Improbable things

How could we possibly have known? In all the hurly-burly of the political campaign just behind us, how could we possibly have predicted the fallout with any accuracy? Our focus for the past 18 months had been on that inexplicable man with orange hair—the one who was going to go nowhere politically and who probably would pull down the whole Republican Party with him. The side effects, we were told, would be catastrophic and terrifying.

So what are the initial indicators of all those dire consequences?

Start, if you will, on election night. Especially if you were inclined to think, as so many of us were, that Trump was headed for a big defeat, it was dizzying to ponder what it might be like in the months ahead with Donald Trump as occupant-in-chief of the White House. And he was getting there not just by the skin of his teeth. The bizarre election cycle was boosting the new president into a posture of enormous advantage—with a comfortable margin in the House and a majority in the Senate. The very electoral levers so many pundits had predicted he would destroy were tilting now to his advantage. He was winning the election by spreading red all over the least likely states—like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

On several crucial fronts, the civic wreckage predicted by so many simply hasn’t occurred.

OK. But what about the practical issues of forming a government? How would such a volatile personality ever attract a cadre of thoughtful visionaries and competent managers to fill out a respectable Cabinet? Well, we’d already been given a hint back in the summer when he’d picked Mike Pence as his vice presidential running mate. High grades came from almost every quarter. Similarly with his selection of Kellyanne Conway to lead his campaign—although that one came after a couple of false starts. “He really knows how to pick them,” a Trump skeptic told me grudgingly, and without sarcasm, in the early days of Cabinet announcements. Indeed, the lightweight wackos that some had predicted simply didn’t show up. And if several of the appointees—like Betsy DeVos as secretary of education and Tom Price as head of the Department of Health and Human Services—had a distinct ideological flavor, they also brought with them undeniable leadership and managerial records. And the ideological tilt seemed a fitting response to a government that for eight years had leaned radically to the left.

Oh, yes. The stock market responded optimistically, scorning high-sourced predictions in recent months that the economy was wary of a Trump administration.

All this, keep in mind, has come weeks before what many voters and observers consider the biggest test of all. That will come sometime in January when the new president, properly sworn in, fills the yawning vacancy on the Supreme Court. For millions of voters, that’s almost totally what the recent election was all about. I could point right now to several dozen personal friends who told me during the campaign that their only meaningful consideration was the hundreds of thousands of babies whose lives were at stake if abortion were not challenged. But this was no one-sided argument. It took nothing more than a glimpse at Planned Parenthood’s TV commercials to see that abortion’s defenders were just as adamant about the importance of Supreme Court appointments.

So on several crucial fronts, the civic wreckage predicted by so many simply hasn’t occurred. Instead of being clobbered at the polls, Trump appears actually to have buoyed his Republican allies. Instead of populating his Cabinet with weirdos, he has assembled a Cabinet likely to have been applauded in any other presidential cycle. The stock market, and a few other indicators, are headed up.

I’m not sure what I’d do right now if I had been a die-hard NeverTrumper prior to the election. For starters, I’d drop to my knees and thank a sovereign God that He has spared us, at least until now, from the worst possibilities. Then I would remind myself, and everyone within shouting distance, that that same God is altogether capable of doing improbable things.

So aren’t you glad, for the most part, about where we are right now? But don’t you wish the path it’s taken to get us here hadn’t been so messy?

Email jbelz@wng.org