Commentary

One of the things the Left hates most about the United States of America is that there are 50 of them. A leftist revolution is more easily accomplished in a country in which power is already consolidated in a single place among a small group of people. Despite the vast territory of the Russian empire under the last of the Tsars, Lenin was able to hijack the initial anti-Tsarist revolt and turn it into a Bolshevik seizure of power.

Over the course of the centuries, similar things have happened in France, England, and Germany. Indeed, after World War II the western Allies insisted that the new German government be as decentralized as possible, with the governmental departments spread all over West Germany and the capital relocated to dumpy Bonn. They wanted no repeat of another Third Reich powerhouse headquartered in Berlin.

For decades, America has proven a harder nut to crack. Most of its election issues were too local, too diversified, too parochial to go national. The system of checks and balances instituted by the Founders cooled the passions as it was designed to do, rejecting the “fierce urgency of now” in favor of gradual change. From 13 east-coast colonies to 50 states, marked by deep regional differences, America weathered the storms of civil war, anarchism, socialism, National Socialism, and communism without succumbing to any of them.

But the hammering on the gates of our republican democracy has only grown louder and more insistent. The rescue of a coterie of German Marxists from Hitler in the run-up to the war resulted in the elevation of anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism to cardinal academic and intellectual principles. Combined with the legacy of organized crime—Saul Alinsky, the notorious author of “Rules for Radicals,” began his “community organizing” as a member of the Capone Mob in Chicago—ideology turned both poisonous and potent.

For what the gangsters, almost all of them Democrats, learned and imparted to the academics was this: if you could take over the principal city of a given state—Chicago, New York, Detroit, Kansas City, et al.—you could then capture and own the state house and the mechanisms and monies of the state itself.

Thus did a lowly bagman for the Pendergast Machine in Kansas City become president Harry S. Truman; thus did the son of a bootlegger in Boston become president John F. Kennedy. A capstone was the presidency of William Jefferson Blythe III, better known as Bill Clinton, who learned the use and abuse of power growing up in Hot Springs, Arkansas, where he sat at the feet of the “retired” New York City gangster Owney Madden at the Southern Club and Grill and got the best education of his life.

Even Clinton, though, was still at heart a regional politician. Barack Obama, from the thoroughly corrupt city of Chicago, was the real triumph of the Left. Managed by red-diaper babies and schooled in the carrot-and-stick arts of political intimidation, Obama blurred ethnic and regional differences, nationalized issues like “health care,” and proclaimed himself not just the president of the United States but a citizen-politician of the world.

And here we are now: less a federal republic than an imperial capital sucking the life and tax dollars out of 50 non-sovereign satellites, about half of which are Democrat satrapies that support ever-more-centralized government and ever-less state and individual liberty. They won’t rest until all the borders of the United States—not just the international borders, but the borders between and among the states themselves—are erased, and they can rule a captive nation directly from Washington, D.C. via the White House alone.

Trump for Vice President

So, to echo Lenin one more time: What is to be done? The fleeting, constantly besieged presidency of Donald J. Trump demonstrated that there is still substantial conservative opposition to the Democrats’ drive to “re-imagine” the old slogan of E Pluribus Unum from meaning a melting pot to a Stalinist conformity that erased all previous distinctions.

Thus, the last two presidential elections have been decided, narrowly, at the margins. With the country now divided into two camps (one self-armed, the other in control of the military at the moment), a handful of “swing” states determines the outcome in the Electoral College. And as 2020 shows, the Democrats only have to win control of the levers of power by the slimmest of margins in order to bring the hammer down on their domestic enemies.

So now that the United States of America has become an all-the-marbles country, with presidents ruling by decree in the fashion of the Roman emperors, contemptuous of Congress at least until next year, and disdainful of the federal courts… what is to be done in 2024?

Before you scoff, think about it. Donald Agonistes is the movie we don’t want to see again. A second Trump candidacy would be subject to even more of a Leftist assault on the nation’s traditions and institutions and push the country ever closer to civil strife.

If you thought the Democrat-Media Complex had plumbed new depths of dishonesty and animosity in 2020, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Further, there is the question of whether a declawed Trump really has learned anything in matters of personnel and, more important, self-restraint. With the future of the country riding on the outcome, is Trump really the best possible candidate?

The rational, unemotional answer is no. And whether he would accept it is irrelevant to the purposes of this discussion. In April of 2020, I wrote in the New York Post that Michelle Obama would have been the perfect veep choice for Biden, advice he luckily chose to ignore. The next Republican presidential candidate shouldn’t.

Trump as veep is a whole different story than Trump as Grover Cleveland Redux. For one thing, he’d be the first vice-presidential candidate in history who could bring 70 million votes with him on day one of the campaign. For another, he’d suddenly become Trump Unchained, free to stomp around the country like Godzilla, flame-throwing his enemies and stomping their cities into matchsticks. In massive rallies, he could whip up his followers to furies of vengeance, terrify the bed-wetters at the New York Times and plainly demonstrate his and his followers’ resolve to expose the irregularities of 2020 and put it front and center whether the media likes it or not.

It’s the perfect solution. Trump’s thirst for revenge could finally be slaked, his voters assured that there will be a day of reckoning. Since the veep has almost no Constitutional power, the Democrats would be hard-pressed to argue that the Donald, his residence now declared in New York or New Jersey to get around the Constitutional provision that candidates for president and veep be from different states, would be a threat to the Republic.

But at the same time, they’d know he’d have the new president’s ear, have his own bully pulpit, and carte blanche to make Leftist lives as miserable as possible. Best of all, the prospect of Trump’s becoming president if anything should happen to the new guy would ensure any talk of instant impeachment would be stifled in its cradle.

DeSantis for President

And so, as President Ronald Dion DeSantis—a champion of the Tenth Amendment and an exemplary governor of Florida—is sworn in on Jan. 20, 2025, all 50 states would understand that federalism is back, neo-Marxism has been repudiated, rule by decree is over, the phantom menace of Covid and its ilk is defeated, China is on notice, and our great experiment in representative democracy is once again back on course.

What’s not to like?

This is the last article in a series. The previous articles may be read here, here, here, here, and here.

Michael Walsh is the editor of The-Pipeline.org and the author of “The Devil’s Pleasure Palace” and “The Fiery Angel,” both published by Encounter Books. His latest book, “Last Stands,” a cultural study of military history from the Greeks to the Korean War, was recently published.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.