Trump gets it. We all need to get it.
We currently find ourselves in the Republican Party between a rock and a hard place. We want to be principled and stand our ground on many things, but we don’t have the luxury of getting everything we want in our current situation. That doesn’t mean we don’t fight hard for certain things, but we have to be realistic in our expectations of what can be done at the moment.
Example—Biden’s Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas was impeached in the House, but in the words of Senator Ron Johnson, “Senate Democrats abdicated their constitutional duty and did great harm to the U.S. Senate by cavalierly dismissing the serious charges against Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.”
The truth is we don’t have the presidency or the Senate right now. We have a slim (and shrinking) majority in the House—thank God we still (barely) have it. We don’t have the governorship, AG, or the Supreme Court in Wisconsin. The newly drawn (and highly gerrymandered) legislative maps have pit many Republican incumbents against each other and forced them to either move, retire, or run in a primary against one another, and we will lose seats in the legislature because of how the maps were drawn. For those who want to claim that Republicans are not much better than the Democrats—believe me, there are a lot of far-left policies being held back right now by Republicans having the majority in the Wisconsin legislature.
Conservatives are understandably frustrated. I’m angry with a lot of what I see happening in our country. But we cannot misdirect or mishandle our anger in a way that is destructive to our cause. We are limited in our options when it comes to governing and how we approach various issues, especially given the razor-thin majority in the House.
If elections didn’t have consequences, we wouldn’t fight so hard to win. We have less leverage right now than we would like. This doesn’t negate my frustrations with how some Republicans vote at times. But I’m trying to deal with reality.
When it comes to the Speaker of the House, can any of us honestly say that we are in a better situation today than we were with Kevin McCarthy as speaker? This is not a repudiation of Mike Johnson, and it would be incredibly foolish to try to remove him as speaker right now. Has anybody proposing removing Mike Johnson thought of what comes next?
Even if you don’t totally agree with Newt Gingrich here, he makes some solid arguments as a former Speaker for how some of this has been mishandled.
President Trump recognizes the reality of things and stands with the speaker and recently said of Mike Johnson, “It’s not an easy situation for any speaker. I think he’s doing a very good job. He’s doing about as good as you’re going to do.”
Trump gets it. We all need to get it. And I say this as someone who doesn’t agree with President Trump or any Republican on everything. I don’t have to agree with someone on everything in order to support them or appreciate the good things about them.
Despite all of the obstacles we face, I want to offer some hope. We had many successes in the Wisconsin spring election a few weeks ago. It’s important to point that out. The Republican Party put a lot of resources and effort into supporting local candidates, the ballot initiatives, and turnout for President Trump. We needed a successful election night overall and got it. You can read about the successes in the April 2nd election here.
We have also gained ground on election integrity in key swing states, including the two constitutional amendments that were recently approved by voters in Wisconsin.
The US Supreme Court has ruled many times the past few years in favor of our constitutional rights (thank you President Trump and Senate Republicans). The social media platform, X (formerly Twitter), is allowing free speech again under Elon Musk’s ownership and is no longer colluding with the government to help Democrats win.
Corruption is being exposed and more people are seeing the MSM for what it is—a propaganda machine for the left that isn’t concerned about telling the truth. Conservatives are creating more content through alternative news media and entertainment platforms. We are fighting back in schools and elsewhere against the woke agenda being pushed onto our children.
Minorities are shifting away from Democrats. According to the Epoch Times, “Over the past eight years, minority voters have slowly but steadily migrated away from associating themselves with the Democratic Party, a movement that appears to be led by men. An April poll from The Wall Street Journal shows that 30 percent of black men in battleground states intend to vote for former President Donald Trump.
So amidst the chaos and frustrations, there are some positive things to point to. The negative impact of Democrat rule/policies unfortunately have to hit a lot of people personally before enough people wake up. And people seem to be waking up. But it’s going to be a battle.
2024 shouldn’t be about who can yell the loudest or demand unrealistic outcomes in near impossible circumstances. This isn’t about getting every single thing we want right now. It’s about holding back the agenda of the left as best we can until we win back some levers of power. We can’t stop the agenda of the left if we don’t win more. We can’t win if we’re too divided or have unrealistic expectations of what can be done. It’s that simple.
We have a job to do, and part of that job is convincing the American people that the Democrats having too much power is causing inflation, the border crisis, foreign policy disasters, among other problems.
Whether it’s trying to remove Speaker Johnson, running primary opponents against every Republican who isn’t a perfect conservative, or constantly attacking one another within the party, we need to understand that doing those things undermines our ability to unite and win. Not every Republican is Liz Cheney if you disagree with them on something. Let’s keep our focus on defeating the Democrats so we can be in a better position to actually DO something about the problems facing America. We need to live to fight another day.
