by Andrew Cairns
Although at the time of this writing it is far from certain, it nevertheless seems likely that President Trump’s supporters will be robbed of all the joy from his record-smashing, poll-obliterating electoral performance in November—a performance that inexplicably lifted every “toss-up” Republican boat from sea to shining sea except his own. Despite Trump’s garnering nearly 11 million more votes than in 2016, we are supposed to believe that the country has handed the keys of the Oval Office over to a moribund, provably corrupt, mostly virtual candidate on political, if not actual, life support.
If that happens, it would be a tragedy visited upon this nation by an international criminal conspiracy too cleverly conceived and professionally coordinated for politically fickle district court judges and parochial state legislatures following conventional rules of election certification to fathom.
According to Rasmussen, fully 47 percent of the electorate suspects the election was stolen, mainly because they watched it happen live, one post-election day computer “glitch,” ballot box “discovery,” and vertical vote spike at a time. They know something is deeply wrong with these results even without expertise in statistical analysis and despite the media’s eagerness to prop up Joe Biden on his last working leg as “president-elect.”
So the political pros are hastening the certification process to deprive voters of a full examination of Team Trump’s mounting body of circumstantial but convincing numerical evidence, sworn eyewitness affidavits alleging fraud, and on-the-record expert testimony of mathematical, military, and cybersecurity specialists.
The contrast between Team Trump’s abundance of evidence getting zero media play and the complete lack of evidence and anonymously sourced rumors that drove three years of round-the-clock Trump-Russia collusion mania on all the cable networks, is sharp enough to split the stablest political atoms. How will that potentially explosive energy be harnessed going forward if Trump is removed from office?
No MAGA without Trump
In spite of that real worry, some commentators on the Right—in the name of realpolitik, of course—are already considering what the MAGA movement “after Trump” might look like.The reality, however, is that no matter what career GOP “strategists” and pundits think, there is no MAGA movement if Trump’s work is prematurely cut off—particularly if it is gutted so ruthlessly in this Et Tu, Brute? fashion, with the approval if not complicity of not a few NeverTrump GOP governors and establishment figures.
The cold, hard reality facing the populist conservative movement within the GOP, is that if Trump is sent packing after every promise he’s kept in the face of relentless adversities over the last four years, any one of which would have ended a lesser presidency, the GOP establishment will revert like memory foam to its pre-MAGA pin cushion form. This will quickly deflate Trump’s once fearsome political base, and undo his remarkably successful courtship of the working class and minority voters ordinarily averse to the GOP brand. And the GOP establishment that was happy to ride his coattails will find them yanked out from under them, too.
The D.C. gravy train designed to benefit its bipartisan duopoly, having been disrupted by Trump’s global trade reset and his resolve to rethink and transcend old, outdated international and military alliances, will fire up the old, familiar CO2-belching engine of its endless war and political grift machine.
We will see the return of the status quo ante with a vengeance, under the mumbling, incoherent and very foreign policy of an inept Biden-Harris Administration. An otherwise hopelessly divided Congress similarly will sputter its way into tens of trillions more in debt, authorizing more “police actions” that keep the VA hospitals and cemeteries full of wounded and dead soldiers.
So, whatever happens in the next few weeks as the president’s beleaguered attorneys combat reluctant courts, short-sighted state legislators and governors, and a malevolent media to make the compelling case that Biden’s “win” was really a massive, coordinated election fraud, President Trump must prepare to lead the movement, one way or another, whether from the White House, or from someplace else, when the sound and the fury is over.
Until the swamp is drained, the wall is built, the national economy is decoupled from the whims of foreign dictatorships, and a new generation of candidates rises up to lead the MAGA coalition, Trump’s derailed reelection is not yet a loss the movement can survive. Let’s not pretend that it is, just because it looks like the handwriting for the election is on the wall. We can’t just dust off our shoes and move on. Move on to where? As Lt. General Michael Flynn said: “If America falls, there is no place left to go.”
Speaker Trump
It is therefore prudent (if, one hopes, premature) to ask the question: From which “someplace else” should a former President Trump lead his movement, if not from the White House?
I would humbly suggest, with some historical precedent, that he set his sights not merely on creating a new Fox News competitor, or, as some have suggested, acting as GOP chairman (a position for which the main job is groveling for money, not actually doing anything), but rather that he move on to something truly consequential—something that, if he pulled it off, would really put the exclamation point on his claims of having been cheated in 2020: namely, on winning Congress.
More specifically, on winning the Congress and getting elected to the office of Speaker of the House in 2022.
John Quincy Adams was a president who, after leaving office, entered Congress and led an active political life through several subsequent presidencies. Some of the most important political figures in American history, including Henry Clay, were House speaker but never president. Trump could cement his legacy by becoming first president and then House speaker.
While running for Congress from a Florida district he might easily win, President Trump should spend the next two years holding MAGA rallies and town halls to build an agenda, cultivating promising state legislators and politically active citizen-patriots who emerge during this period into viable candidates to challenge even traditionally safe Democratic and RINO House districts and Senate seats. Like Newt Gingrich in 1994, he could frame the 2022 congressional elections as a national referendum on all the issues that have made Congress so despised over the past 50 years, and by winning the majority, also win the speakership.
These are, not coincidentally, the same issues that have made America less great, and made her more vulnerable to subversion, both from abroad and from within, inspiring Trump to run for president in the first place:
1) Illegal immigration and the need for merit-based legal immigration, not to mention the border wall;
2) The bipartisan selling out of American jobs to Communist slave labor;
3) Deliberate degradation of election integrity in most of the 50 states;
4) The dangerous rise of a politically tiered justice system at the Justice Department and FBI;
5) The metastasis of the bureaucratic “deep state” as a cancer in the executive branch, largely created by the encroachments of Congress on executive authority masquerading as giveaways of legislative power;
6) Big Tech tyranny and the assault on the First Amendment;
7) The increasing attacks on religious freedom by secular leadership;
8) The rise of pseudoscience quackery in academia and in government (climate change, the metaphysics of masks and lockdowns, etc.);
9) The impossibility of reining in “fake news” media without thoughtful libel law reform;
10) Social engineering in our military at a time when we need to focus on threats from existential competitors in both cyberspace and real space.
That’s just 10 of about 20 or more I could name off the top of my head. None of these were challenges that President Trump could resolve in his first term, mainly because the feckless House Republicans abandoned him over the criminally bogus Russian collusion investigation, practically handing the House to the Democrats in 2018.
Democrats used the last two years almost exclusively to investigate and impeach him, and otherwise work against his agenda. Yet who other than Trump could, or would, have any chance of herding the cats of the Republican coalition, and possibly a few stray Democrat “moderates” toward victory on these issues?
It seems quite clear, after everything we’ve learned about the man and his restless, seemingly boundless energy and multitasking mindset, that a House Speaker Donald Trump could wheel-and-deal his way to victory on all these issues with a commanding, maybe even bipartisan majority in both chambers, which candidate Trump and his 73 million (and likely more) “Not Your Father’s GOP” voters in 2020 have more than proven he could win.
Imagine what he could do with the subpoena power current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) used against him, only instead employed to rein in the coup plotters as well as the tech and media giants; or with the power of the purse that she wielded like a weapon, only instead prioritized to defund the administrative state, while fully funding the wall, ICE, the military (including the new Space Force) and the police!
Thus, from the perch of the speaker’s powerful catbird seat, having pried the gavel from Nancy Pelosi’s frozen ice-cream sticky fingers, he could orchestrate one of the most emphatic political comebacks in American history. Trump could complete his political mission to right the ship of state and restore the Constitution, only this time as the real “people’s president” and for as long as he wants—or until at last either Washington, D.C., is safe for his second, final presidential term, or new leaders are ready to accept the MAGA mantle.
It’s still a possible future. He, and we, should embrace it, and work toward it. Our alternative, made plain by the surreal results of this election, is to lose it all.
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Andrew Cairns is the pen name of a writer and political thinker living in the United States, who for reasons related to the terms of his full-time employment—not to mention the dilution of the First Amendment—cannot write under his real name, as he would much prefer to do.
