neocon political saboteur, Bill Kristol, on Trump's victory: "the American people have made a disastrous choice; and they have done so decisively, and with their eyes wide open"

By N.S. (full disclosure: I freelanced for Kristol during the late 1990s.)

"It's hard to imagine a worse outcome...."

"And Trump was running against a competent candidate who ran a good campaign to the center and bested him in a debate, with a strong economy."

Who was this "competent candidate..."?


from: Bill Kristol - the bulwark <thebulwark+morningshots@substack.com>
to: "add1dda@aol.com" <add1dda@aol.com>
sent: wednesday, november 6, 2024 at 09:33:59 a.m. est

"what will Trump's win mean"

"what happened and what comes next.­"

"what will Trump's win mean"

What happened and what comes next.

By William Kristol
nov 6

Well, here we go again. Happy Wednesday.

---

Donald Trump points to supporters with Melania Trump during an election night event at the palm beach convention center on november 06, 2024 in west palm beach, florida.

The People's Choice

by William Kristol

"the American people have made a disastrous choice. and they have done so decisively, and with their eyes wide open.

Donald J. Trump will be our next president, elected with a majority of the popular vote, likely winning both more votes and more states than he did in his two previous elections. After everything—after his chaotic presidency, after January 6th, after the last year in which the mask was increasingly off, and no attempt was made to hide the extremism of the agenda or the ugliness of the appeal—the American people liked what they saw. At a minimum, they were willing to accept what they saw.

"and Trump was running against a competent candidate who ran a good campaign to the center and bested him in a debate, with a strong economy. Yet Trump prevailed, pulling off one of the most remarkable comebacks in American political history. Trump boasted last night, "We've achieved the most incredible political thing," and he's not altogether wrong.

Certainly, even before he once again assumes the reins of power, Trump has cemented his status as the most consequential American politician of this century.

And when he assumes the reins of power, he'll start off as a powerful and emboldened president. He'll have extraordinary momentum from his victory. He'll be able to claim a mandate for an agenda that the public has approved. He'll have willing apparatchiks and politicians at his disposal, under the guidance of JD Vance and Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson and Stephen Miller, eager to help him advance that agenda. He'll have a compliant Republican majority in the Senate. And it looks as if Republicans may narrowly hold the House.

It's hard to imagine a worse outcome.

If you think, as I do, that Trump's agenda could do great damage to the country and to the world, if you think of deportations of immigrants at home and the betrayal of brave Ukrainians abroad and you shudder, if you think that turning our health policy over to Robert Kennedy Jr. will cause real harm, you're right to feel real foreboding for the future.

And of course there is no guarantee that the American people will turn against Trump and his agenda. They knew fully well who it was they were choosing this time. Their support may well be more stubborn than one would like. It certainly has been over the last four years.

So: We can lament our situation. We can analyze how we got here. We can try to learn lessons from what has happened. We have to do all these things.

But we can't only do those things. As Churchill put it: "In Defeat: Defiance." We'll have to keep our nerve and our principles against all the pressure to abandon them. We'll have to fight politically and to resist lawfully. We'll have to do our best to limit the damage from Trump. And we'll have to lay the groundwork for future recovery.

To do all this, we'll have to constitute a strong opposition and a loyal opposition, loyal to the Declaration and the Constitution, loyal to the past achievements and future promise of this nation, loyal to what America has been and should be.

And we'll have to have the fortitude to say, 'Yes, at times a majority of the American people can be wrong.' That they were wrong on November 5, 2024. That vox populi is not vox Dei.

I've sometimes quoted John McCain's wonderful comment, something he used to say with deadpan irony: It's always darkest . . . before it turns pitch black.

But the real McCain was cheerful about life and hopeful about America.

So as I write this before dawn Wednesday morning, and as I contemplate the dark and difficult period ahead, I'll instead invoke, as he would in this circumstance, the original sentiment that he was using as his foil. As the mid-nineteenth century Irish writer Samuel Lover remarked:

There is a beautiful saying amongst the Irish peasantry to inspire hope under adverse circumstances: "Remember," they say, "that the darkest hour of all, is the hour before day."

"Hope under adverse circumstances." That's what we need. Hope followed by thought and action, all to help bring about a new day for a great nation which has, for now, made a terrible mistake.