Four Ways a Trump Presidency Could Make Us Happy

1. He won't create his media empire, which would've been a vermin-breeding cesspool in the American landscape for decades, pressured by media necessity to take the most extreme positions on everything. Instead, he'll be president for four years, with immense institutional pressure to moderate (it's an entirely different incentive structure). Trump's administration will most likely not normalize the extreme Alt Right folks who'd have been fueled by the media channel. They will recede rather than be further stoked.

2. He's a builder; that's his passion. And the nation grievously needs infrastructure improvements; the can's been kicked down the road since forever. A Democratic president would never get the funding, but a Republican maverick with lots of momentum and a stunned, scared Republican Congress pressured to go his way maybe can get it done.

3. Similarly, no Democrat could persuade Congress to make urgent, critical tweaks to the Affordable Care Act. Trump can - and it even looks like he may.

4. Many parties figure they'll manipulate Trump to advance their policy agendas (few of them good, from my perspective). But if he chooses to be moderate, these people won't budge him an inch, not even his freakish, appalling inner circle of scarecrows: Bannon, Gingrich, Giuliani, Flynn, etc. His stubbornness, in present circumstances, is a fantastic thing. It's possible (if he restrains many of the impulses we saw in the campaign) that we'll get a truly moderate conservative administration; something we haven't seen in ages. And if the entire time he's thinking to himself "I hate hate hate Mexicans," you know what? I don't give a crap. I just care how he rules, period. It's not like Nixon enacted anti-Jewish policies.


This all falls apart if we Obama him - if we subject him to four years of unceasing strident protest and attack even if he does his earnest best to be moderate and measured and be everyone's president. He is, by nature, unable to maintain a steady course through such treatment, as Obama so nobly has (shoot, I'm not sure you or I could!). See my next posting for more.