One of the advantages of being permanently banned from the member side of the legacy site is that I now read things that get posted on the Main Feed on a more regular basis. (It may surprise you just how little any of that interested me – and many others among the active types – when following things closely on the Member Feed. But I digress.) The names and personalities are familiar and I still enjoy following their “work”. Anyway…

This last week marked the passage of 100 days in office for Second Term Trump and the world was gifted with endless commentary on the activities, successes, and failures so far. Not much more needs to be said about that. But I do want to document a few things (primarily for later reference) about the state of the opposition to Trump from inside the perimeter of the “not openly Leftist” (or the “net yet openly leftist”) camp of the modern political divides. I will do this with three links from that legacy site that were saved to my desktop over the last week or so.

The first, relying heavily on analysis from those long ago exposed political whores at the CBO, is this one:

Here’s a way for Trumpsters to show they are actually serious about reducing the national debt

The title really says enough for me so I will leave it to you to read the post…my interest is in the conversation/feedback to this dump-and-run artist from the establishment. I didn’t take long to get to the point. These two comments were among the first four published:

The “Trumpsters” have no more interest of being goaded into committing political suicide than their Republican (and certainly Democrat) predecessors.

But at least they’ve been busy turning off a whole bunch of taxpayer money Waste-Fraud-Abuse spigots that have been feeding the rent-seeking tapeworms in and around D.C. for decades, something that their aforementioned predecessors have never done. …

Trump is the first politician in my life and probably since before FDR to actually do something about spending. And yet back benchers complain.

The biggest threat is communism. Then the debt. Fortunately Trump is addressing both. But it’s a free country if you still want to complain.

I suspect the lingering heartburn from long term exposure to fake fiscal conservatism extending from Bush-Frist pulling the rug out from under us thru many episodes of McConnell’s Failure Theater will keep many of a certain age poking at these attempts at the same old disingenuous play for quite some time. But here and now, the establishment forces are still trying.

The second link of interest here is this one:

Dear America, from Canada

This one was posted by someone I have never heard of before. While written with just enough of the type of condescending “what Trump doesn’t seem to realize” flair that gets the TDS crowd over at the legacy site running for the basement with their Ouija Boards, it does provide an interesting perspective on that state of things. But, as with the first linked post discussed above, it is the conversation below the post that interests me for this historical marker…specifically the snuggling up of some to the neighbor form the north (ala “A terrific post with deep insight! You seem to know more about international trade than does our own President.“). It will be even more interesting to see how Mr. Trump’s tariff gambit plays out and how this commentary by those obviously smarter than Mr. Trump holds up over the next 12-24 months.

The third link of interest here is this one:

The Strange Attractor: Donald Trump’s China Shop

As for the stated purpose of this post, this link really is all about the conversation below the post. I have noted before just how aggressive the hard-core TDS sufferers became after the election last fall and how their behavior took on a more frustrated tone the closer we got to the inauguration (…and beyond). I think this example as promoted to the Main Feed provides a good update on the state of that fever among the semi-establishment types in their own (controlled) environs. This will be a good reference to look back at also.

This third link comes with the bonus benefit of introducing me this little bit of rare introspection from somewhere inside the TDS pandemic:

Reconsidering Donald Trump – I understood the forces that propelled him forward, but I didn’t give enough credit to the man himself.

The first descriptor I attached to Donald Trump, back when he took the lead in the race for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, was “empty vessel.” He was never that. More recent epithets I have used include “carnival barker” and “master of disaster.” He’s much more than those. Peer beyond the night fog emanating from those who consider him a new Hitler and those who worship him as a sort of messiah: in the light of empirical reality, Trump towers over the first quarter of the twenty-first century like no other political figure.

I understood the forces that propelled him forward—I thought that they were of world-historical importance. But I never gave much credit to the man himself.

What follows is an attempt to correct the record. I have no wish to glorify Trump or to assess his moral worth but only to figure out why, as an analyst, I missed the consequential dimension of his character.

This one should be read in its entirety…the full context is important. But I will provide an additional extended snippet to add to the tease:

Trump is a “strange attractor,” an incarnation of coincidences so incredible that they would be rejected out of hand in the most preposterous Hollywood script. When he enters the room, the laws of probability that rule dynamic systems go haywire.

At Butler, the bullet that would have exploded his head barely nicked his ear when he turned to glimpse at a screen behind him. The distance from the shooter was negligible. Trump was the proverbial fish in a barrel, yet he was left dramatically bloodied but alive. Similarly, the photo taken of him shaking a fist at destiny, blood trickling down his face, Secret Service agents wrapped protectively around him, American flag flying in the background—what are the odds against such an image occurring spontaneously? And yet it did.

If we examine Trump’s trajectory over the last eight years, many similar questions arise. How did he manage to beat Hillary Clinton in 2016? How did he resurrect his popularity after the disaster of January 6, 2021? How did he so easily dispose of talented Republican presidential seekers of the 2024 nomination, a field that included accomplished, proven winners like Florida governor Ron DeSantis? How could he thrive under the relentless persecution of the establishment—the FBI raids, the criminal trials, the lawsuits, the gag orders, the Hitler comparisons?

Events just happen to skew to Trump’s advantage. His ostensibly fatal defeat in 2020 turned out to be the luckiest of breaks: the political steamroller that is Trump today can’t be explained without reference to the corruption and incapacity of the Biden years. The terrible fires that devastated Los Angeles shortly after Trump’s election became a demonstration, on the national stage, of government by anti-Trumpists—progressives so spellbound by skin color and sexual identity that they forgot to keep the fire hydrants filled.

In a world of politicians floundering in the storm, Trump imposes himself on his surroundings: he is the storm.

[Emphasis added]

And the big finish:

The odds are massively against Trump replacing the existing system with one of his own—though, of course, there’s always that strange attractor force at work. But there will be no going back to some artificial version of the long-gone twentieth century; no reactionary fantasy world imposed by the analog mentality; no online censorship, no debankings, no politicized bureaucracy. We have crossed a boundary into the new, and we’ll have to deal with the consequences, fair and foul. The old is gone, not with the wind but with Joe Biden, the perfect symbol of senile government.

The causes of this epic collapse are partly structural and partly a matter of random luck. But much of the responsibility—credit or blame, depending on where you stand—falls on human agency, in the person of Donald J. Trump.

[Emphasis added]

I am not sure about this “strange attractor” stuff…but I’m also not going to piss all over it like a raging loon wallowing in his own TDS. I do know that Mr. Trump has the historic benefit of following two of the most corrupt, Anti-American Presidents imaginable (and the depressed economies and societies they left behind) as well as the political benefit of opposing the pervasive anti-intellectualism ubiquitous among today’s Left, Soft Center Right, and sufferers of TDS. I do suspect that there is a factor involved here flowing through the aforementioned Bush-Frist and Failure Theater wounds – along with those created by the snuffing out of the Tea Party Movement, the McCain-ing of the Obamacare repeal, and the Liz Chaney enabled J6 insurrection charade…just to name a few (and don’t even get me started on “conservative” Chief Justice John Roberts) – where the core of his base continues to reliably impart an amount of antifragility onto Mr. Trump. In such a situation, “the laws of probability that rule dynamic systems going haywire” may just be an illusion caused by the system (Trump and his Base) operating under a set of control laws completely unfamiliar to the modern American political scene.

A final thought: Trump and his Base are, as VDH introduced the topic to me in The Soul of Battle, an Army of a Season. As such, the deliberate speed displayed by the President and his team through the first 100 days is something to be applauded and encouraged. More please.

(Three links to the legacy site were highlighted above to help place the historical marker I wanted to leave here now…if there was to be a fourth, it would have been this one from yesterday: Why Reciprocal Trade Negotiations Will Fail | Richard Epstein.)