Cracking Open the 2024 Election Door a Few Months Early-Tracking the Trump Phenomenon

Normally, “election season” begins in January-February, while still in 2023. What happens in 2024, not just in Washington and Congress but inside those tiny little foxholes that millions of Americans first dug into their hearts and minds in 2010, beginning their little talk-fests at places like Crackle Barrel, where they started talking about changing courses of action. As Baby Boomers now know, 13 years later, the Devil was in the details. A small percentage of their children, Gen X’ers, were also in the game.

If you can remember those days…I attended several meetings around the area, only don’t recall ever sitting down…and nobody even knew me by “Vassar” (my nom de plume). I quickly learned it was an itch most everyone understood, but couldn’t articulate; that things just weren’t quite right in America. and again, it will surprise you younger folks how much American history those folks knew. I suspect it was how people in Boston and others in Williamsburg viewed their high-handed (uninvited) British overlords, different, but still the same.

But in 2010 there was definitely something in the air, and it been that way since the 2008 election, when Barack Obama was elected to sit in the White House. If you were over 40 then, you might go back in your memory to try and sort out what has changed in the way people look at politics today. First there was 9-11, which had a great impact on Millennials and GenX’ers, and with those middle-eastern wars, a change in the relationship between our military establishments and our intelligence agencies. In retrospect, I don’t think our politicians could have bollixed that period up worse. I was writing at RedState.com at the time, and I went back to review Donald Trump pieces I wrote in 2015 and 2016, about the coming election, based on the way the news media appeared to be teasing toward a favorable outcome for Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, who was handpicked to be Act Two of the Obama Dynasty. Republicans couldn’t have picked a greater outlier than Donald Trump, who only stepped into the frame in 2015. Or should I say, “down-stepped”, recalling that film of him coming down the escalator in New York, when he declared.

I recommend you read “Donald Trump and the Law of Generations”, which I penned in October, 2015. In it I laid out some key elements of how Trump connected with the working classes generally and Latino immigrants especially, because they came here to build betterlives for themselves, and not to build up their political culture in the university-based management culture; (Law school, university teaching, corporate front office careers). You’ve known me speak of the Law of Generations several times, as it’s an important natural law in the development of America as well as individual houses inside America. It goes something like this:

  Law: It takes three generations for an immigrant “to be American” (“Ser Americano” as they say in Honduras.) Think of a hill that must be climbed, a new immigrant must first set out to climb it. (As we have seen in the past sixty years, with help from the government, many Americans have never begun to start that climb even after several generations here, so their clock on the Law of Generations has not yet begin to tick.) It’s in the second generation that the house that was built in the first generation takes root and the immigrant family begins to take on more and more the appearance of being American. The habits, even language, of the Old Country, become the second habits and second language, and American English becomes the language spoken around the dinner table. Then in the Third Generation the family is fully integrated as being American, at which time, depending on the wealth it has accumulated, (over roughly 90-100 years) it will begin sinking those roots more deeply, with its many branches going in every direction, some rising to even new heights, others sinking like a rock. Look around you and try to make a judgment about what generation an individual belongs and you will know more about them. For instance, since I’m over 75, most of the Indians I know in my age group are all first generations. Their children, now in their forties will be greatly different from their parents, though also (most likely) professionals. Their third-generation grandchildren, for good or ill, will be totally American, some even forming their own rock band. Today, most Americans of European families are into at least into their third generation, and it is in the third and fourth generation that we find the majority of our professional classes who’ve mostly lost all memory of who their great-grandparents ever were. The shoulders they stand on. It’s in this period that people begin to take their station in America more or less for granted, and fold the constitutional blueprint for their house safely away in a box in the attic. Because of this ingratitude and oversight, few American houses make it through the fourth generation without some diminishing, but always to be passed or replaced by others still coming up the hill. It’s a process, and for two centuries America has been the better for it. Today, most of our first and second generation start-ups come from the south, Latin America, or SE Asia.

For instance, my family first came here in the 1680s (to Virginia), with several generations, so we have as many branches as a pear tree, with fine ripe fruit at the top, and low-hanging fruit at the bottom, which easily falls or is plucked and eaten. My 95-year old aunt, a saucy Indianapolis Democrat politico, is the family genealogist, and had bellowed for years that we are descended from English kings…to which, at least half a dozen times over twenty years, my dad would ask, “Well then, how’d we all ended up in a coal camp in east Kentucky, Your Highness?”

With this is mind, and some interest in finding the European derivation of his name, I checked out Donald Trump on Wikipedia. Donald Trump is Generation Three of the Trump (Drumpf) family in America, which is where the main branches of the tree really start to branch out. Donald’s children of the next generation-children is where wealth means less than how well the new branches have fully learned the blueprint of being American. So the story of the Donald Trump House is only just beginning, as he has five kids, from ages 45 to 17. These will represent the legacy of his House, not his wealth. But when the branches were very few, like most third generation sons, Donald was molded by the first two generations. A chip off the old block, even. For my tastes his grandfather Frederick Drumpf was the most interesting, as the patriarch-pioneer of every immigrant family usually are; for one, because they are the original shoulders the family will always stand upon, and two, they are often the ones, as time and sophistication move on, who the family most wants kept locked in the closet. Frederick Trump came to the Pacific northwest in the late 1880s after emigrating from Germany. There he opened a successful hotel and restaurant for wayward women in Seattle, which would soon become the jumping off place for the Alaska Gold Rush, which Fredrick would chase north and where he would do even better in separating miners from their grubstakes, on behalf of another string of unreformed ladies of the evening.

Now I admit a partiality to such men, in part because my own grandfather got tired of four generations of farming limestone rocks in east Tennessee and headed to the Appalachian interior to take up work in the booming coal industry. The best-read uneducated man I ever knew, I would always visit him in his little 10 x 5 bedroom off the kitchen (he and my grandmother couldn’t stand the sight of one another). And always next to his bed he had an open Bible, a copy of Pliny’s Natural History, an 1872 Army Colt, a blackjack and a pair of brass knuckles. And we would speak of many things. I’m sure, when he first went to east Kentucky in the boom-town days, he’s have taken some comfort at the same sort of hotel Frederick Trump operated, and had I lived and found my way to Whitehorse in those days, Mr Trump’s would have been the first place I would have gone to seek employment. I say this just so you’ll know how I feel about skeletons in the closet.

Now these stories about Trump’s grandfather’s past aren’t new, as they were first reported years ago, but Fred only got his own Wikipedia page recently (2020), and I did note a certain turned-up nose in the reporting of how Frederick Trump made his stash, also failing to note that at the time (1898) prostitution wasn’t illegal, and it was the WCTU that was still taking axes to saloons in Denver at the time. And being a first-generation German of unknown religious background, Frederick Trump may not even have believed that providing temporary room & board for sporting girls and their male companions was immoral…by back-east English Puritan standards. Fred returning to Germany to marry a nice German girl, then returned to the US and settled in Queens, where he died from the great flu pandemic in 1918. His wife and son, Fred (Donald’s father) carried on his new real estate business. Like old Frederick, young Fred was a natural entrepreneur, who built low-income housing as well as a successful grocery chain. He was a builder. Donald was the fourth of five children born (in 1946) to Fred and his wife Mary Anne, a first generation house-servant from Scotland, and probably the strict Presbyterian in Donald’s life. Wikipedia went out of their way to mention a Justice Department consent decree against Frederick Trump in 1973 because of a form of red-lining in his apartment renting, which, in fact, was very typical behavior of second generation Europeans who had never been around black people before. In fact, unlike southern racial attitudes (called “racism” by the Left), northern attitudes in the time of Dr Martin Luther King were entirely the result of first-and second generation Europeans in urban areas such as Chicago, New York and the steel cities of the Midwest. They were perfectly normal and would not have survived the next generation had it not been for the government cementing it into policy.

Donald was a child of wealth, but not a child of privilege, and his dedication to being the best builder he could be, and the tough education path he chose, rather than wasting his father’s money on rich kid frills, proves his nose was turned into the wind early. He attended a military school in New York, to yank the “sense of privilege” out of him, then to Fordham and onto Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania, a genuine Ivy college. He had a financial head-start most others don’t have, but still had to earn his first job with his father. He came from two generations of entrepreneurial genes, not luck, so Donald would have been a failure only if he had not loaded the Trump family tree with more of the same fruit.

  I don’t think America has ever had a president straight out of the private sector but it’s clear the American voting sector is fed up with what the political sector has to offer. It’s run its course, and we need a new direction. Long overdue. We (I) liked Herman Cain in 2012 for that reason especially. And the fact that in many polls the top three GOP candidates were all from the private sector, or “outsiders” as the media likes to call them, proves this public sentiment had grown, not lessened. That preference still persists among the common folk. But choosing someone from outside the political class does not come without risk. Successful people from the private sector carry with them their own self-made bag of troubles, for they are very sure of themselves, cocky and braggadocious, and acustomed to being in charge, and often do not suffer fools lightly. They are not stupid nor cravenly diplomatic, and while they may be slow on the uptake about what is common knowledge to political wonks, they are quicker than most in knowing what needs to be done (situation analysis) and how to get there by the shortest most direct route. At least for the foreseeable future, they also know on which side their bread is buttered, and to whom they owe loyalty, and who it is they want to have their back. Bottom lione, the answer is: The people, not the Establishment nor the special interests. (This was Ronald Reagan’s great lesson.) For both good and ill, they are men and women “in full.”

Compare them the self-made entrepreneur and corporate technocrat. While people who rise to the top of the corporate world (at least in recent years) can become very wealthy, they still draw a paycheck and answer to higher bosses, as modern corporations, even in media, and government, since the 1980s, have been redesigned to provide a top layer that often has no experience in the product or services the corporation provides the public This lack of absolute independence in decision-making and risks, while considered an asset in many quarters, will always place Wall Street bosses a cut below the self-made man in the eyes of America’s immigrant class, who the first and second generation citizens most identify with, as the epitome of “being American” – the man who is his own boss, and in Sinatra’s words, “did it his way.”

In fact, this has been the American dream since the beginning, especially since the ethnic immigrant explosion of the late 18th and early 19th Century. But people from the political class, academic class and lawyer class don’t like this type, for precisely that very same reason; too rough around the edges, and lacking sophistication. That said, from my generation, I never knew a lawyer who didn’t know some kid from his high school class who made more than he did selling scrap metal or used cars, sometimes without so much as a bachelor’s degree. One senior corporate officer told me “it just wasn’t fair” that he’d sweated through years in college for an MBA and thirty years in a company just to finally get $100K year, while a “friend” at his country club had married a niece of Colonel Sanders and built a franchise worth several million in less than ten. The entire system of aristocracy in Britain was built on the class distinctions between the idle rich (gentry) and the working rich (Donald Trump)…which in America one could still become.

And Karl Marx built a religion around hating them, in part because he could not imagine them. They fell outside his world view…and Obama has tried to destroy them, for though Donald Trump is a billionaire, he is just at the top of the ladder of the private, small business sector.

This class always represents the free people in America best, for it represents the American dream. From every direction on the globe people came to America knowing that their House could grow and prosper, not necessarily in their first generation, but in those first three generations, and what they wanted most was to be totally in charge of building that House, and to be in charge of creating their own wealth. To answer to no man. To be one’s own boss. But to start, they first had to take jobs in the factory or in the fields, after all, who ever heard of a third generation factory worker or field hand…in America? Sadly, today we have third generation welfare recipients, third generation government workers, and third generation politicians, but in the small business private sector everything is still fluid, only it is getting smaller.

Donald trump escaped a seine net that was first set while he was still in college. I see first generation Latino entrepreneurship everywhere, small, but certain to grow…if allowed. And it encourages me. When Donald Trump encountered that excited lady from Colombia last week (In 2015, see our picture, above), my immediate takeaway, since I’m older and can remember, is the way in which she used the word “Mister” as an honorific. “Mister Trump!”  In America, if you owned your own business, much less a factory, you were a “Mister” up and down the sidewalk, to employees and the community at large, because you were what everyone wanted to be.

No immigrant ever came here hoping their children would be a politician. They wanted their children to be a “Mister”. No one ever said “Governor Bush” in that tone. Or “Senator Rubio” in that tone. The Law of Generations is immutable, and it really only applies to America. Sadly. Still no historian has ever explained Andrew Jackson in terms that he was a first generation Scotch-Irish, which explains every wrong thing about him. This Law explains more of America’s dark pages than any other phenomenon, making a liar of even nice guys like Bernie Sanders, who says we were born racist. We were born ethnic on a three-generation road. But it also defines our greatness and our exceptionalism, and umbrellas how millions of lost souls, the detritus of the world, could come here, and in three generations not only create great things, but be able to pass on the blueprint, imprinting a model that could be followed by millions of strangers for generations to come. Donald Trump may not be here today by accident. So, I hope Donald Trump keeps a picture of his German granddad hanging somewhere in his closet. The hatred of the Modern Left for Donald Trump today is that he doesn’t need them, and see them for what they are; whore-mongers and petty criminals. For the next 30-40 years we need to draw our leadership from Trump’s sort of profile, strong beliefs in the little people My son was a classmate (and sort-of friend) with Paul Ryan at Miami University, and Ryan turned out just as he told me he would.

This is why I like Marjorie Taylor Greene, but I haven’t spent any hours finding out what she believes and knows down deep. But I like her instincts. In the pages to follow we’ll discuss those instincts, and try to come up with a type of citizen model who 1) knows how things work, 2) a general feel for American history, and how the laws of nature sit at the base of American liberty, and not an MBA from the Ivy League. All the bureaucracies, and their educational foundations, are built on the assumption that elected officials don’t squat.

What I want to establish early on here is the notion that the fear the statists feel about a type of candidate can stir them to go beyond the legal bounds to deny him any role in managing their government. (Donald Trump, 2017-2023, proves this.).

Yes, they can be defeated, but the alternative-history they have attempted to insert into America’s history must be removed, starting with the legitimacy of the Biden presidency from 2020, and all the crimes committed in keeping that legitimacy alive. Besides current events, you need one primary text, Larry Schweikart’s and Michael Allen’s, Patriot’s History of the United States, and David M Poff’s Unwashed Philosophy: A User’s Guide for our Imperefect Union, to which I contributed.
(More to follow)