Brad Griffin – The Unz Review Jan 6, 2020

I voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election.

I spent months making the case for Trump on this website. I will be the first to admit that I was wrong and that those who were skeptical of Trump in our community were right in 2016. In that election, I drank the koolaid and was one of Trump’s Chumps. Unlike AmNats, I have tried to learn something from that experience. I hate getting fooled by Republicans.

In 2020, we have a far better sense of Donald Trump. The Trump administration has a record now. Donald Trump’s first term is mostly history. We can now look back with the benefit of hindsight and evaluate our standing after the last three years without being drunk on Trump koolaid. No one drank the Trump koolaid in our community more deeply than the AmNats. Some of them remained drunk on the Trump koolaid even after the 2018 midterms. A handful of his most faithful cheerleaders have never given up faith in their GOD EMPEROR and succumbed to reality.

What is the reality of the Trump presidency?

1.) Those who feared that the Trump administration would lull the conservative base into a false sense of complacency and put all the normies back to sleep were right. Donald Trump has told his base that they are “winning.” They wear Q shirts and “Trust The Plan” at his rallies. They are Making America Great Again simply by having a Republican in the White House. They are content to go on believing that even as illegal immigration DOUBLED in FY 2019 and became a far worse problem than it ever was under the Obama administration. As we saw after the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, they are also ready to swallow Trump’s war propaganda against Iran and believe anything their dear leader tells them. It was Julian Assange and Roger Stone who went to prison under Trump, not Hillary Clinton. Normies are content to have conservatism in power and are less willing to give us an audience with a Republican in the White House.

2.) Those who feared that the Trump administration would suck all of the energy out of the Alt-Right were right. In the final two years of the Obama administration (2015 and 2016), the Alt-Right was thriving on social media and was brimming with energy. Four years later, the country has only gotten worse, but the brand has been destroyed and all the energy it had back then as an online subculture has been sucked out of the room by Trump and channeled into pushing the standard conservative policy agenda. The movement has been in disarray and has been divided and demoralized ever since Trump won the 2016 election. The last few years have been terrible. As soon as Trump won the 2016 election, conservatives shifted their attention back to policing their right flank. They are far more successful at policing their right flank when they are in power.

3.) Those who rationalized voting for Donald Trump on the basis of immigration and changing demographics were proven wrong about that too. He has refurbished the George W. Bush era fence. Since he has been president, Donald Trump has built all of three new miles of fence, which is actually less than W. and Obama. He didn’t do anything about sanctuary cities or pass E-Verify. He has actually increased guest worker programs. There has been no cuts to legal immigration. Instead, Jared Kushner’s legal immigration plan only proposes to reconfigure the composition of it for big business so that more high skilled workers and fewer peons are imported from the Third World. Illegal immigration has remained steady and has surged past the worst highs of the Obama years. It has recently fallen back to 2015 levels after peaking in FY 2019. Trump has vowed to pass an amnesty to save DACA. The Muslim ban became an ineffective travel ban. The only area where he has had any real success is refugee resettlement, but overall the bottom line is that after four years of Trump there are millions of more illegal aliens and legal immigrants here. Donald Trump hasn’t even deported as many illegal aliens as Obama.

4.) Those who voted for Donald Trump to “move the Overton Window” succeeded in making homosexuality more acceptable on the Right. This was already clear by the time of the Deploraball at Trump’s inauguration. In the Trump era, homosexuals and drag queens would be accepted into the fold on the Right and White Nationalists would remain stigmatized. Congress has actually condemned White Nationalism at least two or three times since Donald Trump has been president. Far more White Nationalists have gone to prison under Donald Trump than Barack Obama. Trump has appointed “conservative judges” like Thomas Cullen who put RAM in prison. Some of Trump’s Chumps point to Bernie Sanders vowing to “declare war” on White Nationalism after the El Paso shooting. They conveniently forget the fact that National Review and conservatives ALSO declared war on White Nationalism last August. We’ve been covering the government crackdown which has been going on since last August.

AmNats have been purged from Turning Point USA, banned from its events and reduced to haranguing Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk from the sidewalk. They have been banned from even attending CPAC. Those who thought that they could work within the system to reform conservatism were grossly mistaken. Steve King was condemned by Congress, stripped of his committee assignments and has been treated as a pariah within the Republican Party. Michelle Malkin was deplatformed by Mar-a-Lago and excommunicated from the synagogue of mainstream conservatism. Ann Coulter was marginalized in the Trump administration. Jeff Sessions and Steve Bannon were both fired. Donald Trump hired conservatives and staffed his administration with his enemies. While I won’t name any names, I will just point to all the people who actually worked within the conservative movement who have all been purged and fired in the Trump era by Conservatism, Inc. as proof that working within the system doesn’t work and is a bad idea and those people would have had more job security doing almost anything else.

5.) What about Antifa and Big Tech censorship? Aren’t those good reasons to vote for Donald Trump in 2020? Neither of these issues were on our radar screen BEFORE Donald Trump won the 2016 election. Both of those problems became dramatically worse as a result of electing the boogeyman as president. Far from being a victory for the Dissident Right, we became identified with Donald Trump and were caught in the backlash while he delivered Jeb Bush’s agenda (the boogeyman wasn’t real). Before Trump was elected president, Antifa was a tiny nuisance that protested Amren conferences and there was still a great deal of free speech on the internet. We could also hold rallies all over the South without serial harassment from these people. Now, everything from harassment and doxxing by “journalists” to chronic Antifa violence to police stand down orders to deplatforming to FBI counterextremism witch hunts has became part of the scenery of life under the Trump administration which is only interested in these new grievances insofar as they can be milked and exploited to elect more Republicans. In hindsight, it would have been better NOT to have identified ourselves with the boogeyman in 2016.

6.) Isn’t having Donald Trump in the White House a huge victory for “identitarianism” and big ideas like “nationalism” and “populism.” President Donald Trump’s signature policy victories have been passing a huge corporate tax cut, criminal justice reform and renegotiating and rebranding NAFTA. Trump is a “populist” in the sense that he has DEEPENED neoliberalism. When you look at his policies, he has continued and further extended the status quo of the last forty years which has been tax cuts, deregulation, entitlement cuts, free trade agreements and huge increases in military spending. Trump’s economic agenda has been no different from the last three Republican presidents. He has been all bark and no bite.

Donald Trump is pointedly NOT a nationalist, populist or identitarian. He carefully avoids ever mentioning the word “White.” Instead, he talks incessantly about the black, Hispanic, Asian-American, LGBTQ and female unemployment rate. He holds events at the White House for blacks and Hispanics. He delivers policies for blacks and Hispanics too like criminal justice reform. The “forgotten man” couldn’t be further from Donald Trump’s mind when he is schmoozing with the likes of Steve Schwarzman and boasting about the stock market. Trump is a demagogue who recognized that nationalist and populist sentiments were growing in the American electorate and he has harnessed and manipulated and exploited those forces for his donors.

7.) Speaking of Trump’s donors, we wrote Trump a blank check in the 2016 election to deliver on the MAGA agenda that he had sold us. We voted for big ideas like “nationalism” and “populism.” The reasons why I voted for Donald Trump in 2016 were immigration, trade, foreign policy, political correctness and campaign finance and furthering these big ideas of “nationalism” and “populism.” He has been a disappointment on all fronts.

Those of us who were duped into believing that Donald Trump had a team of Jews who were going to craft all of these policies which were going to stabilize America’s demographics should reflect on what has actually happened during the Trump presidency. Orthodox Jews hit the jackpot with the King of Israel and Zionists have been on an unprecedented winning streak. In just the last three months, Trump has issued an executive order to ban anti-Semitism on college campuses, assassinated Qasem Soleimani and has given Bibi Netanyahu the green light to annex large swathes of the West Bank. Trump is even considering allowing Jonathan Pollard to return to Israel. Is it any wonder then that a recent Gallup poll found that Israelis support his “America First” foreign policy over Americans by a whopping 18-point margin?

Trump’s Chumps haven’t been deterred by any of this. They want us to write Donald Trump a second political blank check in 2020, which his Jewish donors intend to cash at the White House, only this time he won’t be restrained by fear of losing his reelection. In light of everything he has delivered for them so far, what is Donald Trump going to do in his second term for his Jewish donors who fund the GOP? Do we trust Trump not to start a war with Iran?

8.) In the last two elections, Donald Trump has pulled a bait-and-switch and Trump’s Chumps are gullible enough to fall for it a third time. While I was wrong about the 2016 election, I was one of the first voices in our community to wise up to what was going on. By the 2018 midterms, I saw the bait-and-switch coming and warned our readers about it.

As you might recall, the 2018 midterms were about tax cuts and the roaring economy, deregulation and putting Gorsuch and Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court. It was also full of dire warnings about scary Antifa groups, Big Tech censorship and caravans from Central America to stir up the base. Trump vowed to issue an executive order to end birthright citizenship. The GOP knows what its base cares about and shamelessly manipulates its base during election season.

After the 2018 election was over, you might recall how Trump banned bump stocks and passed criminal justice reform for Van Jones and the Koch Brothers during the lame duck session of Congress. As we entered 2019, the Republican agenda changed to overthrowing the government of Venezuela to install Juan Guaidó in power and passing anti-BDS legislation. The GOP spent the whole year accusing the Democrats of anti-Semitism and promoting Jexodus. Virtually nothing else was talked about for a whole year in Congress but anti-Semitism until Trump issued his executive order on anti-Semitism on college campuses after the House and Senate had failed to reach agreement on anti-BDS legislation. The White House held its Social Media Summit in July and nothing came out of it. Antifa disappeared from the agenda and was replaced by a government crackdown on White Nationalists after El Paso. Ending birthright citizenship was forgotten about. Illegal immigration soared to its highest level in over a decade last May.

Don’t forget how Trump’s Chumps told us how “Chad” it was in 2018 to elect more Republicans to stop Antifa, the caravans and Big Tech censorship and how those same Republicans once elected to office preferred to fight anti-Semitism for AIPAC.

9.) In the last election, Trump’s Chumps were manipulated into splintering their own movement by GOP operatives who divided and conquered and data mined the Dissident Right. When Ricky Vaughn was exposed as a Republican operative named Douglass Mackey who was scraping Paul Nehlen’s Facebook in order to feed the information into the Smartcheckr database, Trump’s Chumps loudly denounced Nehlen for doxxing Vaughn. Strangely, they had nothing to say when Smartcheckr which became Clearview AI sold that database and its facial recognition tool to the FBI and hundreds of other law enforcement agencies.

10.) Trump’s Chumps have demonstrated in the last two election cycles how easy they are to manipulate. They can be relied on to vote and shill for the GOP no matter what it does. Donald Trump isn’t under any pressure from these people to change. He knows his mark better than they know themselves. They are so desperate for acceptance and to participate in elections and to feel like they are “winning” that they will delude themselves like the rest of his cult into believing almost anything. Give a drowning man enough rope and he will hang himself.

Four years later, Trump’s Chumps are still sitting by the phone waiting for the Donald to call back while he huddles with Steve Schwarzman and Bibi Netanyahu. They can’t see what is front of their own eyes. By going ALL IN for Trump, they wrecked, divided and demoralized their own movement in order to advance the standard conservative policy agenda. They have been pushed off the internet and in some cases even to the dark web. In virtually every way, they are worse off than they were four years ago and have nothing to show for it. Insofar as they are getting more web traffic, it is because America has only continued to deteriorate under Trump, which would have happened anyway regardless who won in 2016.

It’s not too late for Trump’s Chumps to reclaim one thing that they have lost over the past four years. They can still reclaim their self respect. They don’t have to participate in this charade a second time and mislead people who are less informed because they now know full well that Sheldon Adelson has bought Donald Trump and the lickspittle GOP Congress.

Note: Imagine thinking a New York City billionaire is a “populist.” LMAO what were we thinking? He told us what we wanted to hear and we believed it.

Originally published in Occidental Dissent

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