Two years ago, I predicted that Joe Biden wouldn’t be on the presidential ballot by November 2024. After Kamala Harris secured the nomination, my rosy scenario was a Trump victory riding a red wave. (It’s true I picked Dewey over Truman in 1948, but I was only three-years-old then.)
Now, all the usual Democrat suspects, the liberal media, and other assorted sore losers are up in arms over President-elect Trump’s announced selections for cabinet posts and other leadership positions in his incoming administration. Really, Rachel Maddow and the crew of lefty wackos at MSNBC are outraged? Isn’t that too bad? Trump’s appropriate response should echo the eloquent words of President Barack Obama when he met with deflated Republican congressional leaders after he took office in 2009: “Elections have consequences, I won.” In Trumpspeak that might include, “go pound sand” or stronger words to that effect. In baseball jargon: “It’s the bottom of the inning, now it’s our turn at bat.”
I like most of his picks so far and love several. His questionable choice for Attorney General of Matt Gaetz (who has since withdrawn), the acrimonious, extremist firebrand who can’t get along with others, might just have been The Donald’s idea of a spiteful “in your face” taunt to anti-Trumpers. There was little chance Gaetz would have been confirmed in the Senate where every Democrat and a good many Republicans were likely to vote against him. This may have been a shrewd Trump strategy to distract the angry mob with a Gaetz lightning rod and throw an easy blackball to the opposition.
When the American electorate delivered the presidency and control of the executive branch to Trump along with a Republican majority in both houses of Congress, it was a mandate for dramatic change to restore the Republic and traditional American values. The mission will be aided by a majority of originalist justices on the Supreme Court who regard the Constitution as a restraint on unlimited government and a protection of individual liberty, rather than the Democrat notion that it’s a “living Constitution” that empowers progressive justices to reinterpret the Constitution to mean what they think it should be according to their leftist ideology.
During the campaign Harris promised “to serve all the people.” That’s an unserious cliché often recited by political candidates. Since we only have one president, obviously he or she is the president of all the people. But no president (or any elected public official) can satisfy the conflic
ting desires of “all the people,” simply because all the people don’t agree about everything. In this divisive era I’d rearrange the words of Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz’s famous maxim, “war is a continuation of politics by other means,” to “politics is a continuation of war by other means.”
Dramatic changes in public policy by Trump and Republicans won’t come easily. They’ll face staunch opposition from the liberal media, Democrat politicians, their army of activists, and their radical left-wing core in Congress that’s no longer just a “fringe.” In fact, those 99 members of the so-called House Progressive Caucus (100, including socialist Senator Bernie Sanders) constitute almost half of all House Democrats. Biden and congressional Democrats weaponized the progressive socialist agenda and cultural revolution to its inevitable collapse and have finally been held to account by a majority of voters in this election.
Liz Cheney and other politically impractical “Never Trumpers” who endorsed or voted for Kamala have been shown up for their foolishness and how out of touch they are with the American mainstream. Their preference for another four years of progressive destruction of our country led by a pair of Democrat pretenders in the White House was crazy.
Trump was elected president, not king. But there’s a new sheriff in town who can do a lot on his own authority, like overriding all of Biden’s executive orders — some of which were brazenly unconstitutional — replacing them with his own (just as Biden did when he took office following Trump). The tidal wave of illegal immigrants will recede as Trump frees the Border Patrol do its job. And he’ll free ICE do its job across the country’s interior to deal with illegal aliens. Striking other Biden orders will reverse programs and overspending that circumvented Congress. Trump will fill thousands of non-Civil Service positions that serve at the pleasure of the president throughout the federal bureaucracy and on boards and commissions. Revoking unnecessary, cumbersome regulations will energize the economy. He’ll appoint U.S. Attorneys and federal judges. He’ll shake up the Pentagon at the highest levels including the Joint Chiefs of Staff, appointing senior civilians and promoting generals and admirals who will roll back Biden’s politicization of the military that imposed a DEI culture undermining morale and causing serious shortfalls in retention and recruitment in the ranks.
Nevertheless, much of the dramatic change the public has demanded must come through Congress where the power of the purse resides. In 2025, the Senate will have 53 Republicans and 47 Democrats. If Democrat opposition remains unified they’ll dig in their heels and create gridlock to thwart change by blocking vital legislation with filibusters requiring 60 votes to override. But the filibuster isn’t in the Constitution. It’s only a Senate rule that can be eliminated with just a majority vote.
During the campaign, assuming a Democrat electoral sweep, Harris inadvertently gave Republicans a foot in the door when she promised to eliminate the Senate filibuster. Now, Republicans should do just that. I’ve been reluctant to support that in the past but Democrats have made this a political war and I have no doubt they were poised to kill the filibuster had they won the election. Republicans need to beat them to the punch.
Longtime KOA radio talk host and columnist for the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News Mike Rosen now writes for CompleteColorado.com.
