Introduction
So what are we to make of the first week of Trump 47? Bnonn Tennant has written that he thinks this whole thing is going to spell long-term difficulties for the church as the church. And while one of his central cautions is very well-taken, what follows below are seven reasons why I am not nearly as pessimistic as he is.
The caution I agree with is the one I touched on here. With the election of Trump, and with all the aggressive moves he is making to unravel and dismantle major aspects of the progressive madness, it would be easy—now that the pressure seems to be off—for Christians to go right back to sleep. Although the seas were turbulent, as long as Jonah was safe in the boat, he was sleeping. He got around to his praying from inside the great fish. One good thing about affliction is that it focuses the mind. Helps us concentrate.
“It is good for me that I have been afflicted; That I might learn thy statutes.”Psalm 119:71 (KJV)
Now some of what I argue below, I have said before in this space, but reminders can still be helpful. But some of it is fresh and new, just like our waves of astonishment when Trump floats the idea of abolishing the income tax.
Josiah and Jehu
For many years, faithful Christians have been longing for, and praying for, a king like Josiah. We want someone who will go after all the high places. But what God in His providence has done is He has given us a Jehu. Now I certainly believe that we should continue to pray that God would raise up our Josiah—but in the meantime, we should take our Jehu.
I mean, it really does look like Trump is going to convert the DEI Temple into a latrine. We are not against that part.
Gulf of America
On the one hand, the name change from Denali back to McKinley is neither here nor there. The same thing is true about the newly-tagged Gulf of America. Never once in my life has it ever chafed me to have the name of Mexico lapping along our American shores. I never even thought about it.
But here is why these moves are so important. These are not examples of Trump’s pettiness, or childishness, but are rather marks of a real tactical genius. I have argued for many years that all of our cultural battles are over editorial control of the dictionary. What Trump is doing here is asserting his authority to name and rename. And naming is one of the most important things we do.
This is the issue, is it not? We currently have a justice sitting on the Supreme Court who declined to answer the question “what is a woman?” because she was not a biologist. And the fact that she did not get laughed out of Washington for that answer was plain evidence that a whole lot of people were acceding to the editorial claims of Old Slewfoot. That sorry business, unlike Denali and Mexico, was a serious naming issue that Trump took on when he announced that as far as the Federal Government was concerned, male and female about covered it.
Pete Hegseth was up to the same thing when he mentioned changing the names of Army bases back to their previous names, even though those names memorialized Confederate generals—e.g. Fort Benning and Fort Bragg. The only thing remaining would be for Trump to put up a statue of Robert E. Lee somewhere.
But the issue is having the authority to name, being willing to exercise that authority over resistance, and not backing down. This naming business is not trivial.
Pro-Life Juke Move?
Like many other believers, I was dismayed some months ago by the softening of the pro-life language in the Republican party platform. I was also dismayed by J.D. Vance softening his stance, apparently to make himself eligible for the veep slot. This lent force to the abolitionist argument that our “smashmouth incrementalism” was clearly a snare and a delusion. “If we are not consistent in what we are demanding, unless we are full-tilt abolitionists, up and down the line, we will lose it all. The first chance they get, we will see our politicians slip their leash and go back to some muddle-headed pro-life smudge position, rape-and-incest exceptions and all.”
So back when this downgrade was happening, I argued at the time that the only way this softening language could be justified honorably would be if they were . . . lying. You know, like the Hebrew midwives. In order to save the lives of babies.
And it is starting to appear as though this might have been the case. At the very least, the pro-life measures being taken by the new administration are significantly to the right of their campaign rhetoric. The standard move of Republican politicians has always been to run right and govern to the middle. But on this issue, the Trump team appears to have run to the middle and is governing to the right. From his immediate action of resuming enforcement of the Hyde amendment, to Vance’s appearance at the March for Life, to reinstating the Mexico City Policy, which bans the funding of abortion overseas . . . pro-lifers have real reason to be encouraged. There is real opportunity for us to work here. Our presence in the room has not been forgotten.
So if this is the case, what they did was mute the abortion issue in the campaign, by means of their downgrade, thus taking away an issue that really does agitate and motivate the liberals. Abortion is their blood sacrament, and it is now looking at least possible that the strategy was “heads down, don’t draw fire on this” as opposed to “let’s reverse course.”
But if it is not the case, if this were not a deceptive feint made at the top, then it indicates that Trump and his advisors still know that genuine pro-lifers are an essential part of what they need to accomplish. Good news either way.
I Really Don’t Care, Margaret
The liberal interviewers are pulling on all the old levers that used to work so well. None of it is working. Some of that is because of the vibe shift in the country, and some of it is because J.D. Vance is a lot smarter than the people who are sent to interview him. This is quite a hot combination. Vance goes on Face the Nation, and memes just pop out. “I really don’t care, Margaret.”
The fatal flaw in the older conservative opposition is that they would growl and all, but deep down they wanted to be invited back. Back on the show, back to the Georgetown soiree, back to the club. The left had something they could threaten to withhold. “We will deem you a disreputable conservative if you keep that up.” You know, a racist. A deplorable. A misogynist. All the icky things that they had in their tool chest here. And conservatives cared far too much about earning the respect of liberals who would never under any circumstances ever respect them.
And this is why Vance’s reply—”I really don’t care, Margaret”—sums up the entirety of this vibe shift. Margaret is soon to discover that Vance really doesn’t care. Neither does Karoline Leavitt. Neither does Pete Hegseth. Neither does Tom Homan. Neither does Pam Bondi.
And the left is about to discover, to their dismay, how much they depended on conservatives caring what was thought of them.
Fifty Wrecking Balls
Trump looks to get all of his cabinet picks, or almost all of them. We will see what happens with RFK.
When Trump came into office in 2016, he was prepared to be a wrecking ball, and although he did good work, particularly with judges, he was successfully hogtied by the deep state—COVID, lockdowns, impeachments, Muller investigation, and all the rest of those deep state monkeyshines.
At that time, when it came to picking his people, he had to choose between loyalists who didn’t know how the system worked, and careerists who did. The careerists were not loyal to his project, and were able to slow walk all kinds of stuff.
But this time around Trump is nominating people who are competent and radical and who have personal reasons that would keep them from “growing in office,” or “going native.” He has put forward a cabinet from a veritable Murderers’ Row, and once they are all in office, we can look for the festivities to begin. Instead of one big threat, like Trump in 2016, which they were largely able to neutralize, there will be fifty wrecking balls. From the left’s perspective, there will be a new outrage every ten hours or so, and they are going to be stretched really thin in their responses—trying to put out the multiple fires that this line-up will start.
On top of everything else, the legacy media has thoroughly disgraced itself, and will be unable to generate the kind of drumbeat “Washington consensus” that in the past used to cow the squish Republicans.
To be clear, the outrages will involve much more than one political agenda being replaced by a different one. There was a lot of criminality involved in the way Trump was treated over the last few years, and so there will be criminal prosecutions. This is why Melania chose to wear that “payback” hat to the Inauguration.
Deep Gratitude for the 2020 Steal
Looking back, I remain convinced that there were a lot of dirty deeds in the 2020 election. I still believe that through an adroit use of certain Electoral College pinch points, the election was stolen from Donald Trump. In my belief that a presidential election was jiggered with, I found myself in the august company of previous election deniers—Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, and other Democrat worthies. So yes, I do still believe that.
But . . .
But what a blessing it has turned out to have been. If Trump had won the White House in 2020, it would have been a squeaker. The cheating was Electoral College cheating, not popular vote level cheating, and Trump would likely have lost the popular vote. But because Trump won in 2016, and was cheated out of a victory in 2020, what has now happened?
Instead of the middle-of-the-night cheating, always disputable, the American public was treated to full display of high-handed cheating and election interference in broad daylight, over the course of years, assiduously and breathlessly covered by the legacy media as though it were honest. The legacy media is called this because they used to have a legacy, which they have mindlessly squandered. They mixed that legacy up with some paint thinner and poured it all down a rat hole. The only up side for them was that it did kill some rats.
Election interference would include the Russian collusion hoax, suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, a couple of bogus impeachment runs, banana republic prosecutions, four of them, an FBI raid on Trump’s home, the J6 Jitney Committee, two assassination attempts, and a bunch of other shenanigans. The more this went on, the more Americans just stared at the spectacle and thought something like, “You know, he is still a lot closer to what I think is normal than those weirdos attacking him.”
The result of this is that Trump won the popular vote. Trump took all seven of the swing states. Trump racked up a decisive Electoral College win. He really does have a mandate. The four years out of office gave his people time to draft a boatload of executive orders. It also gave the American people fours years of trying to cope with the dithering of a hapless, bootless, and rudderless administration. The Republicans held both House and Senate. The Supreme Court is right of center. Had Trump not been robbed in 2020, he would have had almost none of that.
DEI Dismantling
The DEI travesty has been the single greatest engine for the fomenting of ethnic animosities that we have seen in a long time. It has been a gigantic Petri dish, in which various slights, affronts, and micro-agressions—historically committed by white people and alleged to have been committed by white people—have been carefully cultured. This has gone on to the point where whites have been relegated to the status of humanity’s disease. Just think of the Frankfurt School’s critical theory as something cooked up in Wuhan, and which then leaked.
After a decade or two of this toxicity, a bunch of normie white people got tired of it, and decided that Donald Trump was not the weird one. They preferred him in 2016 over a white woman, and again in 2024 over a brown one. The intersectionality jive just wasn’t working any more. The vast majority of these normies were saying, “Look. Can’t we just go back to simple justice?” They did this, knowing that there would have to be radical changes. And dramatic changes have certainly come . . . all appearances indicate that all the DEI grime is going to be washed down a huge industrial sink. That process is already well underway, and I think we should consider it completed when Derek Chauvin is pardoned and released from prison.
In the meantime, it should be recognized that this DEI Petri dish did grow some gnarly stuff over on the far right side of it. That area looked sort of like a diseased custard with some purple streaks that had somehow been growing some fur. There have been some lame attempts by the leftists to blame responsible conservatives for this actual ethnic animosity, but I just look back at them with my best fat face, and say, “Look. It’s your Petri dish.”
Those Beautiful, Beautiful Tariffs
So we have to look at tariffs from two different angles. Let’s try to be grown ups about this.
The first would be their use as a negotiating weapon in Donald Trump’s arsenal. This was seen recently in the recent showdown between Trump and the president of Colombia. We were flying some rascals back to the place whence they came, and the president of Colombia, one Gustavo Petro, refused to let them land. Trump was playing golf and at the third hole he announced monster tariffs on Colombia, and by the eighth hole Colombia had folded. In this instance, we don’t need to discuss the economic impact of the tariffs because there will be no impact . . . because there will be no tariffs. With this use of tariffs, an administration could have a really draconian tariff policy which resided permanently in the threats category and never in the implemented category.
The second use of tariffs would be as a real source of revenue, which is how Trump also thinks of them. This is why he calls them beautiful tariffs. Now what Trump is proposing, if it gets through Congress, could possibly be really great, but it wouldn’t be for the reasons that a lot of his supporters are whizzed up about. Trump is proposing to eliminate the income tax, and supply our federal coffers with monies that tariffs generate instead.
Now let’s say that his plan worked like a charm, and that there was a net zero impact on how much revenue came in. The amount from tariffs was exactly the same as what was being extracted right now from the average taxpaying American goober. It would not be the case that the government used to get its money from Smith, Murphy, and Jones, but now they get it from Argentina, China, and Brazil. No, the cost of whatever tariffs are laid on foreign goods that are to be imported to America will be recovered through raised prices, and these raised prices will be paid, of course, by Smith, Murphy, and Jones. In short, the money that fills up the federal coffers will still be money that comes from Americans. So the blessing here would not be an economic one. If you buy coffee, bananas, sandals, or flat screen televisions, then that is the way your money would go to the feds. The money would still get to Washington, only by another route.
So please note. If a “tariffs are beautiful” regime comes in without the elimination of the income tax, this would constitute a massive “tax” increase.
The blessing of Trump’s proposal would not be economic therefore. The blessing would be the elimination of a vast apparatus of tyranny that gets into everybody’s business. You know, how bureaucrats review whether or not your receipts for light bulbs should be authorized as a household expense deduction. You would lose the same amount of money in the long run, but it would be spread out over the year, and all you would have to do in order to pay is to go buy some more bananas. No paperwork for the individual at all, and no more intrusive personal questions. That would be a great advantage.
But various questions remain on this one. Will the idea get past Congress? Will the revenues gathered be less than, equal to, or more than what the government takes in now? Will DOGE be savage enough to help deal with any revenue shortfall? All of that remains to be seen and I, along with many of you, am all agog.
Conclusion
If this first week is anything to go by, and it appears that it will be, I look forward to having a really good time in the months to come. There is a lot to appreciate and applaud here. And there will be many laugh out loud moments. But I do not write as someone who is in thrall to some kind of Trump personality cult. I don’t think that I could work individually for Trump for 45 minutes straight without getting fired three or four times. Let’s be realistic.
But my appreciation is still great, my gratitude is still profound, and as I watch all this from the vantage of northern Idaho, I am sure I will offer color commentary from time to time.