Losing to Win

The writer is in Australia.

Longer term readers of the Speccie will recall that back in 2015 and 2016 I thought, and argued, that all conservative voters would do better to preference Labour rather than Malcolm Turnbull and the Libs in the 2016 election. In other words, I thought we had to lose short-term to win long-term. The win would come because a Turnbull loss (rather than the incredibly narrow win he squeaked out) would embarrass the partyroom ‘moderates’/Lefties who knifed Abbott; it would take power away from them in future; it would force Labour rather than the Libs to implement Lefty policies (because try to name a single Right-leaning thing that Team Turnbull did); and as it turned out we would not have had the ‘free speech never created a single job’ Morrison Prime Ministership that lied about intending to sign up to Net Zero and that oversaw the biggest inroads into Australians’ civil liberties ever during the shameful, thuggish Covid lockdowns brought to us in part by Team Coalition. I said it beforehand and I think it still. Long term a 2016 Turnbull loss was preferable. (And yes, our preferential voting system, a protection racket for the two main parties, means that we voters cannot do what dissidents do in Britain or Canada and vote for some small third party; we ultimately simply have to preference higher either Labour or the Libs and in 2016 I preferenced Labour just above the Libs at the bottom of the ballot – not that it got me all those university grants and awards and accolades other Lefty voting academics scoop up. On that point, why can’t the Libs end all social science and arts grants skewed incredibly to Left-wing thinking and totalling tens of millions of dollars as they have in New Zealand?)

But why do I bring up the decades-old past? Because it is now pretty clear that a variant of that ‘lose now to win later’ argument is playing out in the US. Let me be blunt. The first fortnight-plus of this second-term Donald Trump presidency is the best first two weeks or so of any US President in my life. And it’s not even close. The list of what he has done in just 300 odd hours is staggering. Trump has pulled out of the WHO. He’s pulled out of the Net Zero idiocies of the Paris Accord. He has pulled out of the awful United Nations Human Rights Council and ended all UNRWA funding. He has banished all men (who have taken drugs or had surgery and want to be seen as women) from playing women’s sports, while ending juvenile sex changes. He has offered re-instatement to all US military personnel who were dismissed for not taking the mRNA vaccines, and done so with the promise of full back pay. He has ordered the removal of all virtue-signalling ‘these are my pronouns’ guff in government emails. He has used the threat of massive tariffs and the appointment of serious top people who actually want to close the border to do just that – in a fortnight the border crossings have never been lower while the deportations have started and are at record levels. He has ended the EV taxpayer scam and the wasting of myriad money on charging stations. DEI is gone from the US bureaucracy and he has threatened any universities who keep it. He has unleashed Elon Musk on the bloated administrative bureaucracy and we have already learned of corrupt USAID spending on things so Left-wing and crazy and basically corrupt – I’m looking at you legacy media around the world – that even partisan Democrats are embarrassed to see this come to light. And Musk is finding so much waste Trump may manage to balance the budget on eliminating this revealed spending alone. He has reset the Middle East world. He has nominated real conservatives to all appointments – people he knows won’t go to water because they’ve been hated by the Left for years and have stood up to it (the sole basis for all conservative appointments Mr Dutton). He has threatened the International Criminal Court over its disgraceful persecution of the Israeli PM, with strong hints as regards what would happen to any country that acted on the ICC warrants. Already US military recruitment has bounced back to record levels (who knew recruits want to fight, not be part of a woke social justice outfit?)

Trust me. Space stops me from listing everything I like about these first couple dozen Trump days. Be honest. What in the above list do you not like? Be honest. Do you think any other conservative leader in the democratic world would have done half of this? Be honest. Do a few mean and boorish tweets outweigh these sort of accomplishments in just the first 300 hours of his second term? Right now I am liking, no loving, nine out of 10 things this Trump 2 administration is doing. This is a whole new political feeling for me.

However, here is my core claim in this column. If Mr Trump had not lost the Presidency in 2020 (no doubt due in large part to the loosest of voting rules in many states, often imposed by unelected state judges under cover of Covid, including world-unique third party ballot harvesting) then he would now be finished on his second term. And he would most certainly not have taken on the administrative state in the way he is now doing. He would not have plunged himself into a full-blooded fight to win the culture wars. He would not have unleashed Mr Musk. Etcetera. Etcetera. It would have been a good second term. But nothing like what we’re seeing. Why? Because just three months ago the US political establishment was still trying to bankrupt and imprison Donald Trump. The Biden administration was still trying to saddle US voters with Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. It was still weaponising the administrative state. It opened the borders deliberately. Donald Trump saw all this. He withstood it all, including two assassination attempts.

Look, unlike in 2016 with Turnbull, I wanted Trump to win in 2020. But with the benefit of hindsight it is now plain to me that his loss then allowed him to pull off the greatest comeback in US political history (we can argue about Andrew Jackson) and then to decide to implement policies many of us conservatives have been dreaming about for eons. He had to lose to create these sort of wins – wins that dwarf anything that the Stephen Harpers or John Howards accomplished (with all due respect). The Spectator Australia‘s Editor and I were two of the earliest pro-Trump supporters in print in this country. Not to blow our own horns too much but we were right. The establishment conservative commentators were wrong time and time again. But it boils down to Trump having to lose to now win.

James Allan is the Garrick Professor of Law at Queensland University. This article first appeared in Spectator Australia.