Replies to post #507340 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[hap0206]

Hey -- there is a guy that thinks Trump may be on par with Lincoln

No one thinks your weak little dictator wannabe is anything but a weak and pathetic excuse for a man. Just like his followers.

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The Saturday Interview

Did Trump Just Win a ‘Tectonic’ Election?
It’s too early to tell, but a Civil War historian thinks the 47th president could earn a place in history comparable to Jefferson, Lincoln and FDR.
By
James Taranto
[excerpts]
“I was at first inclined to think of this election simply as a repudiation election,” he says. He now suspects that Mr. Trump’s victory might be a “tectonic election”—one that marks a permanent structural change in the American electorate and political parties.

He characterizes only three past elections as tectonic—1800, when Thomas Jefferson defeated John Adams and the Federalist Party quickly withered; 1860, when Lincoln’s victory established the Republicans as a major party that would dominate presidential politics for seven decades; and 1932, when Franklin D. Roosevelt trounced Herbert Hoover and cemented the modern Democratic coalition.
[...]
“It’s not a landslide in terms of numbers,” Mr. Guelzo acknowledges, “but it is a landslide morally speaking. What I mean by that is that the DNC was running against a presidential candidate that everybody was convinced was unelectable against nearly anyone. They could have put up almost any candidate and the confidence was that the country was simply not going to buy the idea of a return of Donald Trump to the White House.”
[...]
[...]But Mr. Guelzo is certain that “Trump’s first election was not tectonic, it was a fluke of campaign tactics.”

Now, Mr. Guelzo sees the plates shifting: “It was not just one of these throw-the-bums-out elections. Really big, vital Democratic constituencies shifted, especially among younger voters. And I think if there’s one really big thing which seems to have emerged out of this election, it’s a really decisive shift from race to class.” Mr. Trump’s working-class appeal has shaken the Democrats’ support from ethnic minorities.
[...]
In other words, he wants to govern in a way that ensures the shifts in the electorate are permanent. “MAGA won a campaign, but a single campaign is not tectonic,” Mr. Guelzo says. “MAGA has to realize that the 2028 election started on Nov. 6, so they’ve got to ask themselves: Is everything that we do—is it producing results? Is it producing results for the constituencies who came our way in 2024?”
[...]
Hence the need for results. Mr. Guelzo thinks Mr. Trump will attempt to deliver them in three broad areas. “One is a redirection of the entire economy.” He sees the debate over immigration through this lens: “That’s why the whole business over H-1B visas has blown up the way it has, because we’re not really talking about immigration. We’re talking about the economy and who has access to success and growth in the economy.”

The second is “a major reordering of foreign policy.” Mr. Guelzo sees Mr. Trump as following in the footsteps of Robert Taft, who held what is now JD Vance’s Ohio Senate seat from 1939 until his death in 1953. “Taft was one of the last major American politicians who really thought that, like [John] Quincy Adams said, going in search of monsters was a big mistake.” Mr. Guelzo reckons that Mr. Trump is “very serious about disengagement” and “wants to push that clock on foreign policy way, way back, even to before the assumptions and the consensus of the Cold War.”

That will likely mean “an end of the war in Ukraine with some kind of negotiated settlement,” Mr. Guelzo says—but not a surrender to Vladimir Putin. He will claim victory, but “everybody knows the Russians failed militarily.” Mr. Guelzo thinks that failure will curb the imperial appetite of the Russian dictator, whom he assigns a Trump-style nickname: “I have no respect whatsoever for little Mr. Weasel Face. In my mind, he is almost beneath contempt. But I think that so many embarrassing reverses have occurred on his watch, I don’t think he’s going to be eager to invite that kind of thing happening again anytime soon.”

Mr. Trump’s third major ambition is the one he has assigned to Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Department of Government Efficiency. Mr. Guelzo suggests that’s a bit of a misnomer: “DOGE is not so much about the budget. It’s about disempowering the bureaucracy that is fed by the budget, and that’s also a clock-turner.” It would “turn things back to the days of Woodrow Wilson.”
[all of it]
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/did-trump-just-win-a-tectonic-election-history-allen-guelzo-ef975b14?mod=opinion_lead_pos5