So the blue tsunami has hit the shores of America, with the Democrats handily taking both the Senate and the House, making Donald Trump a ‘lame duck’ president for the two years that remain to his term.
He seems to have been his own – and in many ways America’s – worst enemy of late. I’ve actually wondered whether he’s ‘controlled demolition’. Are there malevolent machinations behind what Ron de Santis, governor of Florida – one of the few Republicans to keep his seat – called an ‘extinction level event’? Did Trump deliberately throw the election? What’s really behind the war in Iran, which motivated a majority of Trump voters, or at least republican supporters, to reject him? His recent decisions and actions seem to have ruined the Republicans. I think back to the post-Covid era here in Canada, when we were breezing towards a conservative government (insofar as such exists in this benighted Dominion, where the two parties differ not all that much). After the unmitigated disaster of Justin Trudeau’s tenure as Prime Minister, people were sick to death of him and his Liberals. That is, until Donald Trump got involved. Now we’re stuck with his successor, the globalist and radical ideologue Mark Carney, who plans to import millions of migrants, fast-track them to citizenship, and turn them into lifelong, loyal Liberal voters.
The question for America (and Canada) is existential, in the sense of ‘pertaining to existence’, and keeping body and soul together. For most Americans, what’s going on across the world is distant and theoretical, with thoughts of ‘regime change in Iran’ rather esoteric and irrelevant, especially when they’re living barely within their means – or not even. As Mark Steyn put it, quoting a recent headline:
Heating oil now 82% more expensive than this time last year
So, if you’ve got a 275-gallon tank, you need to find another 750 bucks or so to fill her up. This is in a country where two-thirds of households live paycheck to paycheck.
It’s worse here in Canada. I recently talked to someone recently driving a large-size diesel pickup, and it cost him nearly $500 to fill up his tank. The war in Iran (or whatever one wants to call it) without any end in sight is connected quite directly in people’s minds with skyrocketing gas prices, making everything more expensive and difficult.
When asked about this, Trump invoked his inner Clark Gable, stating that he ‘didn’t give a d*mn’, and that ‘we’re making a (blank) fortune’. Who’s ‘we’, is the question. Most billionaires don’t care about gas prices, unless they’re the recipients of that fortune. It’s a strange and insouciant statement from someone depending on the votes of those who care very much about the ‘price of gas’.
Now, like Gable, Trump’s Republican party is, more or less, gone with the wind.
Is all of this deliberate?
Trump’s own Vice President, J.D. Vance, admitted in a mea culpa that the Republicans debacle was due to the unpopular Iran war. Again, a disconcerting admission after the fact.
There are any number of other reasons the Republicans were rejected. On the ballots, the people almost unanimously rejected the behemothic, energy gobbling AI data centres Trump has trumped. Then there’s the Epstein files, which were promised to be released, but never were, for reasons that remain mysterious. Need we start upon Trump’s and his fellow Republicans’ moral blind spots, from IVF to drag queens, a moral complaisance and increasing distance from what really made America great?
As the saying goes, politics is downstream from culture, and culture is formed by religion. If America is still in some vestige a Christian nation, it is far less so that it once was. We are, as the 80’s ballad had it, losing our religion. Nature abhors a vacuum, so Islam, socialism and the LGBTQ+ deviancy – bedfellows for now, until one gains dominance – have filled the void. The youth are indoctrinated in the whole trifecta in public schools, from K-1 to university, and the media fills in what gaps are left.
In a bizarre post the morning after the decimation, Trump was praising his plans for the White House ballroom. How’s that going to work out if – or when – America gets its first Muslim president? Their culture isn’t much into dancing, or anything else that we consider Christian, or even ‘fun’.
Meanwhile, conservatives are divided. How does a true conservative cooperate with those who think it’s right to nuke civilian populations, or off-shore much of our economy – including many of the ‘working man’s’ jobs – to countries with slave-like working conditions? Or are comfortable with all that ‘gay’ marriage? As a couple of Gen-Z conservatives on a recent podcast put, ‘it’s so boring’. Hmm.
Well, boring or not, the U.S. is now more or less governed by ideological socialist Democrats, with a radical and retributive agenda. The people will have to find out the hard way that socialism and moral anarchy never has, and never will, work, to say nothing of all the other evils that will be permitted, and even imposed.
Things are grim, and it will be difficult, if not practically impossible, to come back from this. But there’s always hope, and (quasi) miracles do happen. As someone posted, the province of British Columbia here in Canada just elected a conservative premier, which may be small beer, but – if you know anything about BC or have been there – is also a small miracle, and at least a step in the right direction.
In the end, we should always remember that our hope is not in this world, far less in Trump or the Republicans or ‘Conservatives’, or any Cyrus-type political leader or party. As the prophet Jeremiah warned, Put not your trust in the arm of flesh, (17:5). Rather, as the Psalmist declared, our hope is in the Lord, Who made heaven and earth. (Ps 124:8).
While we’re on Scripture, I’ll close these thoughts for now, before heading off to Mass, with these last lines from Psalm 42, which I hope offer some comfort on this first Friday, dedicated to the Sacred Heart:
By day the LORD commands his steadfast love;
and at night his song is with me,
a prayer to the God of my life.
I say to God, my rock:
“Why hast thou forgotten me?
Why go I mourning
because of the oppression of the enemy?”
As with a deadly wound in my body,
my adversaries taunt me,
while they say to me continually,
“Where is your God?”
[Why are you cast down, O my soul,
and why are you disquieted within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,
my help and my God.
