Stein’s Law holds that “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” We don’t know what the era of Trump will mean but the status quo was stifling for too many Americans and it will no longer go on.
It’s easier to discuss what a Clinton victory could have meant: four more years of lagging economic growth, bad regulatory policy, union-dominated public education, a misguided and interventionist foreign policy. And, with Clinton, four years of abject political corruption because that is who she and her husband are and always have been.
With Trump, we’re already seeing a market meltdown [well, that didn’t last very long; back up by Wednesday afternoon!]. Trade will suffer, and that will be bad. But the hope is that saner regulatory and tax policy will again unleash America’s entrepreneurial spirit.
For the record, I voted for Gary Johnson despite some policy disagreements and with regret that his running mate went renegade. It was a message that both parties had nominated unacceptable choices. Nevertheless, I think Clinton would have been at least as bad or worse for the country than Trump, although she’d be better on LGBT issues. But by “better,” I also mean more likely to stoke the culture wars by using the regulatory state to force small business owners to provide expressive services to same-sex weddings in violation of their religious convictions, which is something I adamantly oppose and believe will eventually be viewed as a stain on the gay rights movement.
As for judges, Clinton’s left-liberal big-government advocates would have been worse for the country than Trump’s conservatives—and the idea that Trump’s justices would overturn marriage equality was far-fetched at best. He is not, and never has been, a social conservative and while his initial Supreme Court appointment will probably be in the Scalia mode (because the late justice’s textualist perspective deserves to be represented in court deliberations), there were also names on Trump’s prospective list of future judicial appointments that lean libertarian.
Of course, there’s the larger issue: The white lower-middle and working classes have been through the wringer not only economically but as the object of left-progressive contempt, whether they were denigrated for clinging to their guns and religion, or dismissed as despicable and irredeemable for rejecting the tenets of big government progressivism and the rule of the bureaucrat kings. If your party keeps kicking half of the population in the shins, eventually that half is going to take control. That’s now happened.
More. The LGBT and liberal mainstream media did a good job of promoting the “Trump is anti-gay” meme. NBC’s exit polling shows that Trump got 14% of self-identified LGBT votes, down from Romney’s 22 percent in 2012—and Romney supported amending the U.S. Constitution to block marriage equality (which Trump, by the way, does not).
As NBC (now) reports, “Clinton’s strong support among LGBT people comes in spite of Trump’s direct attempt to court the group this year with targeted appeals in speeches and even campaign merchandise, an unprecedented move for a GOP presidential candidate.” But those efforts went mostly unreported by the LGBT and mainstream media while the campaign was underway.
