James Piereson: Trump will win by six points and both houses of Congress

 

Notwithstanding the euphoria today, Trump will win the election by six points—forty-nine to forty-three percent—winning 339 electoral votes, including all of the so-called swing states, plus the Democratic-leaning states of Virginia, Minnesota, and New Hampshire.  Republicans will pick up three or four seats in the Senate and perhaps twenty seats in the House, giving them safe majorities in both chambers. This will give Trump the margins he needs to implement a good piece of his agenda in 2025 and 2026.

For The New Criterion here.

The best thing about James Piereson's review of Jacob Heilbrunn's book attacking Trump is that Heilbrunn was instrumental in elevating Trump in the first place

Here:

It is strange, then, in light of this background, for Heilbrunn to waste reams of paper attacking conservatives for supporting Donald Trump and his ideas about Russia, when he was as instrumental as anyone in promoting them. There were few conservatives in Trump’s corner at that time; indeed, most supported Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, or Jeb Bush while keeping a safe distance from a candidate whom they judged to be incapable of winning a national election and whose views on foreign policy they generally rejected. Yet there was Heilbrunn, providing a platform for Trump’s speech while sitting attentively nearby as he delivered it.

Roger Kimball doesn't believe in freedom of speech anymore than anyone else

Here, in The New Criterion:

'As for the herds of “Je Suis Charlie” marchers in Paris and elsewhere, it is worth noting how very few actual “Charlies” there were. It is one thing to carry a placard. It is another to take a stand by, for example, publishing a caricature of Mohammed.'

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You see, by Roger Kimball's standard, unless I myself engage in a certain form of speech of which he approves, nay requires, I am an enemy of the West and all it stands for. It's not enough that I subscribe to the principle that one has a right to say or publish anything. Unless I actively read it and publish it myself I am not worthy. Kimball's world has no room in it for people who censor themselves out of religious and moral principle, who believe that without such principles there can be no civilization to begin with. Instead I must become a pornographer, I must become a blasphemer, I must join The Party.

Totalitarian ideology never looked so familiar.