Keep Pushing

Don't stop with the activity

President Trump’s team hit the ground running. Starting on Day One, as promised, President Trump signed executive orders and redirected government assets. In one day, he proved that we do not have to live like this and the Biden era society was all a choice. What did we hear from the left? Screeching from some but no unified message. This is the time to keep pushing as the left has no unified message nor a pivotal figure with which to coordinate around for a response.

In the first Trump term, there was a strategy Bannon proposed of putting out an EO each week and making the left flip out. This was true with the Muslim travel EO and some other EOs about immigration. The left did react. The left did flip out. Then it all stopped one month into Trump’s term. This first week is like a season of EOs and moves wrapped into one.

What does the left react to? It’s not easy because every reaction takes some of the outrage deposits out of the outrage bank. The 2024 election season showed the outrage bank is running low. How do they allocate which EO to go after immediately? Trump signed some heavy hitters by both rolling back LBJ’s affirmative action EO and ending birthright citizenship. A lawsuit sprung up quickly for that one, but attention and focus is divided. Each segment of the left cares more about one specific policy than the other. Now wrap all of this with immediate deportations of criminals. The Trump admin is focusing on criminals and posting their crimes for all to see, so any push back and denunciations of these deportations paints the shrieking crybaby as pro-criminal.

Beyond this problem of how to respond, who signals on the left what to focus on? The top Democrat news item for Trump’s first week was not a protest. The inauguration protests were weak with turnout estimated around 3,500 people. The top news item was that former president Barack Obama might be getting a divorce due to an affair with Jennifer Aniston. A man who has not held office in a decade is their top news flash and for a negative reason. They have no central figure to pose as Mr/s. Resistance. No single person to signal what is the top priority to resist and rhetorical line of attack. To allow a person that role will cause friction between the factions: BIPOC, faux moderate (white), coastal money elite. They cannot focus because they are a polyglot coalition with wildly different top priorities. Eventually, they will solve the internal battle, but for now the money is not flowing and the attention is divided.

This is all the more reason to push as fast as possible while delivering on core promises. Frankly, activity has been so quick along so many fronts I can barely keep up. Wall construction resumed in El Paso. Deportations began and now have a daily quota from the president. EOs keep flowing, and positions are filling. Not just filling positions, but bureaucrats are being fired. It’s a flurry of activity and based on four years of planning.

The left cannot pick one item and focus because Trump’s team is inside their OODA loop and creating new items for them to process. How much outrage is each news release worth? Overreacting to one may leave them spent for the next, worse Trump action. There is the possibility the left is drained after the first term and the super-year of 2020. A lot of emotion was wasted on a vaccine rollout that fizzled and a proxy war that continued far beyond the glorious counteroffensive timelines. Do not sleep on October 7th hurting their cashflow.

The left will recover and someone will step forward for their tribe. The left does have to sort out their side and sideline those who cost them the ‘24 election. Focus group studies need to happen, plus they have to see what the Keystone Cop GOP does in Congress. In the meantime, the Trump team needs to keep the fires roaring and faster faster faster.