It is right and proper to be thankful at Thanksgiving, particularly when our country has just avoided a communist nightmare of epic proportions. Take a moment to sit back and think about how bad it would be right now if we were going to have another four years of leftist rule, probably followed by leftist rule in perpetuity, as these bastards would’ve solidified their hold on power so that we could never hope to rule ourselves again. You know that was their intent because that’s exactly what they said Trump would do, and they always accuse us of doing what they are doing or intend to do. The best case, and it’s a pretty terrible case, would have been us wrenching back our freedom through some sort of rebellion against their anti-constitutional tyranny. When civil war is the best-case scenario, you’ve got a bad set of scenario options. Conservatives never look on the bright side, but this time we should. Be thankful we missed out on all that. Be thankful we reelected Donald Trump.
And part of being thankful is understanding what’s going on here. Don’t allow relatively minor disappointments to swallow our general success. There’s been a lot of dooming lately, and we need to keep things in perspective. Other than President Trump’s prior history and campaign promises, the best indication we have about how he intends to rule for the next four years is through his nominations to key positions. After all, the cliché that “personnel is policy” is a cliché because all clichés are, at their core, true. It’s a useful, but not a determinative, metric.
We can place his selections into several categories. One is the home runs and out-of-the-park selections. He’s got a few of them, including my friend Seb Gorka, who will go back in as the senior counterterrorism advisor. I am also a big fan of the Pete Hegseth selection. Yes, I know his aggressive approach to warfare and heterosexuality frightens and confuses the effeminate losers who have failed to win a war in the last 30 years, as well as invertebrate Republican legislators, but that’s a feature and not a bug.
There are the ones that are pretty much OK. For example, I don’t think Marco Rubio is a terrible choice, though I would prefer Ric Grenell because he would’ve been an outstanding choice. Others, like Pam Bondi, are good in many ways, but they’ve got some bad stuff in their past, like support for red flag laws. Hopefully, she will repudiate that terrible position.
Then there are ones that make me shake my head. Matt Gaetz, for instance – as much as I would’ve liked to see him detonate the whole Department of Justice, it was obvious that confirmation would never happen. He just wasn’t going to get enough senators to support him. That’s the problem with being a rebel and an iconoclast – people will hate you, and occasionally those people will get a chance to blackball you.
But there are others who I think are just terrible without any redeeming quality. That Department of Labor nominee is a big labor stooge who wants to destroy the ability of Americans to do gig work and freelance stuff. What the hell is up with that? This is a Gavin Newsom pick. Hell, Randy Weingarten is OK with her. That’s not a red flag. That’s literally all the red flags.
But the fact is that I, and probably you, think they are just terrible is kind of beside the point. Or it may be the point. After all, I, and probably you, are conservatives. We have a conservative ideology. We want to do conservative things. But Donald Trump didn’t win the election building a conservative coalition. He built a coalition that averaged out to the center of American politics 20 years ago before the left went completely insane.
That means we conservatives are not the coalition but simply a part of the coalition. And that means we’re not always going to get what we want. Oh, I don’t like it. I don’t like it much at all, except for the fact that it allowed us to beat Harris and her coterie of communist cadres. I like that a lot. I’m very thankful for it.
But we must realize where we are at. We are now competing as one of many factions within the Trump coalition. We conservatives are certainly a big and influential faction. Almost all the conservatives went for Donald Trump, at least the conservatives who are still conservative. The conservatives who were conservative but then stopped being conservative because of Trump’s mean tweets are now leftists. These ex-cons are so against abortion and for a strong, free America that they support the party that loves abortion and hates a strong, free America. But, as the people of Wyoming clearly said, enough about Liz Cheney.
The thing is, in coalition politics, every part of the coalition has got to get a taste. Trump had to throw a bone to the other parts of his coalition. Now, this Labor secretary will be annoying but remember that she is still under control and will probably have conservative underlings who will help stymie her worst impulses. She can’t personally decree things like the noxious PRO Act, and it can’t get through the Republican House or Senate regardless. Even if she is somewhat neutered, appointing her is patronage to the new parts of the coalition that don’t see eye to eye with you and I. That’s how politics works. Purity equals defeat.
There will be more of that, and we need to understand what’s going on even as we are thankful that things are not much worse. The simple fact is that our current coalition is not as conservative as we are. We’re just a part of it, but we are not the whole of it, and if the other parts of our coalition don’t get something out of being in the coalition, they will leave the coalition. That’s why they left the Democrat Party. They ignored groups like the working class, who were not only overlooked and ignored but actively vilified. Our new coalition partners got nothing out of being in the Democratic coalition except abuse, so they picked up and left it for ours. Trump is paying them back, which will happen more often than we like. But it must happen and we should not be shocked when Trump does Politics 101.
Welcome to the world of politics. Trump is not going to govern as a pure hardcore conservative, not only because he is not a pure hardcore conservative but because he can’t maintain his coalition governance as a pure hardcore conservative. That’s the reality of things. And it is going to be the reality of things until we build a majority that is hardcore conservative, as opposed to merely normal in the way that our entire coalition, for example, understands that you can’t be a woman when you have a penis.
So, stop dooming about what was inevitable and what is necessary. Yes, we’ve got to push Trump to be as conservative as we can. It’s not unusual for competing coalition elements to push their own agenda. Factions compete – that’s why they are factions. But let’s not freak out and cry and run around like a little female-identifying child because Donald Trump must manage a coalition that consists of much more than just us. Be thankful that our problem is that his administration is conservative, but not quite as conservative as we’d like it to be, as opposed to something that would make Karl Marx turgid.
So, enjoy your Thanksgiving. And let me throw this hand grenade down the hall: Thanksgiving is the worst meal of the year because Thanksgiving food is the worst food there is. Turkey? What the hell is that? Stuffing is like eating rosemary-infused pillow filling. Don’t even get me started on yams.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Follow Kurt on Twitter @KurtSchlichter. Get the newest volume in the Kelly Turnbull People’s Republic series of conservative action novels set in America after a notional national divorce, the bestselling Amazon #1 Military Thriller, Overlord! And get his new novel about terrorism in America, The Attack!
Look, you need to keep up the fight by joining Townhall VIP right now. You get access to a bunch of great stuff, not the least of which is my extra Wednesday column, my weekly Stream of Kurtiousness videos every Friday, and the Unredacted podcast every Monday! Plus, some stuff from Larry O’Connor – and a bunch of other stuff.
My super-secret email address is Kurt.Schlichter@townhall.com