One of the delights of the last couple of months has been watching the Democrats and their regime media adjuncts running their decades-old political playbook and seeing them completely outflanked by the Trump administration running its modern playbook. Check your calendars, guys. It’s 2025, and what used to work doesn’t work anymore. You guys haven’t changed, but we Republicans have. The fact that we are no longer reacting as you expect and demand us to, along with the revolution in media that has allowed us insurgents to evade the regime media gatekeepers, has made all your old go-to moves utterly useless. We’re winning, and you’re losing. It’s beautiful, man.
Take the ridiculous Signal onanism of last week. That pseudo-scandal is gone now, except in the dank recesses of the collective colon of MSNBCNN, where the regime media left attempts to wring a few more nutrients from it before it passes completely.
Why did what they portray as the biggest scandal of all human history sputter into nothingness in less than a week? Putting aside that no one outside of Washington, DC, or Twitter cared about it – I drove almost 2,000 miles across the country last week, met dozens of people, including military folks, and never once heard it mentioned – there’s another reason it vapor-locked. We Republicans refused to play along this time, and our refusal to do so killed it.
You see, one feature of the 20th-century model of politics was that the Democrats could invent a scandal, and the Republicans would treat it as a scandal instead of laughing in their pinched, fugly faces. They deserve mockery – all the sissy whining about national security from these femboys and Chardonnay-guzzling crones would be hilarious if it wasn’t so pathetic – but our role in the old order was to play along. The paradigm where the Democrats and the regime media reinforce each other in an operation to collect a Republican scalp – insert Elizabeth Warren joke here – depended on Republicans doing just that. The norms said we had to take this stuff seriously. The norms said we had to nod along in agreement that whatever the Republican target did was oh, so very bad. And the norms said we then had to offer up that Republican for sacrifice.
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They win, we lose, rinse, lather, repeat.
Except this time, we said, “No.” We gave them nothing except mockery. We didn’t pretend that their phony outrage was anything but such bad performance art that it was probably eligible for a USAID grant. Fire somebody? Apologize? Nah. Get bent.
And because we didn’t cooperate, the whole thing just sort of faded away. Our cooperation is the key to perpetuating the scandals. They can’t win unless we help them win, and we’ve chosen not to help them win anymore.
Now, not everybody in or around the GOP was on board. We still have a few soft Republicans who don’t know what time it is and feel some bizarre compulsion to police fellow Republicans at the behest of the Democrats. Some of them never feel so good as when they can wag a soft, girlish finger at one of their own, while it makes them extremely uncomfortable when Republicans are putting up win after win. Most of the tofu-spined caucus was in the allegedly right-wing media this time. Most of our politicians, except Democrat-complicit Senator Roger Wicker (who can pose and buster because he's sadly not up again until 2030), have gotten the news: You don’t go against the family, Fredocons.
Oh, you could see some of the other GOP establishment submissives just aching to get out there on camera and complain about Pete Hegseth, Mike Waltz, and all the rest of them. They wanted to do it so bad they could taste it – strange new respect is a hell of a drug – but somewhere, in their reptile minds, they understood that that would be political suicide. Their next election is not six years off, and if they got suckered by the Democrats as Wicker did, they would be on a political one-way rowboat trip out to fish in the middle of Lake Tahoe.
And properly so. The complicity of Republicans in the Russian collusion hoax, where they took seriously a Democrat/regime media operation to neuter President Trump, led to disaster. The whole fake scandal was ridiculous on its face, yet you had old-school Republicans joining in and nodding solemnly that they “needed to get to the bottom of this” even when there was manifestly nothing to get to the bottom of. You had Attorney General Jeff Sessions allowing himself to be bullied into recusing himself, which led to the Mueller witch-hunt that totally denied us the presidency we had won.
We’re not going to accept idiocy from Republican politicians anymore, and they’ve apparently gotten the message because you didn’t see a lot of them out there in front of the cameras explaining how this minor kerfuffle was the worst thing that ever happened in the history of ever. Most of them now understand that their political survival depends on them not betraying us. Those are you who first got into politics when Trump came down the escalator might not remember, but we have vastly fewer of these invertebrates today than we had 15 years ago. We also now have a president who does not give a damn what either the Democrats or the regime media think. That leaves the Democrats with exactly nothing to deploy but increasingly shrill and profanity-laden caterwauling. At one time, that would’ve cajoled us into cutting our own throats. Now, it just makes us giggle. Is Eric Swalwell babbling on about security breaches? That’s just an opportunity to revisit the Fang Fang Bang Bang. And when Hakeem Jeffries promises to keep crying about how somebody needs to be fired, and no one is fired, it reiterates their utter impotence.
They look weak and ridiculous, mostly because they are weak and ridiculous.
One of the great things about Donald Trump is that, to the extent he knew the alleged rules of politics that were in effect before him, he didn’t care. He doesn’t feel compelled to be bound to norms; his only purpose is binding Republicans. He was preceded by other legends who showed us the way, including Andrew Breitbart and Rush Limbaugh. But remember that Donald Trump is really the avatar of a movement of patriotic Americans who are tired of being abused, who are tired of leadership that is weak and feckless in the face of people who hate us, and who are completely done with the idea of gentlemanly decline.
The bare minimum for Republicans is to not help the Democrats and the regime media, to the extent those two groups differ, defeat us. We will no longer play our assigned roles in the old kabuki dance that always ends up with Republicans shafted and Democrats skating on accountability. Hey, Dems, I’ll see your Signal chat and raise you 13 dead Americans in Afghanistan and no one getting fired.
They don’t get to win. Give them nothing except mockery and contempt.
Follow Kurt on Twitter @KurtSchlichter. Get the newest volume in the Kelly Turnbull People’s Republic series of conservative action novels set in America after a notional national divorce, the bestselling Amazon #1 Military Thriller, Overlord! And get his new novel about terrorism in America, The Attack!
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