I’m not gonna lie. 24 hours ago, I thought the Republican party was dead.
I figured Hillary Clinton was well on her way to surpassing 300 electoral votes—perhaps even racing past the Obama ’12 total of 332. It was a foregone conclusion that the Democrats would reclaim the Senate, as well. I began to think about how eight more years of Obamacare and progressive social policies would create an entire generation of Julias, unable to perceive any possible existence that didn’t involve the evermore intrusive and invasive government’s presence in every facet of their lives. I foresaw a world where all conservative ideals and principles were denounced as racist, sexist, and nationalist, where no man would be permitted to hold a view that didn’t adhere to the one given to him by the media. I imagined a 2024 election much like a California Senate race, where two Democrats ended up fighting for the right to be President. I thought that I would never see another Republican president in my lifetime.
Of course, I was incredibly, gleefully wrong. And so was everybody else.
So today we wake up to headlines like, “Why Did Hillary Clinton Lose?” An entire industry, blinded by their infinite desire to contine the Clinton Hegemony, befuddled as to how the impossible became not only possible, but seemingly inevitable. Some of them didn’t even think it was necessary for them to vote in order for her to win. The sheer arrogance of it all is downright amusing in the aftermath.
The Left cannot handle this. If Trump had lost, if the Senate had switched hands, do you know what conservatives would have done today? They would have just kept living their lives, just like they have for the last eight years. No meltdown. No bizarre, profanity-ridden rants. No, they would have been sad and disappointed, but they would have gotten up and gone to work and continued to be the economic engine of the country, just like always.
But the Left? They’ve lost their minds. They’ve gone from rabid to straight-up unhinged. I’ve lost about 5 percent of my Facebook friends, Twitter followers, and Instagram peeps, just for saying that I was happy that Trump won. This includes people I’ve considered friends for over twenty years. Not just acquaintances, but personal friends.
“You’re the only person who is voting for Trump that I respect, and I just don’t understand it and I can’t talk about it,” said one close friend of mine. The Left succeeded in not only convincing its followers to vote for its candidate, but to think that voting for somebody else was inconceivably wrong. They could not and still can not discuss it rationally. A Clinton voter could not bring herself to admit that Trump might have been right about immigration, or foreign policy, or terrorism. No, she had to swallow the entire party line, and no deviation was allowed.
There’s infinite blame to pass around, of course, and the Left is wasting no time in doing so. But there are some real reasons why Hillary lost and nobody saw it coming—including me.
False Accusations of Racism: Listen, you just have to stop calling everybody who disagrees with you a racist. All you do when you apply the label of “racist” to your entire opposition is diminish the meaning of the word. Voting against the continuation of Barack Obama’s failed policies does not make one a racist. Wanting to secure our borders, properly vet refugees and immigrants, and solidify our nation does not make one a racist—just ask Germany how it’s working out for them. In fact, Trump underperformed with white males versus Romney in 2012. It was Trump’s performance with the Black and Latino vote that likely led him to victory, so what “racist” conclusions can you draw from that?
I’m tired of being called a racist. I’ve been teammates and bandmates with black men and women my whole life. I dated black and latina women when I was younger. I’ve hired and promoted blacks and latinos. Nobody who has ever spent a single moment around me would call me a racist. Yet my desire to return to conservative financial principles makes me Orville Faubus in the eyes of liberals. It’s ridiculous, and it devalues any actual argument they might have. Real racism exists in the world. Don’t diminish it with your political sideshow.
Failure to Nominate Rather Than Coronate: Hillary Clinton was a terribly flawed candidate, and everybody knew it—even her supporters. She carried thirty years of political baggage with her, including her lecherous husband’s, and she had nary a single positive to outweigh the negative. The media has been trying to find positive things to say about HRC for about ten years, and they still can’t do it. She has no accomplishments. She has no record to speak of. She sponsored three bills as a Senator that passed into law—and they were all completely meaningless. She had a checkered record as Secretary of State, to say the least. As Trump so simply stated, “Hillary has experience, but it’s bad experience.”
And perhaps the FBI really didn’t find anything terribly damning in her emails (although it would have been enough to land a normal person in jail, or at the very least lose security clearance), but the sheer arrogance it took for her to ignore the law and create her own email server was enough to cast a shadow of doubt over her own campaign. (Do you know who StoneTear is? You should.)
But the problem was that they spent the last eight years preparing for Hillary to take the crown directly from Obama’s hands. They were ready for Hillary, but they never checked to see if she was ready to become President. And all it took was for a little known septuagenarian from Vermont to ignore party orders and challenge her to see how quickly her support folded within her own party. They had to rig the primary election in her favor, and even then she barely won. By the time the general rolled around, nobody was excited to vote for her. The six million extra Democrats who showed up for Obama couldn’t be bothered to show up on Election Day, or in any of the early voting days that preceded it.
And now they’re really screwed, because they’re a party without a leader. They shunned Bernie and never thought to develop any bench strength. Hillary lost. Reid retired. Wasserman Schultz is disgraced. So is Brazile. Obama can’t carry the torch for them anymore. Who the hell is the leader of the Democratic party right now? You don’t know, and neither do they.
They never took Trump seriously: I’ll just let Michael Moore say it for me, as he did on his Facebook page today:
“Everyone must stop saying they are “stunned” and “shocked”. What you mean to say is that you were in a bubble and weren’t paying attention to your fellow Americans and their despair. YEARS of being neglected by both parties, the anger and the need for revenge against the system only grew. Along came a TV star they liked whose plan was to destroy both parties and tell them all “You’re fired!” Trump’s victory is no surprise. He was never a joke. Treating him as one only strengthened him. He is both a creature and a creation of the media and the media will never own that. “
—Michael Moore
The Clinton camp failed to recognize that Donald Trump wasn’t a man—he was a movement. And it took a man like Trump to lead it—a man who had nothing to lose, with no party bosses to kowtow to. He said everything that we all wished Romney had been man enough to say. And do you know who he took his cues from? Why, his old pals, the Clintons.
Like Hillary and Bill, Donald apologized for nothing. And with each arrow the mainstream media slung at him, his base supported him more. You do realize that he has yet to release his tax returns, right? And that he’s not gonna? And that it didn’t matter? Romney tried to be the candidate the media wanted him to be—he never realized that the media wanted him to lose. Trump gave the middle finger to the media, and the more they hated him, the more we loved him.
Independents were drawn to his strength. He fought the Republican party. He fought the Democratic party. At times, the debates often looked like two or three against one, as he was forced to debate both Clinton and the moderators.
He was the hero America needed at the time we needed him most desperately. A man who wasn’t afraid of anyone or anything who managed to be the billionaire working-class hero. We knew how Trump got rich, and he never apologized for it. We had no freaking idea how Hillary did it, and she made it worse by pretending that she wasn’t an elite. Nobody bought it. She lost the rust belt—Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania—to a billionaire member of the Lucky Sperm club. Let that sink in for a minute.
We all really do want America to be great again: The simple brilliance of that slogan on that ugly red hat. It worked. It meant something to us. Listen, I know that America might not have been as great in the Eighties as I thought it was at the time. I know that opportunities for women and minorities were not what they are now. I know that the LGBT community was oppressed. I don’t know if Reaganomics was as good a policy as I perceived it to be.
But, damn it, it felt great. We stared the greatest menace the world has ever known in the eye, and we made them blink. We won at everything. We felt completely united. Hell, we even cared about the Olympics and Mary Lou Retton.
It’s been a long time since we’ve felt like that in this country. Bill Clinton’s impeachment divided us. The aftermath of 9/11 provided a brief moment of unity, but it quickly unraveled in the face of an unpopular war with an enemy we didn’t understand. We went from a cowboy, likeable President to a somewhat inscrutable “constitutional scholar” and community organizer who bowed to foreign dignitaries and proceeded to apologize to everybody everywhere for being American.
Trump said, screw that. We’re gonna win. We didn’t even know what it meant, but we liked the sound of it. He never clearly articulated how we were going to win, or even what we were going to win, but he said we were going to win! And damn if that just didn’t feel great to have a President who didn’t apologize for winning—in fact, he wanted to win more. Trump tapped into the feeling of American Exceptionalism that Obama and Clinton tried to bury. We didn’t want to become citizens of the world. We wanted to be the best. Trump made us believe we could be.
But they didn’t learn: Today, I’ve seen nothing but messages of hate and vitriol from the Left. I’ve been called an idiot. A Walmart shopper. A racist. A misogynist. A hillbilly. A Deplorable.
Go on, liberals. Keep calling me that. Keep calling us that. Keep demeaning us and belittling our experiences. Keep forgetting that the flyover states exist. Keep saying how terrible it is that white, non-college educated voters put Trump in office.
And, in 2018, when you have to defend Senate seats in Indiana, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota and West Virginia—not to mention Florida, Ohio, and Wisconsin—we’ll remind you what you thought of us today. And when you realize how close you got to permanently making this country in your image yesterday and how you let it slip through your fingers with your combined arrogance and foolishness, you’ll cry even harder when you have a super-majority, filibuster-proof Republican Senate and a 6-3 or 7-2 Supreme Court.
Hillary Clinton lost what might be the most important election in the history of our nation. But the Democratic party didn’t learn a damn thing from it.
And that makes me very, very glad.