Hail Trump: A Year Later

Hail Trump was a year ago.

It has also been a year since the beginning of the Twitter purge of the Alt-Right, Donald Trump’s disavowal of the Alt-Right and the beginning of the public feud with the Alt-Lite. This moment was the peak of the Alt-Right’s relationship with Trump.

At the time, I believed that the attacks on Richard Spencer were exaggerated. A year later, I still believe that. It was the first clear sign that the Trump administration and the Alt-Lite were going in one direction and the Alt-Right was going in another. The Alt-Right was going to remain an explicitly racial movement. It wasn’t going to be marshalled into a Trump cheerleading squad.

By the beginning of 2017, it was clear that the Overton Window had shifted. The fight over the Deploraball had shown that the new line in the Trump administration was going to be homosexuals are in and racists are out. This had been telegraphed throughout the campaign with the repeated disavowals of White Nationalists in contrast to the warm embrace of homosexuals.

I still don’t believe that the Hail Trump moment had anything to do with this. Instead, I think it reflects a deep ideological difference between civic nationalism and racial nationalism. A year of fighting with the Alt-Lite has revealed that it is fundamentally nothing more than warmed over conservatism and libertarianism. It is the same old conservatism with better marketing on social media. These people are vultures who steal our content and attempt to monetize and channel our energies.

I began to smell a rat around the same time last November. As I recall, the first sign was the news that Anthony Scaramucci was part of the Trump transition team, but I became truly alarmed when Gary Cohn was selected to head the National Economic Council. We would later learn this was the beginning of the emergence of the Jared Kushner faction. The Cabinet picks were announced and it was a full slate of CEOs, generals, big donors, establishment hacks and conservative throwbacks. In particular, the choice of Andrew Puzder for Labor Secretary (he was never confirmed) didn’t sit right with me. The staffing of the Trump administration for smaller positions skewed even more one sided.

The Trump administration was Donald Trump’s creation. President Trump surrounded himself with family, with “winners” and people he perceived as being useful like Mitch McConnell’s wife. It is clear the man isn’t an ideologue and didn’t give much thought to detail. He delegated those tasks to others and most of those people were members of the corporate and political establishment he had ostensibly overthrown in the 2016 election. It was Reince Preibus’s idea to do healthcare reform.

Before Trump was even sworn into office in January, we knew that all of 2017 would be squandered on pushing the Ryan agenda of healthcare and tax cuts:

1/ Paul Ryan’s agenda is same old conservatism: repeal Obamacare, tax cuts, deregulate Wall Street, condemn UN for being too hard on Israel

— Hunter Wallace (@occdissent) January 2, 2017

2/ Ryan and McConnell want to pass new sanctions on Russia w/ McCain and Graham. Also want to pass REINS for Chamber of Commerce

— Hunter Wallace (@occdissent) January 2, 2017

3/ Funny how Breitbart has nothing to say about Paul Ryan and McConnell railroading their own agenda through Congress

— Hunter Wallace (@occdissent) January 2, 2017

4/ It’s all the same stuff that President Mitt Romney would have signed. Reward huge corporations by catering to their interests

— Hunter Wallace (@occdissent) January 2, 2017

5/ Trump’s crowds screamed BUILD THE WALL and LOCK HER UP. Paul Ryan must have heard TAX CUTS and REINS Act

— Hunter Wallace (@occdissent) January 2, 2017

6/ Ryan and McConnell want to use the first 100 days to pass a bunch of stuff dreamed up by conservative think tanks

— Hunter Wallace (@occdissent) January 2, 2017

7/ What happened to BUILD THE WALL? Maybe we will get to that in 2020 after plunging into a healthcare fight like Obama did in 2008

— Hunter Wallace (@occdissent) January 2, 2017

8/ Anyone else have deja vu? The big tax cut was the first item on W.’s legislative agenda, too

— Hunter Wallace (@occdissent) January 2, 2017

9/ So far, I haven’t seen anything from Congress except big plans to do what Republicans always do

— Hunter Wallace (@occdissent) January 2, 2017

10/ How did we go from BUILD THE WALL to UNSHACKLE WALL STREET?

— Hunter Wallace (@occdissent) January 2, 2017

This was waved away at the time as “you’re black-pilling me, bro.”

In hindsight, a number of factors produced the year that has since passed: Trump’s lack of an ideological core, nepotism and delegation of power, his instincts as a New York social liberal, the “winners” he surrounded himself with in the Cabinet, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and the True Conservatives on Capitol Hill and the intensity of the Democratic resistance. The “nationalist-populist revolution” lasted for about a month, faded and ended when Steve Bannon was fired in August.

It has come to this:

“Transgender Day of Remembrance” #MAGAhttps://t.co/QI3vPsCmST pic.twitter.com/BiVlyi2Vvx

— Hunter Wallace (@occdissent) November 21, 2017

And this:

Earlier today, @EliMosleyIE represented us at NPI’s Winter Conference. pic.twitter.com/LKlj1sncpC

— IDENTITY EVROPA DC (@TheDistrictIE) November 20, 2017

These two images juxtaposed side by side tell us something important about the Trump administration. Candidate Trump was very useful for us. President Trump not so much.