What Team Trump Must Do Now
With the conclusion of the US election, the thrill has set in for half the country: that we have a chance to re-secure our nation and its ideals. The other half of the nation, however, is in shock and even in a state of mourning.
Meanwhile, in only two days, the drumbeats of “resistance” from that half of the country have begun to sound: Rep Eric Swalwell encouraged his allies on X not to “Go[…] quietly”. This is dangerously inflammatory language, and it warns of a potential Democratic resistance to a peaceful transfer of power.
Insta-marches have begun — as I warned, warned, warned you for months would be the case — in Chicago and then, tick-tock, Philadelphia. Expect more. The tell-tale identically printed signs and instantly-amassed crowds don’t mean that these protests do not present a threat to the newly elected transition team. There will be more eruptions across the country, more instability, more threats to a peaceful transition of power. These will accompany of course power outages, national security crises or “crises”, legal challenges, and other messes, November and December and right up into January.
My point is that these are not just tactical eruptions targeted at actually unseating President Trump and his new team. That is unlikely to be directly successful.
What these are, as President Trump and his advisors should quickly understand, are efforts by my former colleagues in the media and the political establishments to change the subject so as to undermine or derail President Trump’s mandate and to dilute his political capital.
In other words, there is an urgent lesson that the last Trump administration never fully grasped: successful politics is not just transactional. It is also narrative, and mythological, and iconic.
In that wisdom lies the secret power of great kings and Queens, and great Presidents.
President Trump is a businessman, and so thinks, reasonably enough given his field, that applause should follow actual achievements. This is a misleading expectation, however, in Presidential messaging. What audiences applaud is what they have been led to understand has happened to them that is positive, via their having been told a powerful, proactive story.
While President Trump has been in media forever, he and his advisors have not mastered the art of telling a proactive symbolic and iconic political story. They tend to be highly reactive to adverse news coverage and to criticism, which is one of their most concerning vulnerabilities, as this continually misleads them into reactive media strategies.
President Trump’s engagement with the media, and even with live crowds, has insulated him to an extent, and that is a risk at this critical moment in his pre-Presidency. President Trump is used to dealing with “fake media” that continually lie about him no matter what — so in his calculus, he does not need to win them over at all. He is also used to speaking live to adoring crowds. So he is not used to speaking live to people who are unsure of him, or to people who actively hate and fear him.
But his task right now is to make it impossible for the “fake media” to disregard the positive points of his policy initiatives and the great news of his transition’s personnel decisions.
President Trump also urgently needs to lay to rest the active, traumatized fears of th
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
