Roger Kimball

Bishop Butler once observed that probability is “the very guide of life.” This is true. It follows that possibility is cheap, an errant muse. Yes, we must stash away in the back of our mind the admonition that “in this life... we must always distinguish between the Unlikely and the Impossible” (that’s the philosopher R. Psmith, courtesy of P.G. Wodehouse). Nevertheless, we should not run our lives or write our columns on that basis.   “Why Trump won.” That is my assignment. I shall treat it as a declaration, not a question. And even though I write before the returns are in, I can give you the reasons. After all, I have been predicting that Donald Trump would win “in a landslide” at least since July.

Elon Musk has often commented that “if Trump is NOT elected, this will be the last election.” He often adds that, “far from being a threat to democracy, he is the only way to save it.” I believe both statements are essentially true. I say “essentially” because, should Trump lose — or to follow Musk more accurately, should he not be elected, which is not quite the same thing as losing — then there would still be events called elections. Only they wouldn’t be like elections of yore.  According to the Constitution (another thing that would retired should Trump fail to be elected), the qualifications to be president of the United States are pretty minimal.

Who has better lawyers: Donald Trump or the Syndicate? The fate of the election, and hence the fate of the country, may well come down to the answer to that question.  By “the Syndicate” (what I sometimes call “the Committee”), I of course mean the shadowy board of overseers that controls the Democratic Party and, by extension, the administrative apparatus that governs us. No one knows exactly who sits on this board. I suspect that even those who, in retrospect, we can see have occupied senior positions in its ranks are often uncertain about their place in the hierarchy.  Elsewhere, I have invoked C.S. Lewis’s idea of “The Inner Ring” to explain the dynamics of this phenomenon.

No one with an open mind — you can even scratch the adjective — no sentient sapiens period can have witnessed Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally without a frisson of awe. Even the most tireless Trump supporter must be a little jaded with Trump’s rallies by now. Just as in 2016, they have been building to a crescendo in both size and frequency. And even avid politicos might be forgiven for thinking they had been there, done that.  But Sunday’s rally at Madison Square Garden was something different. Perhaps other rallies were as large. We’re told that the MSG event boasted a capacity crowd of nearly 20,000 with more than 70,000 lined up to view the festivities on screens set up outside.

When you look back on the 2024 presidential election and try to understand why it was that Kamala Harris lost, there are a few things to remember. The first is that the two most important issues for American voters were the border and the cost of living. By “the border” I do not just mean the incomplete physical barrier along our southern frontier. That structure is merely the objective correlative of a policy that has its roots in such lofty ideas as sovereignty, the meaning of citizenship and national identity. After her coronation as the Democratic candidate in late July, Harris began to squirm and prevaricate about her appointment by Joe Biden as the “border czar.” But we have the phrase in black and white in the record of the appointment.

One of the entertainments that every election season brings revolves around polling. Every season seems to bring more and more and more frequent polls. The measure registered voters and (for all I know) unregistered ones. They register people who are designated “likely voters” and they claim to filter for gender(s), age, race, ethnic back, party affiliation or non-affiliation, ZIP code, income, and favorite pastimes, and what seems like a thousand other things.    Like everyone else who is interested in politics, I pay fretful attention to the results of these surveys and questionnaires beginning about a year out from the election itself.

What happens when you continually demonize someone as “Hitler,” insist that he is “a dictator” and “a threat to democracy?” Why, you get chaps like Thomas Matthew Crooks, who tried to kill Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, two months ago. Yesterday, Crooks was joined by Ryan Wesley Routh, a self-described “revolutionary.” Routh who showed up at the Trump International Golf Course in West Palm Beach with an AK-style rifle and a GoPro video camera. The Secret Service espied him in the underbrush a few hundred yards from President Trump. He fled the scene after the agents opened fire on him but was soon apprehended by the local police.

Sydney Smith (1771-1845), the great English wit and Anglican divine, once said that he never read a book before reviewing it because he found that “it prejudices a man so.” (He also confided that his idea of heaven was “eating pâté de foie gras to the sound of trumpets.”) I have nothing to add to Smith’s soteriological dictum. In partial defense of his announced journalistic practice, however, I will note that while it might compromise his reliability as a literary cicerone, there are plenty of situations for which such lack of exposure is a beneficial prophylactic. I write during the Democratic National Convention. I have sat down to watch none of it. Like Smith, I know that doing so would prejudice me.