2:28 AM EDT —

About fifteen minutes ago, Trump just toddled offstage in Grand Rapids with a sharply satisfied look in his eye. It was his last appearance in a presidential campaign, and almost reminiscent of a fulfilled craftsman. His pace is steady and he seems content with where he has put every nail.

It’s a political frame that might just weather the most dire storms until Inauguration Day, when work toward freedom in America might begin with resolve unprecedented in my lifetime. An uncanny team has come together around the man, with an almost intriguing variety of personal outlooks and angles on the crises of the day. The prospects for entertaining confusements are considerable. Even so, the whole thing has a basically American sort of rollicking initiative which tends to confound and simply outrun communists and other primitive mobs.

The idea of “coalition politics” bored me fifty years ago, already, on reading stuff like Hunter Thompson’s encomiums to Pat Caddell (an earnest enough mutt, it might be said). To be able to see through to the principle of mashing & tossing principles like septic confetti is a scourge: let me tell you. It’s hurtful to the brain; to listen to abject contempt for the language and everything it means, all for the sake of elbowing-up with mutual-contemptuals when it comes time to wrench another kink in the spine of America, with deadly malice and conspiracy aforethought.

All of this began at The Beginning, of course. Shall I reel it out for for you? Or; can we take the long history of winks & nods in the dealings of U.S. power (in the name of America) as implicitly understood?

I’m not here to curse the Constitution — again.

It’s just that the habit, the convention — the institution — of compromise is now tested in a desperate crucible: it now forms a ragged line not only in defense but on something of active attack against Amsoc; American Socialism.

Amsoc — that strutting feral beast-child of the twenty-first century, conceived over a century ago in feeble, presumptuous, and downright evil minds without moral foundations of their own but borne on stilts of Euro-envy; crawling through the twentieth century beneath the feet of people unsuspecting that everything they loved was being used against them in “The New Deal”; erecting itself on bent legs fashioned by Lyndon Baines Johnson and trampling America ever since, with ever greater ferocity.

And now, it has all come to the decade-long punch-up with a New York lout whose heart (yes, I am convinced) is in the right place, and whose greatest strength is some hair-fine and mysteriously powerful cord with which he has gathered the outraged aspirations of at least half a nation, because they now appear to have some intimation of the danger at their throats.

The statues won’t look like they used to. It won’t be equestrian pylons with drawn swords. This guy ain’t any of that.

I point that out because the moment feels just about that heavy. Ruby-red velvet drapes and solemn candelabra in the middle of a dark night; that sort of thing. Gold braid on uniforms and striking poses.

On serious reflection, neither Vivek Ramiswami or RFK Jr. attract a classical eye. One is a philosophical lark enjoying a political groove, and the other a spastic lover of cause. It’s profoundly rueful to consider such adventurers on the ramparts of freedom (a word and concept still quite rarely served in any of this) — they don’t even have the nerve to put bounties on jobholders’ heads, like some honorable pirates of old.

It’s a proper disgrace before all the remainder of human history that any of this — America — sank to the remotest possibility that a specimen like Kamala Harris might actually accede to the office of United State Executive Puppet. What else would it be? The slightest review of video clips of that unspeakably retarded (see Michael Malice) person can illustrate the fraud to the commonest of sense. She can’t do anything of value, certainly not for a nation in crisis. She can only be valuable in the cause of crisis, therefore naturally inviting the question; “valuable, to whom?”

Soros? Schwab? You pick ‘em. It’s not so greatly important to me as the idea, the instant fact, that the fangs are now deeply in the throat of this country. It’s a wretched, grotesque, shame and everyone knows it, including the communists.

Why would I care who, exactly, are the barbarians in the living room when I know that proper exertions of American mind, body, heart, and soul could vanquish them all?

That’s a long fight, now. The old joke, “Rome wasn’t burned in a day,” goes hard for this country. Half its history has seen it under siege by every collectivist sect that ever festered out of Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Lenin. They have boiled the children’s brains, generation-by-generation, until the march of stark, malicious morons resounds in every university and legislature, with general approval abroad the public for decades. (This is manifest in the plain Look-Around-You fact of the current straits. Voting is how we all got here, and the communists have been winning, on their premises: certainly not mine.)

Comes the New York Lout, and he’s been making noises about ridding America of one of its worse scourges; the Department of Education. Well, then. That’s a thrilling thing to imagine.

The implications are enormous. I do not imagine that Trump is able, or even much inclined, to work them out. I can’t conceive that he has the same thing in mind that I do: to get all government out of all education in the same way as a separation of church and state, and for all the same reasons. No; it’ll be a terrific fight to devolve government education to the states, and he might prevail. There would be nothing like the produce-or-die imperatives driving all education to the qualities that freedom would produce.

Here is what that example means: Trump cannot save America.

In four years, he can put on a tactical political defense against the mother of all politics, now gone bad: ethics. To wrestle even mightily with the political machine, the administratum, of the federal government is not to contend with the morals upon which it was raised. Elon Musk’s “Government Efficiency” gag (I can’t help it) is an adorable naivete of a sort that causes bureau-dwellers and congressional committees to slap their crummy flippers in glee at the prospects for more work.

It’s the evil of government force, you see, that prevails in all of this. That’s what wrecks morals to the extents we now see.

Trump cannot analyze this (very few can), and he’ll be busy as hell, if he lives through it as he seems to intend. A great question to me is in how much he learned on his first lap around the mulberry bush. (e.g. — how quickly impressionable will he be around the last person in the room with him?)

It’s Election Day, 2024: in almost shameful suspense at having held lifelong moral convictions against voting, and sensing a creep of banal hope that Trump will win this thing in thundering style. It’s a really sordid matter, to grub around with polls and listen to every hopeful commissar and viddie-star hacking-out his rote pitch every time she gets a minute on camera. It’s sorrowful to watch respectable people have to make late-hour nail-bite ‘endorsements’ in their posts, knowing how desperate it all is.

I’m convinced that it really is: desperate. It’s almost enough to drive a man to the ballot.

For weeks and months, I have rolled in mind the political satisfactions (and their moral implications) of seeing Amsoc checked from an angle that its century-long technocracy never calculated: a New York Lout with his heart in the right place.

No matter what I cannot have of what I require of American politics and might never live to see, that would still be a lovely day, today.