They're Going To Let Trump Win

Fighting The Last War

There's a common fear on the right that despite Trump's current lead in the polls, the Democrats are going to find a way to pull the rug out from under him in November. 

As our friend Kevin Dolan points out in the post he was kind enough to let us share below though, there are a number of reasons why the 2024 election is not going to be a repeat of the 2024 one. 

They're Going To Let Trump Win

We’re all bracing for craziness during the 2024 election. Nobody’s quite ready to give it a shape or a name to their expectations, but we have all agreed it will be “crazy”.

So let’s nail it down. Are you expecting a civil war? A “color revolution”? Another steal?

I suspect the reason we are all gesturing vaguely at “things getting spicy” is that none of the concrete theories for exactly how it will get spicy make much sense.

We’re just absolutely sure that he’s going to win the election fair-and-square, but “they’re not going to let him win”, so it must inevitably get “spicy” and “froggy” and “kinetic”, somehow.

But I actually think they’ll probably just let him win.

Civil War?

The Russian Civil War was preceded by fifty years of bombings, assassinations, repression, famine, and two consecutive military defeats.

“Weimar solutions” only came after fifteen years of Weimar problems, including street battles between hardened WWI veterans that left dozens dead every few months.

It’s true that we are headed for hyperinflation — but in Germany, hyperinflation had come and gone by 1923. Millions were wiped out, and the Weimar government limped along for another decade thereafter.

The American Civil War didn’t start at Fort Sumter; it was the culmination of a decade of paramilitary violence with a death toll in the hundreds.

Here in 2024, the last leftist who suggested that his comrades arm themselves to prepare for physical violence got shouted down for being ableist by hundreds of mentally ill commies who said they would immediately off themselves if they had access to a gun. (Post the link if you have it, it was priceless and I can’t find it.)

Fantasy / Reality

Even when they aren’t morbidly obese and hormonally incapacitated, people don’t just form death squads from a cold start. There is simply no political development, no revelation, no economic catastrophe that gets us from our present comfortable state to a shooting war in the next eight months.

Color Revolution?

People often suggest that “the CIA” will simply “do a color revolution” on Trump. But the playbook for a color revolution involves accusing the existing regime of rigging the election and stoking popular anger against government abuses and corruption.

Then, you storm the hall of parliament or congress and “nonviolently” demand the resignation of the illegitimate government, or a repeat of the vote.

Which is to say: January 6 was a textbook color revolution, and it failed.

But Trump isn’t in control of the government, and never was — and the actual government has spent the last 4 years banging the drum that American elections are unriggable.

“People like that re-form… say, maybe we should get us some”

There can be no situation in which Trump assumes control of the government under questionable circumstances, because unlike Yanukovich or Shevardnadze, he has no access to the practical levers of power that would permit him to do that. He will either win unambiguously, or not at all.

Biden was a weak candidate in 2020, but it was easy to connect the chaos of the Floyd riots and COVID to Trump’s chaotic and disruptive personal style in ordinary voters’ minds.

By comparison, Biden looked like “a return to normalcy”, which appealed even to many conservatives. But that promise evaporated — we got a disastrous retreat from Afghanistan, new wars in Gaza and Ukraine, a blockade in the Red Sea, and double-digit inflation.

The US intelligence services do not actually have infinite reality-warping narrative control. You can’t run re-form when you’re the damn incumbent.

Another Steal?

The 2020 election is another domain of folk political science where our guys are simply unwilling to admit any limitations whatsoever on the enemy’s power.

Most of the sane takes on the 2020 election don’t imply total control of the voting system. The election was “stolen” in the following ways:

• Changing rules governing mail-in ballots and expansion of deadlines made fraud harder to prove

• Democrat campaign workers went through nursing homes and housing projects gathering ballots and illegally filling them out for Biden

• News outlets and social media companies colluded with US intelligence services to suppress damaging stories about the Bidens and fabricate accusations against Trump

Many of you point to the brazenness of the intervention in 2020, and the stupidity of the justifications for it, as evidence of a kind of supreme Nietzschean self-confidence among our enemies.

I see the opposite:

If they could just add a zero to Biden’s vote count on the Dominion machine, all this scrambling and wriggling and lying would be unnecessary. They are showing you that their power has limits. There is a “margin of fraud”.

In the meantime, confidence in mass media is falling:

TV news viewership is falling:

The CIA and FBI no longer have a back channel to demand the censorship of politically inconvenient content on Twitter/X. Fox News has lost its monopoly on the boomercon viewer after firing Tucker Carlson.

The main lever of “the steal” in 2020 was not outright fraud — it was censorship and narrative manipulation. We live in a “media-managed democracy”, and the state has lost control of the media.

Ragequitting across the board

The weakness of our enemies’ position can be seen in all sorts of domains.

Instead of drumming up mobs and getting people fired on Twitter, they’re whining about how unfair it is and running off to ideological cul-de-sacs like right-wingers did in 2018.

In 2014, commies rampaged through the gaming industry and made everything hideous and boring; now they’re fuming impotently about how no one is buying, and threatening (?) to go back to prostitution.

They’re realizing they have no way of threatening naughty crypto gorillionaires, so they’re histrionically taking their ball and going home.

Again, these aren’t self-assured, battle-hardened Bolshevik gangsters and killers we’re dealing with. They’re targeting state enemies in performative, haphazard and counterproductive ways for personal career reasons — and it sucks for the person thus targeted, but it isn’t actually making the regime more powerful or demoralizing their enemies.

In the wake of Elon and Jamie Dimon’s public “coming out” in favor of Trump, it has become normal for famous faces in tech and finance to say on mainstream news that maybe Trump isn’t so bad and it would probably be OK to let him be president.

So what’s actually going to happen?

All of this talk about preparing for political violence and race riots is another case of conservatives gearing up to fight the last war. The enemy is good at creating chaos, but that won’t help them — their guy is in charge.

So they probably can’t beat Trump, and it doesn’t seem like they have the juice to try that hard.

The smart thing to do — which also happens to be the easiest thing for a massive faceless managerial state to do — is nothing.

Let Trump back in, and fight him on home turf — in the maze of the executive bureaucracy. Some of his backers have announced their intention to become politically competent in the event that he wins — but compared to the alternatives, that’s a very manageable risk.

More importantly: let Trump hold the bag for the all-but-guaranteed economic calamity of the next four years. The regime could skate for another decade if they succeed in pinning the collapse on a dangerous, erratic right-wing upstart.

How should we prepare?

If there is any uptick in violence to prepare for, it’s likely to be the low-grade violence of crime and immiseration, so the way to prepare is to secure assets that can’t be inflated away or digitally expropriated, and avoid jurisdictions where your rights to property and self-defense are unlikely to be respected.

Now is the time to get physically close to friends and family in a stable, politically-reliable jurisdiction, and trade your funny money and fake/subsidized/ZIRP income streams for productive assets in the real world.

Get started with us at exitgroup.us.

EXIT News:

• Our scouting trip in Texas has been a success — EXIT HQ is going up in the hill country between San Antonio and Austin.

• Tonight on our weekly full-group call we’re going to discuss various techbro experiments in getting likeminded people from distributed digital networks to come together in the real world.

• Last week on the full-group call, we did a brainstorm on how we might update the country-club model to connect values-aligned families. Goals:

  • Strong interest in co-working, with investments in shared capital equipment (local servers and GPUs, CNC machines, power tools, etc.)

  • Greater emphasis on fitness and nutrition, with a gym, clean food, saunas and plunge pools, etc.

  • Digital-free spaces with Faraday cages

  • A library of actual banned books

• We are looking for EXIT members to participate in a hot seat call. You bring your EXIT plan, and we select a panel of members with relevant experience to talk you through it in a private call. DM if interested.

• Seattle meetup (3/29) is this Friday. Cocktail hour meetup link is below the fold for subscribers, along with Austin (4/26), and Boston (5/24).; members-only invites coming via email.

In Case You Missed It

The performance of Portfolio Armor's top names and hedged portfolios has been on a tear over the last two months, as we noted in a post earlier this week, Hedging Doesn't Have To Be A Drag. 

If You Want To Stay In Touch

You can follow Kevin Dolan on X here, and subscribe to his EXIT newsletter below. 

You can scan for optimal hedges for individual securities, find our current top ten names, and create hedged portfolios on our website. You can also follow Portfolio Armor on X here, or become a free subscriber to our trading Substack using the link below (we're using that for our occasional emails now).