Programming note: We have a brand new Tale for Our Time - a very far-sighted novel by Robert Hugh Benson from 1907, Lord of the World. Part Four airs tonight at SteynOnline.
~America's uniquely unique peaceful transfer of power? I am inclined to agree with General Flynn:
Given the changes of location for the inauguration due to security, the walk away point of it all is that the outgoing administration cannot or will not secure the inauguration sufficiently for the United States of America to hold a peaceful transfer of power.
ABSOLUTELY...
— General Mike Flynn (@GenFlynn) January 19, 2025
Katie Hopkins has a subtly different but not incompatible take - that a last-minute indoor inauguration was the plan all along:
Hopkins in DC: Word on the street - inauguration pulled to keep the President alive & get him in the White House.
Planned perfectly. Late switch. Enemies thwarted. Beautifully done. pic.twitter.com/sf4F9u3NT5
— Katie Hopkins (@KTHopkins) January 19, 2025
Trump's first term was in large part subverted by the Permanent State, which declined to recognise the "head of the executive branch" as such. One should take it as read that they will attempt to do the same this time round.
However, things have degenerated further since 2017. A significant chunk of that Permanent State wants the forty-seventh president dead. It is only six months since a total failure of US security led to a supposed "lone wolf" putting a bullet in Trump. Well, assassination attempts can happen to anyone, I guess. But what are we to make of the Democrat-media complex's total lack of interest in either of 47's would-be killers? Both men remain as unknown as they were twenty-four hours after either incident. A prudent person - which Trump should certainly be after the last eight years - would conclude that high-ranking elements in the federal state are, to put it at its mildest, not ill-disposed toward anyone minded to go for third time lucky.
To state the above - as if America in 2025 is merely Burkina Faso in 1987 with higher running costs - is to acknowledge the scale of the challenge facing the incoming forty-seventh president. He is, necessarily, a wiser man than the incoming forty-fifth president, or he would not have survived. But he still has the next four years to get through: Fool my first term, shame on you. Fool my second term, shame on me.
Since January 2021 I have been saying that Trump doing a Grover Cleveland is an act of necessary political hygiene. He pulled it off. But he was not the only victim, and in federal prisons across the land there are legions of others awaiting justice:
President Trump has the executive order for release of J6 prisoners ready to go. My friend Gary Haven and a number of patriot partners are all getting jets ready to transport them from 60 different prisons. They will also get cell phones and counseling support. More to come! pic.twitter.com/yQM0mkiI4d
— Lance Wallnau (@lancewallnau) January 19, 2025
If true, that is a good start. So is this:
🚨BREAKING: Donald Trump will REJECT Keir Starmer's US ambassador choice due to his ties with the EU.
Trump is back, and he doesn't care. pic.twitter.com/HAJT1X6qVZ
— Inevitable West (@Inevitablewest) January 18, 2025
America's capital city is already wholly depraved. It doesn't need to import Peter Bloody Mandelson. So good for Trump.
The prevailing facts on the ground are far beyond mere "Trump Derangement Syndrome". Much of federal employment is a racket - from the Pentagon to "public health". It is necessary not just for Trump but for his iconoclastic lieutenants to hit the ground like a Musk space rocket that missed its catching clamp and to crush the permastate beneath them - and not to get distracted along the way: Last time round, a president elected principally on public anger with out-of-control immigration managed to get buffaloed by wankers like Ryan and McConnell into prioritising tax cuts. One assumes he has learned his lesson, but, thanks to the Democrats' dissolution of the southern border, the problem has metastasized over the Biden years. We are at a societal tipping point, and Trump has promised the biggest mass deportation programme in American history.
To repeat: If true, that is a good start.
Don't expect much help from the party establishment with that: they might as well be working for MS-13. Eleven years ago - 2014 - when the GOP donor class was besotted with Jeb Bush - I wrote as follows:
There are over 300 million people in this country, and, granted that 57 per cent or whatever it's up to by now are fine upstanding members of the Undocumented-American community, what is it about the Bush family that makes them so indispensable to the Republic as to supply three presidential candidates within a quarter-century?
Incredibly, respectable persons were willing to put their names to the Jeb bollocks. As The Washington Post reported:
"He's the most desired candidate out there," said another bundler, Brian Ballard, who sat on the national finance committees for Romney in 2012 and John McCain in 2008. "Everybody that I know is excited about it."
Not me:
The guys who picked last season's loser are already excited about next season's loser. How exciting is that?
Trump will take his second oath of office because tens of millions of Americans decline to be told by the likes of Brian Bundler that Jeb vs Hillary is all the choice a self-governing republic needs. Yet how seriously does the Uniparty take that conviction? Enough to launch Crossfire Hurricane, the Russia investigation, the Covid lockdowns, two impeachments, the "Vote for the Dead Husk in the Basement!" campaign, civil trials and criminal convictions and knicker-pawing raids by the dirty stinkin' rotten corrupt FBI, and the "We don't do sloped roofs" school of presidential security.
And he's still here. That's testament not just to Trump but to all the millions of his voters who are disgusted by how low the political class who perpetrated all the above have brought a once great nation. They're not going back.
A decade ago, on July 10th 2015, three weeks after Donald Trump jumped into the race against the unstoppable Jeb juggernaut, I wrote:
Trump is supposed to be the narcissist blowhard celebrity candidate: He's a guy famous for erecting aesthetically revolting buildings with his 'brand' plastered all over them, for arm-candy brides, for beauty contests and reality shows. The other fellows are sober, serious senators and governors.
And yet Trump is the only one who's introduced an issue into this otherwise torpid campaign - and the most important issue of all, I would argue, in that ultimately it's one of national survival. And so the same media that dismiss Trump as an empty reality-show vanity candidate are now denouncing him for bringing up the only real policy question in the race so far... Like other philosophically erratic politicians from Denmark to Greece, Trump has tapped into a very basic strain of cultural conservatism: the question of how far First World peoples are willing to go in order to extinguish their futures on the altar of 'diversity'.
We are now eight years on. This is crunch time. There's no margin for error, no margin for getting FISAed, no margin for getting Romneyed. As the above laundry list demonstrates, Trump will never be treated by the permastate as a "normal" president.
So don't even bother pretending to be. The lesson of 2024 - from the courthouse to the garbage truck - is that abnormal works for Trump. So go for it.
~We had a very busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with Mark's column on the latest baroness charged with chairing England's gang-rape scandal under the carpet. Mark's Saturday music show presented highlights from The Jacques Brel Songbook and The Mrs O'Leary Songbook, and Rick McGinnis's weekly movie date opted for Hope Lange in The Best of Everything. Our Sunday Song of the Week tipped its hat to our cousins Down Under. And our marquee presentation was the launch of a brand new Tale for Our Time - Robert Hugh Benson's extraordinarily prescient Lord of the World: Click for Part One, Part Two and Part Three. Part Four airs tonight at SteynOnline.
If you were too busy clearing out your office at the DoJ this weekend, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
~We thank you for all your kind comments this last grisly year - and especially all those new members of The Mark Steyn Club, and those old members who've signed up a chum for a SteynOnline Gift Certificate or a Steyn Club Gift Membership. Steyn Clubbers span the globe, from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati. We hope to welcome many more new members in the years ahead.