brevity I will not debate them here. And I hope all of you have read the I Am No Trump Fan boilerplate that appears in this and every other column I publish that mentions Trump, of whom I am not a fan.

What I will dispute is the premise behind these articles that Trump’s continued insistence that he won the election — the enthusiasm with which his excitable supporters echo his assertion and sometimes remonstrate with election officials about it — the laws recently passed in some states giving Republican legislators the ability to overturn election results at their discretion — the seeding of state election boards with Trump loyalists — and that no one in Trump’s own party will lift a finger stop him, all means that he may be more successful in overturning the election if he runs in 2024.

First of all, this scenario ignores the very real possibility — I would call it a probability — that Trump can win it fair and square. Did you ever think about that? Huh? The Republican campaign to turn voters’ attention to the radical America-hating tax-and-spend communism of the Biden administration is sure to weaken the current president, and I have seen a genuine longing for Trump’s return in many Facebook memes, and in the hearts of ordinary Americans who gather in groups to forcefully express their opinions into the faces of health care workers and school board members. This will surely have an effect on swing voters in 2024. Plus there is the little matter of Hunter Biden’s laptop!

Also, let’s consider the possibility that it may be the Democrats who try to steal the election in 2024. Did you ever think of that, huh? We all know what violent brownshirts Democrats are — look at the monsters who followed Kyrsten Sinema into the ladies’ room! I have it on good authority that some if not all of those Democrat “women” were actually “trans” men!

Plus antifa Black Lives Matter ooga booga. If you have a hard time imagining these people breaking into the Capitol and trying to violently overturn the election results, consider that before January 6 I had no idea Republicans would ever do such a thing. I even wrote a column saying so. Yet here we are.

But even if Trump again loses and says he won, and even if he requests that Republican-run legislatures reverse the will of the voters, and even if he invites his followers to intervene in the result physically, there’s a very important reason that you can be sure it will all come to nothing: Because it all came to nothing last time. And the divisions in our country aren’t getting worse, and conservative intellectuals aren’t increasingly calling for civil war and minority rule, and Republican officials like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Rand Paul aren’t increasingly using insurrectionary language, and Republican voters aren’t increasingly given over to conspiracy theories — in short, nothing has meaningfully changed over the past year, nor does it promise to do so in the next three years.

And if you don’t agree — if you seriously don’t want to accept the comfort and reassurance I am offering you in these stressful times (though, as I said, they’re not so stressful that anything really bad could come from them, except maybe Joe Biden the senile socialist putting us all in concentration camps), then I may just have to refer to you in the same insulting terms I use on liberal columnists. How would you like that? It would be no more than you deserve.

And one last thing: It’s not a “democracy,” it’s a republic.