How the ‘Red Wave’ Died on the Vine

Read Time: 4 Minutes

The Trump phenomenon in 2016 “really wasn’t about Trump himself,” writes Salena Zito in the Washington Examiner, “[but] mostly about the conservative populist movement to let people know they were not going anywhere.”

The movement was a counteraction to Barack Obama’s snooty elitism over the eight years of his leadership and his loutish slight that conservatives “cling to guns or religion.” Not to be outdone, Hillary Clinton poured fuel on the fire right before the 2016 election with her peremptory ‘deplorables’ declamation.

Dr. Scott H. Huffmon, the Executive Director of the Center for Public Opinion & Policy Research at Winthrop University, argued in 2018 that polling showed that half of evangelicals would not describe President Trump as the paradigm of piety or virtue, but that his appeal came from being viewed as a bulwark against an increasingly hostile and autocratic secular state. In other words, Trump was simply the card-carrying messenger in 2016.

Unfortunately for the former president, with the injustices contrived by the Deep State, media kingpins, sectarian big government bureaucrats and Republican in-name-only functionaries, he forgot what brought him to the dance. His vision of making America as a nation great again has been put on the sidelines, while the mission and the message are now subordinate to personal grievances and self-importance.

On Nov. 8, Ms. Zito continues, “A lot of [people] stayed home last Tuesday because of [Trump’s] decision to make the midterm election results all about him.” Alternatively, we might point out that the FBI’s raid on the former president’s home on Monday, Aug. 8, was a strategic maneuver intended to put him front and center in the midterm elections. Regardless, “the red wave died on the vine.”

President Donald J. Trump’s initial strength during his reign came from him standing up for and with the people of America. Specifically, the rescinding of the Johnson Amendment in 2016 [the pastor muzzle act], his Poland speech in July 2017—”The people of Poland, the people of America and the people of Europe still cry out ‘We want God.'”—his blue-collar patriotism, his fight to place constitutional traditionalists on the U.S. Supreme Court and U.S. Courts of Appeals and his strenuous efforts to bring big government and dark state bureaucrats to heel.

Unfortunately, the former president’s penchant for settling political scores and his compulsion to keep the spotlight upon himself have both become threadbare and trite. His refusal to stay off Twitter and remain unseen at Mar-a-Lago in Jan. 2021 cost Republicans both Senate seats in the Georgia runoff … and catapulted Chuck Schumer into the position of U.S. Senate Majority Leader.

William P. Barr (born 1950) served as U.S. Attorney General in the Trump Administration. He divulged his preference for anybody but Trump in 2024 in a recent New York Post article, asserting that “Trump threatens to burn down the GOP, it’s time to move on.”

“For many, supporting Trump (in 2015-2016) was an act of defiance—a protest,” he wrote. “The more over the top he was, the more they savored the horrified reaction of the elites, especially the media.

“It is painfully clear from his track record in both the 2020 election and the 2022 midterms that Donald Trump is neither capable of forging this winning coalition [nor] delivering the decisive and durable victory required.”

Mike Davis, former Chief Counsel for Nominations to Senate Judiciary Chairman and Law Clerk to Justice Gorsuch, puts things in context: “For six months, Attorney General Bill Barr allowed BLM and Antifa to go to war against the good men and women who serve as police officers, kill dozens, [causing] billions in damage, destroy the Portland Federal Courthouse nightly, attack the White House and destroy American cities.”

Here is the gist: All men—including both the writer and the reader, and Trump as well as Barr—have clay feet.

In his classic “The Life of David,” A.W. Pink comments: “Corrupt nature thirsts for retaliation, and has a strong inclination that way; but grace should check it. Men think it a base thing to put up with wrongs and injuries; but this it is which gives a man a victory over himself, and the truest victory over his enemy, when he forbears to revenge.

“When the soul is out of touch with God, when fellowship with Him has been broken by giving way to the lusts of the flesh, the judgment is dulled and imprudent conduct is sure to be the effect.”

As it says in Proverbs 13:10 (NIV) : “Where there is strife, there is pride, but wisdom is found in those who take advice.”

Twenty years ago, upon the prospect of running into an antagonist that had defrauded us, I said to former Ohio Congressman Bob McEwen, “I’m just not sure what I’ll do.” Bob replied: “You know what Ronald Reagan’s strength was? He was bigger than the process. He could go to war with Tip O’Neill and Congress and then sit down and have a beer afterward. Reagan was bigger than the process, and Tip O’Neill knew it.”

We pray that God will raise another Ronald Reagan.

Last week we received a text from newly elected NC State Representative pastor Neal Jackson, of Beulah Baptist Church in Bennett, North Carolina: “Met for the first time tonight with our freshman class of 13 for the North Carolina Legislature of which three of us are pastors—American Renewal is making a difference.”

Gideon’s and Rahab’s are beginning to stand. {eoa}

David Lane is the founder of the American Renewal Project.

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