It’s not enough to win the next election, say the Democrats.  They have to win the one they just lost.  As irrational as that sounds, it has been their strategy since 2016, by means legal and otherwise.  Every day that President Trump presides over the republic is a day that Democrats lose money, influence, and the prospect of ever achieving permanent power.  That fact makes them desperate to execute, in effect, a coup d’état, or something close enough to it, to enable them to recover from the train wreck their party has become.  They believe that they cannot wait another three and a half years.

Amid all this drama, there is one fact that many Americans are failing to detect.  There has been a sea change.  There has been a metamorphosis from the republic we once were, to a de facto monarchy.  It began with Obama’s second term, but America’s Trojan gates were flung wide open during Biden’s term.  Therefore, in typical projectionist fashion, the Democrats accuse Trump of trying to be a king, but if he were ever to become one (he won’t), it would be because his enemies have left him little choice but to seize from them the power that they have abused.

In that light, the mess from which Trump saved us bears review.  By the end of 2024, the American republic was on its last legs.  We no longer had a real president; we had a secretive cabal, an oligarchy, of self-interested kleptocrats, mingled with a few extremist ideologues, illegally making life-or-death decisions for the nation — unauthorized decisions that could easily have led to a collapse of the economy or even a world war.  Even those of us (and there were millions) who sensed that the internal rot within government was a clear and present danger did not fully appreciate just how dire the situation had become.  Director Gabbard recently produced the proof of what we already suspected.

Had Democrats succeeded in installing Kamala in the Oval Office, we would by now be living in a nightmare of endless, overwhelming invasion, spending, and corruption.

Here’s the part that few understand.  Although President Trump is the singular historical figure who rescued us from impending disaster, we should never have needed him.  We should not be hoping that the next king will be a good one.  What Trump is doing now should have been done by Congress and by the fifty state legislatures all along.  That’s what a republic is: a government by the governed — a system of self-government.  We are not that, but we can be once again.

We were taught in school that the main problem with monarchies is that even a good king can be succeeded by a bad one. 

As pleased as we are with the performance of President Trump, we have to ask, after he leaves office, can anyone replace him?  True, there is a deep bench of capable, committed patriots from which to choose in the next election, but again, we should not need to rely upon a superhero to descend from a golden staircase.  We should not depend on someone with the wealth of a billionaire, the endurance of a marathon runner, and the courage of the Spartans at Thermopylae to do for us what we, through our elected representatives, must do for ourselves.

The Founders envisioned a republic populated by an engaged citizenry armed with guns, with information, and with fervent patriotism.  All three of those are sadly deficient in the portion of our electorate who oppose President Trump. 

There is no quick fix to any of this.  We need every conservative citizen to recognize that our future hope is not in a mortal king, for we are all imperfect.  The genius of the Constitution is that by diluting power, and balancing powerful institutions against one another, so also is the influence of evil among us thereby reduced. 

Under the former, unconstitutional oligarchy, evil ran rampant.

To prevent that in the future, it is vital that we do more than praise Trump.  We must enter politics, beginning at the level of school boards, precinct captains, and political action committees.  We must confront the left, and do so publicly — not in protest marches, but by participating in the processes of government, infiltrating as it were.  It seems a small point, but I have read anecdotal comments by leftists who are pleasantly surprised that once they get to know us, they find that we are decent folk after all.  There needs to be more of that.  Involvement is key.

At the moment, slightly more than six months into Trump’s presidency, we must support him and his team of patriots — but we must remember that it is our responsibility to govern ourselves.  “We the people” must mean something.  The four years of Trump’s term will fly by, and although we must replace him with yet another stalwart patriot, nobody can replace us.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.