No Circular Firing Squads This Time, Republicans

We’re starting to see the results of the November election in a variety of ways, both within our movement and among the enemy. Look, folks, we’re dealing with human beings. That means we’re dealing with human nature. And human nature never changes. We’re just as susceptible to its vagaries on the right as they are on the left. That means we’re going to fight among ourselves within the newly formed Trump coalition. That means people on our side are going to jockey for power, positions, prestige, and, of course, money. As far as the other side, despite the fact they are alien lizard people, they’re going to do what human beings tend to do. They will retreat to doing what’s comfortable, even if it isn’t the most effective tactic. We need to take advantage of that.

Human nature could end up handicapping us. Human nature could also end up handing us victories. We’ve got to be smart. We’ve got to be objective. We’ve got to think through what we’re doing to minimize our internal conflict and maximize the chaos on the other side. Are we doing that? The wackiness about the continuing resolution last week was an example of what we face. On our side, we have a very narrow majority which empowers dissenting individuals far out of proportion to their numbers. We’re also trying to navigate the reality that this is Donald Trump’s party and not the same GOP we grew up in. He’s the loudest voice, but he’s not the absolute dictator. There are incentives and rewards both for following him and defying him – as well as risks. How we manage our new coalition is the question. Our new coalition is not just conservatives. We conservatives make up a big chunk of it, but it’s also populists, anti-war folks who reject the old foreign policy consensus, as well as RFK granola/crunchy Make America Healthy Again types. Organized labor has an unprecedented presence too. Our Trump coalition is a new thing, a potentially unstable thing. We’re going to have growing pains.

This new coalition is unstable both because of competing interests and the fact that it hasn’t yet developed the institutional structures that minimize the disruption caused by internal disagreements. Let’s look at what happened with the continuing resolution. At one time, the Republicans were supposedly the budget-cutting party. They were the fiscal sanity folks, the deficit hawks. There’s still that faction in our coalition. But there’s another part of our coalition that really doesn’t care about debt that much. Donald Trump did not come into office as a budget cutter. Though he wants to see DOGE streamline the government and cut regulations, he did not get elected by promising to take a meat cleaver to America’s finances. In fact, he took entitlements like Social Security, Medicare, and all the rest, which are the majority of our spending, completely off the table. So, you can see the problem. We’ve got both budget hawks and budget doves inside our tent. And that conflict has to be resolved.

Now, there’s a tendency on the part of some Republicans within the coalition to go nuclear immediately to try to force unity. Sometimes, you’ve got to go nuclear. The ridiculous opposition to Donald Trump’s nominees like Pete Hegseth was worth pushing the button on, and I don’t have a problem with putting some heads on pikes at primary time when politicians decide to put their own personal interest above what we elected them to do. For their part, some in Congress have been absolutely outraged that normal people didn’t immediately forget about politics on November 6th and kept paying attention. And boy, have we been paying attention. Thanks to Elon Musk and X, we can maintain a level of interest in, and expose, what they’re doing. The big example is Joni Ernst and her posturing against Pete Hegseth that drew attention to her, and people dug into her record only to find out she was a hell of a lot squishier than we ever imagined. She’s come around, understanding there’s a primary ahead if she doesn’t conform. 

But that’s neither necessary nor necessarily wise to do every time you have an internal disagreement. Getting mad at Republican congressmen because they want to read a bill before they vote on it is counterproductive. Mike Johnson has certainly not earned that level of trust – Trump himself didn’t trust him and rejected his first CR proposal. Look, when you’re to the point of considering Chip Roy the enemy, you are losing the plot a little bit. And if you’re demanding that everybody be 100% MAGA, there’s a problem – the coalition isn’t 100% MAGA. It’s not 100% anything. The American First folks, who I identify with, are not the only faction in this coalition and they don’t make up a majority of the American people. I wish they did. They might yet if these people can get the hell together and pound out a single reconciliation bill that will square away the budget and tax issues so we can get the economy going and prove to America that America First has the keys to prosperity. 

But that’s the thing. The various factions of our new coalition must work together, and that is a challenge. Everybody’s got their own interests, and human nature teaches us that people will pursue their own interests. When you don’t have a big majority, a few folks who won’t play nicely can disrupt everything. Every once in a while, you get someone who is unreasonable and insane. You can’t deal with him/her. But most people you can deal with. You have to deal with them. And that’s what we need to be doing. We don’t need to form a circular firing squad every time somebody advocates a different tactic. We’ve got to be objective. We’ve got to control our tempers. We’ve got to be focused on results.

In that way, we’re ahead of our opponents. The Democrats have managed to learn absolutely nothing from November 5th except the lesson that America is much, much more racist than they thought. Good, go with that, guys. They have no new ideas – they keep trying to stick the square pegs of their current ideology into the round holes of the political zeitgeist. You can see it happening as they repeat stuff straight out of 1996. Oh, the Republicans want to cut taxes to reward billionaires! Never mind that they’re spazzing out because we’ve now got two billionaires compared to their dozens. 

And then there’s their hack CR responses. The Republicans want to stop child cancer research! Just ignore that congressional pay raise and all that woke crap behind the curtain. This doesn’t work when the regime media is not our sole source of information because they can’t count on the regime media to hide the truth. That’s why they hate Elon Musk. That’s why they are trying to use Alinsky Rule No. 13 (“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”) against him. Last week, it was “Trump is Hitler.” Now it’s “Elon Musk is the real president.” Blah blah blah blah blah. No one believes that, no one buys it. It’s not going to work. They’re shouting, and nobody’s listening.

Hell, nobody even cared about the CR except those of us on Twitter. In fact, all this stuff about who’s got political capital and who doesn’t because of the wrangling around the government shutdown is a boutique concern. Normal people don’t care. We care. We’re patriots. People in Washington care. They’re social parasites. But it really doesn’t mean anything. The only thing that means anything is macro results, which we must focus on. Donald Trump has got to get this economy going. To do that, he’s got to get his coalition to pull together on the things they can agree about and get them passed in a single reconciliation bill soon after he comes into the office. There’s a place for carrots, and there’s a place for sticks, too, but this is coalition politics. That means we must figure out a way to work together. Luckily, we’ve got opponents who refuse to learn from their mistakes. We just have to not help them out by unnecessarily fighting among ourselves.

Follow Kurt on Twitter @KurtSchlichter. Get the newest volume in the Kelly Turnbull People’s Republic series of conservative action novels set in America after a notional national divorce, the bestselling Amazon #1 Military Thriller, Overlord! And get his new novel about terrorism in America, The Attack!

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