No! Trump did not pull off a shocker to analysts who did not have a horse in the race. Anyone who had an open, unbiased mind and spent the prerequisite amount of time on the road in observation and discussion with voters around the world knew there was little chance of a Clinton victory
Debbie and I, as small government unaligned intelligence seekers, did not take to the road last spring with any preordained conclusions. We develop an international investment strategy on behalf of clients of Richard C. Young & Co. Ltd. That is the long and short of our effort. We travel gathering anecdotal evidence both in America and in Europe. We do not model with computers or mix with electronic media or print media analysts and pundits. We observe, we question, and we develop an ongoing profile of real time feelings and developments on the ground.
Daily mavens of richardcyoung.com know that Debbie and I have been consistent with our set of conclusions since the start of our intelligence gathering last spring. Hillary Clinton was a deeply flawed candidate and a probable felon and a traitor. She was widely perceived as a liar, responsible for the Libyan debacle and, along with her disgraced husband Bill, was bought lock stock and barrel by her criminally allowed and foreign influenced foundation. All of this was in the public domain for any analyst who wished to observe and question. There was only a small chance Hillary Clinton was going to become president of the United States despite the hideous performance by the U.S. electronic and print media and the entrenched Washington elites of both parties.
The rotten to the core legacy of the Clintons will now burn in flames with the charred remnants but a sordid stain in the annals of American history.
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Gracious? Modest? Unifying? Not words normally associated with Donald Trump. The incredibly radioactive candidate’s acceptance speech early Wednesday morning was notably “non-ideological.” Donald Trump “emphasized increased infrastructure spending, taking care of our vets, and getting along with other countries — an agenda that most people would find utterly unobjectionable,” writes NRO’s Rich Lowry.
Perhaps if the mainstream media and Washington elites had turned their backs on the prism of their narrowly focused worlds, they would have seen what Dick and I saw first hand as we traveled between New England and Key West. Over 6 days and 2,000 miles, many of which were off the interstates and into the countryside, the people were not buying into Hillary Clinton.
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In the last three days, you’ve undoubtedly seen the crying, shouting, forlorn looking Americans who voted for Hillary Clinton. They’re grieving. Many Hillary Clinton voters are having a tough time accepting a loss that none of them predicted. After the 2008 election, GOP voters were upset, but they hadn’t had the same level of confidence in McCain that Hillary voters had in their candidate. Obama was a shoe-in. And Hillary’s voters thought she was too.
They couldn’t have been more wrong. You can see the signs of grief all across America, especially in big cities and on college campuses. Here’s a rundown of the five stages of grief, and how they are manifesting themselves.
- Denial: The most prominent display of denial has to be Hillary’s refusal to address the crowd Tuesday night with a concession speech, even though she did manage to call Donald Trump to concede. Various levels of denial could also be seen among liberal pundits and analysts watching the election. In 2012 during the Obama/Romney showdown, GOP denial was best epitomized by Karl Rove’s freak-out on Fox News when confronted with the call of Ohio for Obama.
- Anger: Protests across America and vitriolic rants on social media have displayed the anger of voters. There have even been beatings of Trump voters or supporters by angry Americans. This is the worst stage of acceptance for obvious reasons.
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Bargaining: This is where many Hillary supporters are today. Bargaining is the most interesting phase because that’s when people get creative. Calls for “faithless electors” in the Electoral College, ballot measures to secede, and talk of how the self-avowed socialist Bernie Sanders would have won are all forms of bargaining. There were similar fantasies created by conservatives during the Obama years. Most notable was a vote by rural Colorado voters to secede.
- Acceptance: Acceptance is the final stage of grief, but you rarely see it in the political arena. Sixteen years after the fact, the left still argues that Bush stole the election from Gore. And conservatives have never accepted Obama. The major priorities of the Trump administration are to dismantle every executive order and major piece of legislation Obama completed. That doesn’t sound like acceptance. With another election four years down the road, and what promises to be a divisive mid-term half-way along, it’s unlikely Hillary voters will have time to accept Trump’s win.
- Depression: This phase will probably last a long time. If you spend the holidays with any Hillary supporters, prepare for some dreary Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner celebrations this year. The depression among conservatives caused by Obama’s 2008 victory didn’t seem to end until the wee hours of the morning on Wednesday. You can expect the same from ardent Clinton supporters.
WARNING: GRAPHIC LANGUAGE AND VIOLENCE
What is most unfortunate about all the teeth gnashing over the outcome of the election is that it illustrates just how far America has strayed from the intent of the Founders. The Founders designed a system that put much of the power of government in the hands of the states. The federal government was intended to be of limited powers. Were the federal government’s powers still limited to only those enumerated in the constitution, there would be little left to grieve over.
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In the days before Election 2016 Debbie and I drove down the eastern seaboard surveying the support, or lack thereof, for the candidates for president. We made this trip a number of times throughout the campaign, but our final journey coincided perfectly with the last week of the race. (Read our final five posts on the race here, here, here, here and here). Our unscientific yard sign poll predicted the outcome of the election perfectly, as rural voters rallied behind Trump’s populist message. You can see in the set of maps assembled here by the LA Times, that Trump’s win was powered by strong support in rural and suburban areas where he outperformed Mitt Romney’s 2012 performance.
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The low-hanging fruit for President-elect Donald Trump is spending cuts. My friend Chris Edwards, director of tax policy studies at Cato Institute, gives his advice here:
So let me suggest some wasteful spending that the new administration should tackle, and the annual savings from terminating each:
- K-12 school subsidies, which generate bureaucracy and stifle innovation ($25 billion).
- Farm subsidies, which enrich wealthy landowners and harm the environment ($25 billion).
- Rural corporate welfare, which is handed out by the Department of Agriculture ($6 billion).
- Energy subsidies, which have been one boondoggle after another ($5 billion).
- TSA airport screening, which Trump has said is “a total disaster” ($5 billion).
- The war on drugs, which wastes police resources and generates violence ($15 billion).
- Excess pay for federal workers, especially gold-plated retirement benefits ($33 billion with a 10 percent cut).
- Housing subsidies, which distort markets and damage cities ($37 billion).
- Community development aid, which is corporate welfare used for buying votes ($11 billion).
- Urban transitand passenger rail funding, which are properly local and private activities ($12 billion).
- Obamacare exchange subsidies and Medicaid expansion, which should be repealed along with the overall law ($225 billion a year by 2026).
President Trump will face major budget pressures in coming years as deficits and entitlement spending soar. Today’s $600 billion deficits are headed toward $1 trillion, and deficits will be even higher if a recession comes along.
Federal spending cuts would help avert a fiscal crisis and boost growth by reducing economic distortions. The incoming Trump team should start with some of the cuts here, and there are plenty more proposals at DownsizingGovernment.org.
Chris Edwards discusses what a Trump or Clinton election win would mean for the economy
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Donald Trump has assembled an “A list” of street fighters to facilitate the mission of freeing America from the progressive, liberal yoke of foreign intervention, income redistribution and constitutional disregard.
Here latimes.com details the Trump roll out:
The tension between passion and pragmatism played out vividly with Trump’s selection of his often-provocative campaign operative, former Breitbart News executive Stephen K. Bannon, as “chief strategist and senior counselor to the president.’’ In the same announcement, Trump named Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, known as a more collegial figure, to be White House chief of staff. …
Publicity for a 2010 documentary that Bannon directed and produced, “Battle America,’’ described it as “a searing look at the ongoing conflict between ‘Constitutional Conservatives’ and an out-of-touch, arrogant and ever-expanding central government.’’…
“We call ourselves ‘the Fight Club.’ You don’t come to us for warm and fuzzy. We think of ourselves as virulently anti-establishment, particularly anti-the permanent political class.’’
Trump, in an interview broadcast Sunday night on CBS’ “60 Minutes,’’ appeared to adjust expectations for how he will implement immigration policy, one of his signature election themes. Though he backed prompt deportations for those in the U.S. illegally who also have criminal records, Trump also said he will defer the far wider exclusions he called for during the campaign until “after the border is secure.’’
“What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records … probably 2 million, it could be even 3 million, we are getting them out of our country or we are going to incarcerate,’’ Trump said. …
Newt Gingrich, who served as House speaker in the 1990s and who is assisting Trump’s transition, told CBS’ “Face the Nation’’ that the deportation of immigrants in the country illegally who have criminal pasts would be the new administration’s priority.
Former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a close Trump ally whom the president-elect may appoint as U.S. attorney general, said his administration “would have to be very careful’’ regarding immigration from terrorism-prone regions of the Middle East.
“I think this is going to be a country-by-country decision,’’ Giuliani told CNN, saying that much will depend on the extent to which each country cooperates in sharing information.
One clear exception, Giuliani suggested, would be prospective immigrants from Syria, because of the possibility that terrorists might be planted among refugees.
“We would be foolish to allow these people to come into the United States,’’ Giuliani said, adding that U.S. authorities “already have 1,000 investigations of radical Islamic terrorists in the United States.’’
Trump’s transition team springs into action
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Reince Preibus was in Newport four years ago for the Romney campaign. I liked everything he had to say. Here’s what I wrote to you then about his speech that evening.
“Reince said you get a name like his when a German and a Greek get married. But not to worry—his kids have normal names. He talked about growing up in a Greek family, saying that it was just like the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Looking at his phone, he said that his mother could be calling him right now.
Reince talked about growing up and how much he loved his grandfather or papous (pah-POOH) in Greek. He said he doesn’t know what it is about grandsons loving their grandfathers so much, but as a kid he would follow his papous everywhere. And because they spent months at a time together in Greece or America, they were very close.
Papous’s favorite thing to do would be to look over the Encyclopedia Britannica, take out the book with the letter “P” on the binding, and read to Reince about the presidents of the United States. He would tell Reince stories about every single president—“Some true,” said Reince, “and maybe some not so true, but they were great stories.” He said Papous did it because he loved America and what America stood for.
Reince commented on the current situation in Greece. He said it’s what happens when the “takers” of society take over a country. He said when you’re a taker, you become irrational. Right now, Greece is a country of irrational takers.
Rational conservative principles can take you a long way in this country. Reince said it takes time, though, and a real grassroots effort. He said he and Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, his best friend, got started at least 10 years ago when Scott was a Milwaukee County executive. He said the reason Scott Walker is a success is that Americans at their core are conservative. He said their grassroots effort staked everything on Scott. And their winning formula for every candidate they helped and are helping is simple. First, you need to believe in conservative principles; second, you need to run on them; third, and most importantly, you need to govern by them.
With Reince at the helm, I expect a lot of good things in the future for the Republican National Committee. He understands that the Tea Party is not on board with your father’s Republican Party. He knows that you get Americans together not by asking “Are you in the Republican Party or the Democratic Party?” but rather “Are you concerned about your kids’ or your grandkids’ future?” For a lot of us, that’s a big yes.
I had the great pleasure of speaking with Reince after his speech. I told him I was the guy on the Helen Glover Show at 920WHJJ right before his segment with Helen that day. On the show, he said that coming to Rhode Island will mean he’s been to all 50 states. Based on the enthusiasm he generated at the dinner, I think there will be plenty of reasons for him to return to the Ocean State real soon.”
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If Hillary Had Won, We’d Be Already Talking about Chelsea’s First Campaign
With the Democrat Party now in tatters, Frank Bruni—yes, that Mr. Bruni of the NYT—points out that after telling the readers ad nauseam that the Republicans were unraveling, readers of the New York Times might not ever care to listen to the paper’s predictions about, for example, the Super Bowl or the Oscars.
The smugness and sanctimony of political correctness undermined its own goals. Mr. Bruni admits he has learned a lesson—he will now listen harder to fellow Americans who go against the grain of NYT’s thinking. Mr. Bruni promises to use greater care in talking with fellow Americans who are “more culturally conservative” than is he. “It’s a grown-up acknowledgment that we’re a messy, imperfect species.”
Democrats, as well as Republicans, need to understand that many Americans voted for Trump as an instrument of change, “which they craved keenly enough to overlook the rest of him.” The Clintons, Mr. Bruni reminds us, shoulder much of the blame for voters’ demand for change.
It’s hard to overestimate the couple’s stranglehold on the party — its think tanks, its operatives, its donors — for the last two decades. Most top Democrats had vested interests in the Clintons, and energy that went into supporting and defending them didn’t go into fresh ideas and fresh faces, who were shut out as the party cleared the decks anew for Hillary in 2016.
In thrall to the Clintons, Democrats ignored the copious, glaring signs of an electorate hankering for something new and different and instead took a next-in-line approach that stopped working awhile back. Just ask Mitt Romney and John McCain and John Kerry and Al Gore and Bob Dole. They’re the five major-party nominees before her who lost, and each was someone who, like her, was more due than dazzling.
After Election Day, one Clinton-weary Democratic insider told me: “I’m obviously not happy and I hate to admit this, but a part of me feels liberated. If she’d won, we’d already be talking about Chelsea’s first campaign. Now we can do what we really need to and start over.”
The loss is not entirely the blame of the Clintons. President Obama, who campaigned unprecedentedly hard for Hillary Clinton and criticized and mocked Donald Trump relentlessly, now looks at a tattered Party. With perhaps as many as 12 fewer Senate seats, 60 fewer House seats, about 14 fewer governorships, and more than 900 fewer seats in state legislatures from when President Obama first took office, it is a “staggering toll.”
It was an ugly race on both sides. Let’s hope lessons will be learned and both sides can move forward. President Obama, pledging to help make a peaceful transition of power, said he is now “rooting for success in uniting and leading the country.”
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Forget all the downstream issues and get America’s small business owners supercharged to launch a tsunami of innovation and job creation.
Everything else is secondary until you deliver on your promise to make America great again with jobs and innovation.
Yes, Americans want you to nominate a Scalia-like Supreme Court justice (do so on inauguration day). Deport our millions of foreign criminals and felons, secure our borders, terminate Obamacare and Dodd-Frank, and end America’s intervention into the religious war in the Middle East. It is long since time to extract Americans from the Middle East permanently.
But first, honor your pledge to America’s small business owners, family farmers, blue collar skilled tradesmen (Harley workers and NRA members) that have propelled you into office.
Start now. You can begin by ending taxation on savings and investment, including an end to double taxation on dividends and taxation on interest, estates (see family farms) and capital gains. Make Wall Street (especially the hedge fund pariahs) pick up the tab. This cannot happen soon enough.
Immediately initiate a flat tax system in which every American pays his fair share and entrepreneurial success is not punished. In such a setting, the tax code would be junked 100% and the IRS shuttered. Tax filings would be made on post cards.
Immediately begin cancelling the vast array of Obama executive orders with the goal of dramatically reducing the regulatory burden on America’s small-business-owning job-creators.
Tell Americans we are going to move as fast as possible to 100% reliance on North American energy resources. Appoint a North American energy czar to work with our neighbor in Canada to make such a program beneficial to both countries.
Americans voted for you for action. Let’s not hear any back-treading and mincing of words. Let’s roll!
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