Michael Anton On Stopping Trump

Election 2024 is till a long way off, but it’s never too soon to obsess over it—ask any Never Trumper. They’re obsessed with keeping Trump out of the White House, and Michael Anton’s latest explores the ways—he counts them and assigns each way a letter—the Never Trumpers have devised to accomplish just that. Here’s the link to the Zerohedge version, which is in a more easily readable format:

They Can't Let Him Back In

The people who really run the United States of America have made it clear that they can’t, and won’t, if they can help it, allow Donald Trump to be president again. In fact, they made this clear in 2020, in a series of public statements. …

If the regime felt that strongly back then, imagine how they feel now. But you don’t have to imagine. They tell you every day. Liz Cheney, Trump’s personal Javert, has said that the 45th president is literally the greatest threat facing America today - greater than China, than our crashing economy, than our unraveling civil society.

After playing around a bit with the over the top rhetorical phenomena associated with Never Trumpism, Anton gets down to brass tacks. What’s this really all about? Not Trump, or not Trump per se. It’s about us, and certain core issues that are dear to the established ruling class. Why do “they”—meaning, not so much the loony left as “the people who really run the USA”—need to destroy Trump?

I think it’s because, while Trump’s core MAGA agenda is decidedly not outside the historic bipartisan mainstream, it is well outside the present regime’s core interests. Our rulers’ wealth and power rise with open borders, trade giveaways, and endless war. Trump, at least in principle, and often in practice, threatens all three. The old America—the one in which Republicans cared about the heartland and weren’t solely valets to corporate power, Democrats were pro-worker and anti-war, and Bill Clinton and The New York Times could advocate border security—is in the process of being replaced, if it hasn’t already been, by one in which there is only one acceptable opinion on not just these, but all other issues.

Anti-Trump hysteria is in the final analysis not about Trump. The regime can’t allow Trump to be president not because of who he is (although that grates), but because of who his followers are. That class—Angelo Codevilla’s “country class”—must not be allowed representation by candidates who might implement their preferences, which also, and above all, must not be allowed. The rubes have no legitimate standing to affect the outcome of any political process, because of who they are, but mostly because of what they want.

Complaints about the nature of Trump are just proxies for objections to the nature of his base.

Note that what Anton is actually saying is that our rulers are at war not simply with Republicans or conservatives, but with everyone who’s not part of their club. Consider:

Our rulers’ wealth and power rise with open borders, trade giveaways, and endless war.

You don’t have power, but does your wealth, such as it may be, rise with open borders, trade giveaways, and endless war? I know mine doesn’t, and I’ll bet yours doesn’t either. How about those old America Republicans—Main Street small businessmen, farmers, middle class salaried workers, culturally traditional folk? Open borders, trade giveaways, and endless war do nothing for them—those issues work very much against them, by shutting down their livelihoods and raising their taxes. How about the old America Democrats—the urban blue collar working class, blacks? I get that the wannabe liberal intelligentsia are still invested in supporting anyone who looks down on mainstream Americans and still buy into the ruling class rhetoric, but traditional Democrats gain nothing and lose a lot from open borders, trade giveaways, and endless war.

Notice something here, that Anton doesn’t explicitly address. Trump’s base should logically include all Americans who are harmed by the ruling class agenda of open borders, trade giveaways, and endless war. In other words, Trump’s base, his natural constituency, cuts across traditional party lines as well as across other social class and identity lines. We didn’t see the full potential effect of that in 2016—just a glimpse. But that glimpse was terrifying for the ruling established class. And now polling is showing further shifts, helped along by the growing economic instability of life in America as well as by growing cultural rifts between our rulers and ordinary, mostly normal, people.

Suburban women, blacks, Hispanics—demographics that our Dem rulers thought they had a lock on—are, to varying degrees, showing signs of shifting. That’s good news for the populist conservatives, but not necessarily good news for the GOPe—because just like the Dem elites, the GOP elites also have gotten wealthy from open borders, trade giveaways, and endless war. Mitch McConnell was recently asked about 2024, and his reply was interesting. He said the GOP presidential primaries would be “wide open”. Of course 2024 is still a long way off, but with Trump polling at 56% and no alternate possibility (think: DeSantis) making it to 20%, that doesn’t look so wide open. McConnell’s response came across more as an expression of determination to do whatever it takes to stop Trump—after all, what other way could there be to have “wide open” GOP primaries, when Trump is currently so far ahead?

From these considerations we see the real nub of the problem facing our rulers. They haven’t yet figured out a way to truly dispense with elections. They’ve jiggered with them, but a populism of the sort we’re starting to see coalescing can’t be denied indefinitely. That’s scary—for our rulers. And it’s why Trump has to be stopped. Our rulers have convinced themselves that by stopping Trump they have a chance of stopping populism—opposition to open borders, trade giveaways, and endless war. In fact, they might even be willing to compromise on open borders, for the time being, as witness the resumption of wall construction in Arizona. If Trump can be stopped, the question then becomes: Can other GOP hopefuls (think: DeSantis, for now) be bought off by the people who favor open borders, trade giveaways, and endless war? That would buy more time to subdue the populace.

So, now let’s look at how Anton thinks the rulers will try to stop Trump—I summarize Anton fairly drastically.

Plan A is to use the Jan. 6 show trials to make it impossible for Trump to run again, or barring that, to win again.

But that isn’t working; at least, not well enough.

They may have dented Trump a little in opinion polling, but not nearly enough to prevent him from getting the GOP nomination.

I’d go a bit further than Anton. This looks like a clear loser. Not only does all polling show that nobody cares, nobody buys into the Insurrection narrative, but the show trials appear to be really turning people off. It’s part of the Trump phenomenon. He may be out of the White House, but he’s still forcing them to reveal who they really are—and, as before, it’s a turn off for the American people.

Plan B is for the Jan. 6 committee to lay the groundwork for an indictment of Trump.

The Justice Department is already leaking that “seditious conspiracy” might be the charge.

Now, I personally believe that such a charge would be ludicrous.

As with Plan A, it’s even worse than Anton says. Polling is showing that even large percentages of Dem voters believe that Election 2020 was tainted by widespread fraud—widespread enough to have affected the outcome. In that climate an indictment, which I believe would likely be tossed, would simply focus popular rage on the ruling class. And in this regard Anton makes a telling point:

Moreover, if the regime goes forward with this, it’s going to try him in the District of Columbia’s 77 percent Democratic and 92 percent virulently anti-Trump jury pool, which lately has been acquitting obvious Democratic miscreants and convicting Republicans on silly charges that never used to have been brought in the first place.

It’s just a fact—perhaps, to many, a baleful fact—but nevertheless a fact that somewhere between a third and half the country is going to find this totally illegitimate and be outraged by it.

As with most of these attempts to stop Trump, what is really happening is that the ruling class is delegitimizing itself. Again, the Trump effect.

Plan C, if none of this works, is to have Trump declared ineligible under the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment.

Again, I believe this gets tossed. The problem with all these approaches—and Anton recognizes this—is that they end up in front of the SCOTUS. The simple solution for the SCOTUS is to say: Go have an election. Because the SCOTUS will see no benefit to the Court as an institution in taking sides against We The People when they don’t have to. That’s the lesson of this last term, and the clear trend of the conservative majority on the Court.

Plan D—just beat him at the ballot box—is also risky. The country is in desperate shape. Biden is enormously unpopular. Harris is spectacularly unpopular. Getting rid of one of them will be hard. Getting rid of both?

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. The Dems have put themselves in a box. I don’t see how this—removing Zhou—works. There are too many problems, starting with constitional problems, let alone problems with all of the potential players. I just don’t see this working. To make this work the Dems would need to come up with a solution that would also be palatable to the GOPe, and even they would gag at the possibilities I’ve seen on offer.

Plan E is to cheat. 

This is another way of looking at Plan D. This, too, is risky—because of the shifting demographics. Getting out the vote could backfire big time, when the demographics you get to come out are the same ones you’re screwing with your policies: open borders, trade giveaways, and endless war. And remember, the same people who are hurt by those policies are also the people who are getting hammered by inflation. Anton get this—or some of it:

But there is reason to wonder if they can get away with it next time. Whatever happened in 2020, a supermajority of Republicans doesn’t believe that the election was on the level. The regime is extremely worried about this, which is why the propaganda on it is so intense. They know that to pull off a win in 2024, and have it accepted by the 2020 doubters, the next election is at least going to have to look a lot cleaner than the last. Making it look cleaner is hard to do without actually making it cleaner. The downside to that, though, is obvious.

And so we come to Plan F:

Which leaves Plan F, which they have already sketched in broad outlines. I don’t know exactly what form it will take, but they have made clear that “under no circumstance” can Trump be allowed to take office again. Among the “circumstances” covered by the word “no” would seem to be an Electoral College majority, or a tie followed by a House vote in Trump’s favor.

What happens then? Well, in the words of the “Transition Integrity Project,” a Soros-network-linked collection of regime hacks who in 2020 gamed out their strategy for preventing a Trump second term, the contest would become “a street fight, not a legal battle.”

Again, their words, not mine.

But allow me to translate: The 2020 summer riots, but orders of magnitude larger, not to be called off until their people are secure in the White House.

OK, I understand that the regime is trying to remake the US Army into a private party militia, manned with the same freaks that Soros paid for to trash our cities. I don’t think the military is ready to support those freaks, and I’m pretty sure we the people aren’t ready for that either. Polling shows support for these freaks—and Antifa is heavily staffed with sexual freaks—is rapidly dwindling.

Now, to finish this off, here’s a consideration that I find troubling, but which Anton doesn’t address.

The US position in the world is changing rapidly. Between now and Election 2022—in November—I expect Russia to have reached its endgame in Ukraine. But Russia isn’t stopping there. Russia is busying building a loose international coalition that will tie the hands of the Neocons in many ways. There are those predicting that the EU will be reduced to vassaldom, under US tutelage. I’m not entirely sure about that. Russia will have a say in that. Russia could be in a position to “rescue” all or some of Europe—the lure of heated homes is strong, and that’s something the US can’t guarantee. China, too, will be emboldened—probably thanks in part to Pelosi’s daft move on Taiwan. The latest word is that, one way or the other, it appears she won’t defy China. That is a victory for China. It is the US letting the entire world know that it has no choice but to respect the red lines China has drawn, because our threats of military force have been shown to be bluff in anything short of nuclear war.

The question is, how will the global situation affect the ruling class between now and 2024? The times are uncertain, but it just may be that our ruling class has overplayed its hand.