America is so back

The supplicants gather.

“Morning Joe” Scarborough and his wife Mika Brzezinski left off reviling Donald Trump and made the trek to Mar-a-Lago to seek the president-elect’s blessing. They wanted, Brzezinski said, to “restart communications”.

I wonder how that went down? Several years of spluttering epithets: “You’re like Hitler, you’re a fascist.” Then: “Can’t we please be friends?” 

Something like that, I imagine.

For his part, Trump was polite. “I very much appreciated the fact that they wanted to have open communication,” he told Fox News.

But the circling piranhas of the commentariat were quick to pounce. “Hypocrite,” suggested the once-funny Jon Stewart. Nikki Haley, hardly a Trump advocate herself, seethed that “Joe and Mika didn’t suddenly see the light, they saw their ratings. They realised they needed Trump for their survival.”

This may be true. But anyone who has followed Scarborough’s career knows that, when it comes to political colouration, he is eminently, er, pliable.

He was a conservative Congressman from 1995-2001. He called for the US to withdraw from the UN (still a very good idea). He condemned the Rev Al Sharpton for “racist and anti-Semitic” views. That was before he became pals with Sharpton and invited him on his show to talk politics.  

Scarborough is what you might call a “Whitmanian figure”. “Do I contradict myself?” old Walt asked in Leaves of Grass. “Very well, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.”

I predict that we are in for many such Whitmanian moments as the reality of Trump’s victory penetrates the collective consciousness of the punditocracy and their attendant political chihuahuas.  

Like Caesar after the battle of Pharsalus, Trump has been a model of magnanimity to former critics like Scarborough and Brzezinski. We’ll likely see a steelier side of his temperament after January 20 when his administration begins focusing on the people who weaponised those institutions charged with maintaining the rule of law. What Elon Musk calls the “hammer of justice” is hovering in the wings. It won’t be wielded by an Attorney General called Matt Gaetz. I am confident, though, that Pam Bondi will be Thor-like in dealing with the corruption and politicisation of the DOJ.

In any event, the procession of supplicants in which Scarborough and Brzezinski were marching is growing longer and more diverse. Yes, there are little eructations of protest as various “celebrities” threaten to leave the country and unhappy females with poor matrimonial prospects shave their heads and mope in the corner, alone.

But for reasons only the Zeitgeist can unravel, the serial revulsions against all things Trump, so common during his first term and through much of his 2024 presidential campaign, are more and more failing to get traction. The gears won’t mesh. The Rosie O’Donnells of the world cast their imprecations against the bad orange man into the air, but no one is listening.

It’s not only Trump. It is the mood of the nation. A couple of years ago, cynical politicians would drape themselves in Kente Cloth and kneel in homage to George Floyd. All across the fruited plain, athletes would “take a knee” when the national anthem played.

Perhaps that is still happening on isolated college campuses. But the new hotness is the “Trump dance,” which is on happy display in stadiums from New York to Los Angeles. “Donald Trump’s quirky dance moves on the campaign trail,” we read, “have become the latest celebration craze in sports.”

To the inattentive, the fad might seem epiphenomenal. I think it signals a shift in the national mood. It’s not just Trump. It’s the phalanx of normality, of common sense, of fiscal and policy sanity. It’s the return of prosperity, of a southern border, of men who are men and women who are women. The era of endless apology and fake accusations of racism is giving way to a new, healthier, more confident dispensation.

Roger Kimball is editor and publisher of The New Criterion and president and publisher of Encounter Books