Over a weekend of discussing politics with like-minded family, we of course discussed Trump and the mean tweets. Women don’t like mean tweets. Especially from their president. Because? Never mind.

Remember Ronald Reagan? Back when Ronald Reagan was building up to a presidential campaign he was broadcasting weekly opinion pieces in which he sounded pretty angry and determined to do something about it. When he was on the Carson Show he emitted corny one-liners, and everyone laughed. But when he became president he switched to an avuncular personality.

I wonder why? Do you think it was because he had a strategic mind and understood that the president is the father of his country? Or did he just want Clark Clifford to think he was “an amiable dunce?”

Doesn’t matter. And at one point “Saturday Night Live” did a skit where Reagan acted like an amiable uncle in public and an effective, nail-hard leader in private.

So, maybe Trump should have acted more avuncular in office and gotten reelected? Who knows? Maybe it is a good idea for the post-COVID period to be an opportunity for Democrats to self-destruct. Maybe the Trump experience is a suitable research project for the new generation of Republican leaders, from DeSantis to Youngkin, to help figure out how to offer themselves to the voters.

And when would be the best time to give the Woke-ologists enough rope to hang themselves? Right now, or after a second-term Trump?

I mean, wouldn’t it be great if the Progressive Caucus gets their heads handed to them later this month when it’s time to pass the reconciliation bill and the moderate Democrats are staring into the headlights of the onrushing 2022 midterms and refuse to vote for the spend-until-you-see-the-whites-of-their-eyes progressive agenda? And then the Democrats are really in a bind because they also have to extend the debt ceiling and pass the overall spending for 2022?

Think of what would have happened if Trump had won in 2020 and the House still remained Democrat-controlled with Nancy Pelosi determined to oppose him. Imagine a disastrous 2022 midterm for the second-term Trump, and then a Time for a Change election in 2024 with big Democrat majorities brimming with woke progressives in both Houses of Congress.

So here is my fearless prognostication for the next three years.

Prediction One: The Democrats won’t get the economy on an even keel by 2024. Democrats really need to crank up interest rates to curb inflation right now and flush all their stimulus and new entitlement plans away right now. Any delay makes the inflation worse and puts the Fed in an impossible situation when it will really need to raise interest rates to kill inflation. Just in time for the 2024 election.

Prediction Two: The Democrats won’t curb their CRT wokey crazies before 2024, and the American people will be fit to be tied by then. In a way, I get why Democrats are saying that there’s nothing to see here, no CRT in the schools. They see their current woke initiatives as just noble activism that continues the fight against the age-old evils of patriarchy and racism. Put it another way: we ordinary Americans see Let’s Go Brandon as a spontaneous organic response to the incompetence and the elite pretensions of the Biden administration. To our Democrat friends, LGB is a sinister conspiracy hatched up in the fever swamps of far-right conspiracy theories.

In fact, I dare say that there are some that say that the omission of the T in LGB is clearly a transphobic slur that threatens the safety of transgenders and non-binaries everywhere in America.

Prediction Three: You ain’t seen nothing yet. I experience the current populist wave as just the latest in a succession of increasing political revolts that began with the Nixon years and the Silent Majority, continued with the Reagan years and the Reagan Democrats, and erupted immediately after the election of America’s First Black President with the Tea Party. On this notion, the Trump 2016 election is just the point at which the Gathering Populist Storm actually elected a populist president.

Just as it did with the Nixon virus and almost did with the Reagan virus, the ruling class got in a room together and expelled the Trumpist virus, but immediately the Youngkin variant appeared, and the terrified ruling-class moms are masking up and demanding anti-Trump vaccine booster shots. Next up: the 2022 variant.

According to anthropologist Peter Turchin, our society is suffering from “elite overproduction:” too many credentialed would-be elitists for the jobs available. The elite needs to create jobs for would-be elitists to order the plebs around, but the Yeomen and the Commoners don’t want to be ordered around. At some point, the irresistible force meets the immovable object, and God decides what happens next.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

Image: Marco Verch Professional Photographer

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