LIZ HODGSON: ADVERSITY IS OUR STRENGTH @Arts & Opinion

“Rough seas make good sailors” is a saying I’ve heard often enough, and generally agree with. Watching the US presidential race, I’m beginning to think the reverse is also true: calm seas make lousy sailors.

Since announcing his 2016 presidential run, Trump has been slandered, smeared, impeached (twice), nearly bankrupted, arrested, convicted, and now, shot at.

I’m not being cute. Set aside the crack-high euphoria of cheating death, the bullet that narrowly missed Trump’s bean has turbocharged his support far and wide, raising his status from “controversial political outsider” to “American folk hero.”

After dodging all bullets, real and metaphorical, Trump leads a party that hasn’t been this fired up for a candidate—this resolute and united—since the Reagan years.

Since Biden’s “Grandpa Simpson” debate implosion, his administration has been swirling with chaos, drama, leaks and second-guessing. His remaining allies insist he’s not going anywhere. But they’ve stopped pretending he’s the “Dark Brandon” of the short-lived meme that painted the president as a laser-eyed omnipotent political chess master—cold-blooded, confident and hyper-competent.

Things look a little brighter over in the Republican tent—a party our parents would hardly recognize. This is no longer the GOP of sherry sippers in navy blazers and pocket squares debating which fraction of a percentage point to shave off the capital gains tax, or which country to invade next, between rounds of golf. It’s not the “basket of deplorables” Hilary sneered at either. Unless you count Kid Rock, Hulk Hogan and Amber Rose. It happens to include a rising counter-elite of tech billionaires, like Elon Musk, Bill Ackman, Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, and the Winklevoss twins, to name a few.

Loathing Donald Trump is no longer “high status” in Silicon Valley. Mark Zuckerberg, who funneled 400 million zuckerbucks into Biden’s campaign back in 2020, supports neither candidate and now says that “Trump getting up after getting shot in the face and pump his fist in the air with the American flag is one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Even arch-liberal Jeff Bezos was impressed by Trump’s poise under pressure…

I’ve heard you can wear a MAGA hat in public in deep-blue San Francisco and nobody bats an eye. As Biden would say . . . not a joke.

Looking up at the scoreboard, it’s clear something odd has happened; something counterintuitive. The candidate favored by every instrument of American power—corporate media, the bureaucratic class, coastal elites, Hollywood, academia—is in turmoil. The candidate that withstood a prolonged barrage of slings and arrows is rising like a phoenix.

How different things looked for Trump just two years ago, when his midterm picks were a bust and his communiqués on Truth Social were limited to all-caps tirades, recycled memes and a Trump-themed NFT rollout. Without much in the way of rallies or events, his announcement to run in 2024 felt scripted and the public reaction subdued.

The three-pronged attack from Democrats, high-profile Republicans and Trump himself was supposed to make him go away, as it would for most people. After launching his political career, he was at first ignored, then mocked and then, after winning the nomination, faced with an alliance of NeverTrumpers whose message of “we’re Republicans and even WE hate him” resonated with a TDS-stricken commentariat. His victory over Hilary was considered such an insult, thousands gathered in protest, chanting “not my president,” while Antifa’s finest smashed storefronts and set things on fire—all before he’d served a single day in office. Then came the fake “Russian asset” story, overshadowing the first half of his term. After leaving office, he faced a barrage of indictments, including Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s legal gymnastics to turn a misdemeanor into a felony. Advocacy groups tried to scrub him from the ballot, and the FBI raided his Mar-a-Lago home armed with long guns and shoot-to-kill orders.

When the unfolding indictments dialed Trump’s poll numbers up, Democrats and Democrat-friendly media switched tack to He’s Hitler! An existential threat to the Republic—a narrative that may or may not have landed him in the crosshairs of a disordered loner’s AR15.

Repeated lawsuits were probably the greatest tactical error in the war on Trump. As Sun Tzu warned, “always provide your enemy an escape route.” Confronted by the prospect of life in prison, Trump had no option but to fight back with single-minded grit. The endless investigations energized his base, galvanizing his followers and position within the party.

And where is Biden now? “Under siege” pretty much sums it up. His legacy on the line, he now runs the risk of being remembered not as the avuncular and genial statesman but a cantankerous, cadaverous geezer, mouth agape and saucer-eyed, who spent the final days of his presidency holed up in his Rehobeth Beach getaway, seething at former allies and refusing to step aside.

Biden’s media enablers have a lot to answer for. They ignored an endless string of gaffes and valorized him as a father to the nation (Howard Stern called him just that while Drew Barrymore, with cringe-inducing intimacy, beckoned Kamala to be “Momala of the country.”) Biden-friendly pundits shamed and gaslit anyone who dared question the President’s mental wherewithal, blaming his pudding-brain ramblings on a stutter and calling videos of his erratic movements “cheapfakes.” He’s so spry and vigorous, they insisted. We can’t keep up! Watch this supercut from Grabien for the damning evidence.

Compare that to the media’s endless scrutiny of Trump’s every word and action, firing pointed questions at every turn, along with the endless refrain of “kids in cages,” “Putin” and “white supremacy.” These lettered news platforms will need to dial it down if they care anything at all about capturing GenZ which—plot twist!—is turning to MAGA in droves. Canadian rapper Tom McDonald’s pro-Trump song “You Missed,” recorded a day after the assassination attempt, immediately rose to number 1 on iTunes and number two on YouTube, where it’s racked up 381,000 likes and over four million views.

With MAGA’s social status rising, corporate media and their NeverTrumper friends like Adam Kinzinger, Liz Cheney, and The Lincoln Project founders, are looking more and more like the kind of dorks who show up at a dance party with an accordion and herbal tea, invisible to the cool kids and only talking to themselves.

None of this recent momentum guarantees Trump will win. Four months is a long time in presidential races and anything can happen. Right now, the path ahead looks smooth—meaning there’s a distinct possibility it will be anything but.

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