There’s a wonderful expression that conservatives need to master: The perfect is the enemy of the good. It means that people who are obsessed with perfection, which is seldom achievable, become incapable of achieving good things. We saw that immediately after the debate, when many conservative pundits, as well as ordinary people, collapsed in a heap, thinking all was lost. Well, it wasn’t lost. Trump scored a real victory that keeps paying dividends—and we conservatives need to start projecting that we are, in fact, victorious.

Last week, I wrote about how Ben Shapiro came up with an awesome list of topics Trump should discuss at the debate. Had Shapiro, not Trump, been debating Kamala, he would have nailed every one of those things and left Kamala and all the Democrats broken. That’s because Ben Shapiro has a superb analytical brain.

But Ben Shapiro is not Donald Trump, nor is he the Republican presidential candidate in the coming election.

Instead, Trump is Trump, and he is the candidate (and that’s true whether you like it or not). And being uniquely Trump, Donald Trump has a unique skill set: Trump crystallized things in accessible images the issues that resonate with the American people.

I remember Scott Adams saying this back in 2016. Then, as now, Trump was certainly an unconventional debater. His speaking style was eccentric. Trump also used sarcasm as a weapon in typical New Yorker fashion, which delighted his supporters. Opponents either didn’t recognize the humor, or they intentionally ignored it so that they could claim that he meant literally those obviously sarcastic phrases.

But what Scott Adams and the American people picked up is Trump’s unique knack for taking complex and abstract issues and making them straightforward and even concrete. In 2015/16, Americans were already bewildered, overwhelmed, and angered by the unending influx of illegal aliens, something that Obama, like his shadow, Biden, had encouraged.

Americans saw their manufacturing jobs shipped overseas, and the last remnants of their cities and towns then handed over to illegal aliens:

(See also James Mullin’s post about the neo-colonialism that Democrats are practicing against Americans.)

Recognizing what Americans—many with roots going back centuries and all having lived here and paid into the system their whole lives—faced and feared, Donald Trump came up with both a plan and an image: Build a wall. People understand walls. People know how walls work (and they do work), so that wall summed it all up: Their concerns, their needs, and what their government can do. And Trump won.

Trump campaigned just as well in 2020, and I still think he won. However, systemic problems (mail-in ballots, drop boxes, ballot harvesting, illegal actions) all combined to give Biden, a corrupt fossil, the White House.

And now, here we are in 2024, and Trump is still being Trump and still crystalizing profound problems in concrete ways. Yes, he missed all sorts of opportunities in the debate, but he went in for the real kill, bypassing sophisticated language and deep arguments. Instead, he stated simply. “In Springfield, they're eating the dogs. The people that came in. They're eating the cats.”

And for large numbers of Americans, that said it all. The media and the political class frantically tried to cover it up, which The Unpolled Conservative nicely satirizes here:

Still, the truth kept leaking out. Moreover, those dogs and cats became a metaphor for all the huge problems when a town’s population increases by 30% in 3.5 years thanks to shipping in people with no ties whatsoever to America or to American values (or even to Western values). (See, e.g., here and here.)

The story also exposed the fact that the government’s focus is no longer on American well-being. It’s somewhere else entirely:

And if you want to know how much the story resonated, just look at the meme explosion. We noted some of the early memes here, but what’s interesting is that they haven’t stopped. Instead, they’re escalating in sophistication and reach. One of my favorite musicians, David Scott (aka The Kiffness), created this mesmerizing gem:

The whole thing is becoming a huge trend (queued to start at 1:58):

And what’s really funny is that hardcore leftists have no idea how to respond. I found this poster on a leftist page and couldn’t stop laughing. No, it’s not Trump doing the eating, you dingbat!

Likewise, I think Hank Azaria, a Hollywood liberal, was trying to attack Trump with this video but all he did was to reinforce Trump’s message—and could anything be more perfect than the fact that the whole thing arose in a real Springfield?

Chief Wiggum, Springfield PD, here… they’re doing WHAT? pic.twitter.com/KiK3srkb0i

— Hank Azaria (@HankAzaria) September 12, 2024

Scott Adams, of course, quickly figured out what was going on:

I’m revising my debate scoring. My first impression was a tie, which I called a Harris victory.

But the only thing I recall about the debate today is “They’re eating the dogs.”

Visual. Scary. Viral. Memorable. Repeatable. And directionally correct in terms of unchecked…

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) September 13, 2024

My point is that, with a few words, Trump won the debate by dominating all post-debate discourse with a powerful image that completely overwhelms everything else. This is a win, and we need to take it.

Remember that victory is a state of mind. We create the world others see. And no, I’m not saying that we’re going to turn into Baghdad Bob, assuring us Iraq was winning, even as American tanks were creeping into the shot.

However, in a fluid situation, you act like a winner, and you tell people what they’re seeing. You don’t win elections by telling people that you think you’re a loser. You win by telling people that you’re a winner.

Funnily enough, this is a self-defense technique.

If someone is in my face (too close, yelling at me, etc.) to the point at which I feel threatened enough to punch that person, witnesses will say, “Andrea started it because she threw the first punch.”

However, in the same situation—and this is human psychology—if I put my hands in the air in the surrender position while saying, “I don’t want to fight,” and then elbow the person in the face using my conveniently already-upraised elbow, witnesses will say that the other person started the fight. I’ve framed what they see and how they respond.

We conservatives must start looking at the psychology of victory, something we’re utterly failing to do. So, while we might long for Trump to have turned into Ben Shapiro on the debate stage, he didn’t—but he still won.

He made the most important, viral point, he managed to land blows about the economy and Kamala’s ties to Biden, and he stood valiantly against a three-on-one pile-on and a cascade of political lies and defamatory claims. That, my friends, is a victory, and it behooves us to remind the American people of that fact.