HALF-FULL REPORT 11/11/16

The Winner

This is a significantly more than half-full kind of week, perhaps “cup runneth over” even.

Donald J. Trump was elected the 45th President of the United States this Tuesday, along with Senate and House majorities, and absolute blowout numbers at the state level all across America.

He defeated the most corrupt candidate in American history, a woman whom the FBI now tells us allowed classified information to fall into the hands of at least five foreign enemies, and a woman who would have used the Supreme Court to annihilate the First Amendment as well as the Second. As her warm-up act.

Many of us have been more than a bit uneasy with Donald Trump. But as it began to dawn that all of us, our nation, our businesses, our churches, our families, had avoided the abyss, it was hard not to let out a deep sigh of relief. Trump at his worst will not be our enemy. There is still time for America.

And a six to seven seat Supreme Court majority composed of virtually any of the names on Trump’s lists might well do more to turn back the clock on the left’s annihilation of Constitution boundaries than all the Republicans we’ll ever elect in our lifetimes.

We’ve survived an existential threat. We may well spend the next four years in partial frustration: we have before. But we won’t spend it in chains. And we might well see the dawn of a better – a greater – America none of us have dared imagine.

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Yes, I’m writing the Half Full Report again this week, because Jack is again in Kathmandu (though with the Obama-Clinton era over, he may well be back in the States a lot more in coming years).

Nevertheless, just before press time, Jack sent me this:

On Wednesday November 9 at about 10am Nepal time (11:15pm Tuesday east coast time), I was on the shore of Lake Tilicho in the Himalayas, the highest lake in the world at 16,257 feet, when the satphone rang.

A friend called to tell us that Trump had won Ohio, North Carolina, and Florida. My heart leaped. A few minutes later, our friend called back to say he’d won Iowa. My knees almost buckled and I started to cry. I had hoped against hope this was possible and now it really was – Trump could actually win.

Our helicopters took us to the Hidden Kingdom of Lo near the border of Chinese Tibet. We got word that the electoral count was 244 to 203, that Pennsylvania was up for grabs. We drove to the remote Chhosar Sky Caves, where people lived in caves carved out of vertical cliffs 3,000 years ago.

The satphone rang again. I was some distance away. After the call, several in our group walked over to me to shake my hand and inform me the electoral count was 274. “Jack,” they said, “America has given you a wonderful birthday present – Donald Trump is the next President of the United States.”

Yes, November 9th is my birthday and I couldn’t have asked for a better present. America is saved, I thought. November 9th is World Freedom Day, as it’s the day in 1989 that the Berlin Wall fell. Now it’s also the day the Clinton Corruption Machine fell along with the entire Democrat-Enemedia Complex and the Global Elite.

Now we have a chance to make America America again. Providence is smiling upon our country once more.

To which I can only say, amen.

*******

While the final popular vote count is still not in (and there’s some question as to whether Trump or Clinton will win it), the Electoral College was perfectly clear in the wee hours of election night:

Yes, Donald Trump did exactly what he said he’d do from the beginning: he won legions of Rust Belt working class Democrats.

Republicans last won Wisconsin in 1984. We last won Pennsylvania and Michigan in 1988. That’s 28 years, more than a generation.

It took no time whatsoever for the media to spin this – one popular line was that the voters Trump took from Clinton are old and will die soon, another was they were all ignorant, uneducated racists.

To this one must ask: were they all ignorant, uneducated, irredeemable deplorables in the last six or seven elections too? And does screaming at them in this fashion help or hurt Democrats’ chances in 2018 and 2020?

You tell me. But I know this. All our lives we’ve been told that Democrats were the party of the working class, the very same people they are now demonizing as idiots, haters and fools.

There’s an enormous opportunity in that which no one on Earth is better suited to seize than Donald Trump.

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By the way, Trump outperformed Mitt Romney with blacks and Hispanics (so much for the RINOs “superiority” in this vein).

And yes, Trump was right: the polls were rigged. I described this in some detail last week and I won’t repeat that here. However, when almost every single poll is wrong, and almost every single poll oversamples one side by roughly the same amount, and when they did it in Britain – twice, against Cameron and then against Brexit – and in Israel against Netanyahu, and in Kentucky against Bevin…

…the only remaining thing you need to ask is this:

Why didn’t any of these skew toward our side, ever?

And suddenly, the light goes on.

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Not to pat myself on the back too much, but as you probably realize, even though I personally supported (and even bundled for) my friend Ted Cruz in the primary, my batting average as a prognosticator has been virtually .1000 throughout the entire cycle.

Part of the reason for that has been my belief that a Republican realignment is and has been genuinely possible. Trump believed this too, and made the first crucial step of that happen. There’s more for him to win, if he’ll just listen to Kellyanne.

But another part has been my appreciation of just what “Make America Great Again” really meant. It’s not a mere slogan: potentially, at least, it’s an entire new metanarrative for the conservative movement, something Republicans have utterly lacked since the end of the Cold War.

I wrote at some length on the need for this, all the way back in 2010. I also formulated it much as Trump later did, although my “Keep America Number One” is nowhere near as good as his phrasing. I encourage you to read it. There is vastly more to this, and vastly more potential, than just the words themselves. They could change everything for us.

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As long as I’m quoting smart people, here’s Peggy Noonan (no friend of the Trump candidacy) in today’s Wall Street Journal:

“Donald Trump said he had a movement and he did. This is how you know. His presidential campaign was bad—disorganized, unprofessional, chaotic, ad hoc. There was no state-of-the-art get-out-the-vote effort—his voters got themselves out. There was no high-class, high-tech identifying of supporters—they identified themselves. They weren’t swayed by the barrage of brilliantly produced ads—those ads hardly materialized. This was not a triumph of modern campaign modes and ways. The people did this. As individuals within a movement.”

Yes, despite everyone on both left and right assuring it wasn’t true, the Trump movement was indeed Brexit redux, complete with a silent, angry majority that was utterly fed-up with being called racist homophobic morons simply for living their lives, while their “enlightened” leadership focused on every niche leftist cause except their jobs and their futures.

Again, do you think an unending barrage of insults will help the Democrats recapture these people?

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It hasn’t been helping them at the state level.

Republicans already held 31 governors’ offices. Even after narrowly losing Pat McCrory in North Carolina (but not a veto-proof majority in his state legislature), Republicans now have 33, including a pickup in Bernie Sanders’s Vermont. 34 is the GOP’s all-time high. They also now have 29 state attorneys general, an all-time high, which is remarkable considering George Soros’ and Tom Steyer’s longtime effort to dominate these.

Republicans won the Kentucky House for the first time in nearly a century and reclaimed the Iowa Senate from Democrats, giving the GOP control of both legislative chambers and the governor’s offices in those states. Indeed, Republicans now control 66 of the nation’s state legislative chambers, to Democrats’ 30.

It hasn’t been helping them in Congress either. Republicans retained overwhelming control of the House: with 3 seats still undecided, the balance stands at 239-193. The Dems picked up just 6 seats out of 435 in a year they believed they might win control. And in the Senate, the Pubs easily kept control, losing just 2 seats for a 52-48 balance in a year nearly everyone believed the Dems would take control.

It was not a good election for the pundits.

But it gets worse (or better, as the case may be): Republicans dominated their Senate races…except for the Republicans who ran against Donald Trump.

Now didn’t the NeverTrumpers promise us that Trump would kill the downballot?

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What’s remarkable about this is that 2016 was the first re-elect for the Senate Class of 2010. Pubs had to defend a lot more seats than Dems. It would have been perfectly reasonable to lose the Senate no matter who was running at the top of the ticket.

Ah, but 2018 is a whole other matter.

Next time, Democrats are defending not one, not two, but NINE Senate seats in states Trump won:

Oh, and just for funnies: there’s talk that Joe Manchin, seeing the handwriting on his extremely red state wall, may switch parties. Probably won’t happen, but then, Jim Jeffords swore he wouldn’t switch either.

*******

The inevitable leftist meltdown has been nothing if not entertaining.

It started with Hillary’s refusal to thank her assembled supporters, people who’d worked for years for her, at a packed Javits Center Tuesday night.

Instead, she hid behind a man – as she is wont to do – sending John “Spirit Cooking” Podesta out to tell everyone to go home, as the campaign hadn’t decided whether they’d won or lost as yet. Why that should have affected any decent person’s desire to thank the weeping crowd for their sacrifices one can only wonder.

Just five minutes later Hillary was on the phone conceding.

The tacky selfish leader was not to be outdone by her entitled snowflake followers. Cornell students held a “cry in”. The University of Kansas offered mourning Young Democrats therapy dogs. Several universities actually cancelled classes because “they simply couldn’t face the day.”

These are adults?

A little more realistic, DNC staffers screamed at disgraced Chairman Donna Brazile in a staff meeting for “helping elect Trump”.

But don’t worry: they haven’t learned anything. News reports today state that the leading contender to replace Brazile is Minnesota’s Muslim Congressman Keith Ellison.

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Less amusing are the riots.

 The irony of rioting by people who just told us Donald Trump was “threatening democracy” by not pre-accepting the results is pretty rich, of course.

But it’s important to remember. When people are brutally beaten for voting for Trump, when the President-Elect receives a flood of assassination threats, when property is destroyed and voters are intimidated, you know why:

Yes, it’s because senior DNC and Clinton campaign operatives, caught on tape here discussing their acts, pay thugs to incite that violence.

They aren’t the only reason. But if you think this high-level Brown-Shirtery isn’t driving it, I have some swampland to sell you.

Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams, a liberal atheist, described this in alarming detail when he endorsed Donald Trump in a column called “The Bully Party”. You very much need to read it.

This is the America we’d be living under had Hillary won. It’s the America Donald Trump now has to sort out.

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As I keep telling you, personnel is policy. What Trump – or any politician – says is a lot less important than who he hires.

The early reports are great. You already know my thoughts on the brilliant conservative dynamo Kellyanne Conway. But this week, Trump named a who’s who of Reagan conservatives that reads like the leadership of the “ultra-right” Council for National Policy, a group of which Jack and I have been members for many years.

Chris Christie is out as head of the transition team; Mike Pence is in. Jeff Sessions’ people are everywhere. Ken Blackwell is heading the domestic transition. The Heritage Foundation is staffing everything in sight.

No cabinet picks yet, but early talk centers on Sessions, Newt, Ben Carson, Larry Kudlow, Steve Forbes, and Rick Perry.

It’s a dream team, if true.

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Actual policies haven’t gotten lost either. You can look for yourself at GreatAgain.gov, which Trump wasted no time launching. Top priorities so far: building the wall, rebuilding the military, dismantling Dodd-Frank, tax cuts and tax reform, renegotiating NAFTA (which both Mexico and Canada say they’re on board to do), and yes, repealing Obamacare.

The devil will be in the details. But imagine what the foregoing paragraph would have read like in a Hillary Administration.

This is a great day.

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It’s time to wrap this up. But in quitting now, we quit after the victory not before. And that’s precisely what virtually everyone told us not to do. We spent an entire election being told to quit, being told it was over, being told there was no point in going forward at all.

It was in this way also like Brexit. Leave was certain to lose, they said. The betting sites gave it a 16% chance even after the polls closed. It won.

And we won. Overwelmingly and historically.

It ain’t over till it’s over. No matter how many Erick Ericksons and Steve Deaces, no matter how many Bill Kristols and John Kasichs, no matter how many ABC and CBS polls tell us to stop.

The ideas which are America are greater than they are. They are great enough to animate the world. And we are their custodians. They are in our care. It wouldn’t have mattered if the outcome had been 99-1 against us. We owed it to everyone to fight on.

That is perhaps Donald Trump’s greatest virtue. He fights, when all those around him tell him not to fight, when the whole Republican Party would rather cry in its beer and hand the country to its enemies than seem “mean” or “offensive” or fight.

Churchill said never quit, never ever ever quit. And we did not quit. And we won.

Today is Veterans Day. It is the day we honor the sacrifice unto death of our heroes lo these two and a half centuries, and the willingness of millions more to give their lives as well.

Can we not, in a civic realm which, even now with leftist rioters, carries virtually no comparable risk do the same.

We can. We must.

Now, seeing just how great the potential truly is before us, perhaps far more of us will.

God bless America. Let us thank Him for His great deliverance.

And now, let’s go earn it.

Rod D. Martin is a technology entrepreneur, futurist, hedge fund manager, and professor. Fox Business News calls him a “tech guru”, Britain’s Guardian labels him a “philosopher-capitalist”, and Gawker describes him as a “brilliant nonconformist.” He was a senior member of PayPal’s pre-IPO startup team and is a member of the Board of Governors of the Council for National Policy.