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This Thanksgiving we got a reminder of what might-have-been. And what we have been unburdened by.
We should be truly grateful.
For this was the week in which Kamala Harris broke her post-election silence. And I think anyone who saw it can agree: the vice president is not doing well.
In an almost 10-minute-long word salad, the former presidential candidate told her supporters such things as: “You have the same power that you did before November 5, and you have the same purpose that you did. And you have the same ability to engage and inspire, so don’t ever let anybody or any circumstance take your power from you.”
The only thing that made Harris’ message different from a late-night conversation with a very drunk friend was that at no point did Harris actually say “I love you guys” and then burst out weeping.
But it was a reminder of how close this country came to a decline that other countries are experiencing.
Back in my native Britain this past summer the public elected a Labour government that, like Kamala, doesn’t seem to have any idea of what it is doing. Or what it could do.
They are currently working out how to kill off the citizenry with euthanasia. But as for plans to grow the economy, secure the borders or improve living standards? Nope. Not an idea in sight.
Choosing well
By contrast, President-elect Donald Trump has already surrounded himself with a remarkable group of people who are at the forefront of the issues of our time.
Some of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s ideas may be a bit cranky. But nobody could say he isn’t onto something with his wish to make it easier for Americans to eat healthily.
He isn’t wrong when he highlights the billions spent by the fast food and sugary drinks industries to make Americans less healthy than they should be.
If RFK Jr. can be directed in these directions, there is a lot of good he could do.
It is the same with appointment after appointment. In 2020 the man nominated to head the National Institutes of Health — Jay Bhattacharya — was smeared and belittled by much of the media as well as members of the church of Anthony Fauci.
They dismissed the Stanford professor as a “fringe epidemiologist.” In fact Bhattacharya was more correct on lockdowns, mask mandates and more than any of the people who pretended that they were “mainstream.”
And if there was another pandemic, I would want Bhattacharya to be in charge over almost anyone else.
Then, of course, there is the Elon effect. Thanks to the prominence of the “first buddy” in the Trump team, other tech geniuses are also suddenly flocking to Mar-a-Lago. Mark Zuckerberg joined Trump for dinner this week.
Which is an interesting change in relations from the time that the onetime Democrat megadonor was at public loggerheads with the president. A spokesperson for Meta said in a statement this week: “It’s an important time for the future of American innovation.”
And they are right. But there is no reason why innovators like Zuckerberg need to stick in the tech lane.
Palmer Luckey (born in 1992) is another of the most interesting breakthrough artists of our age. One of America’s youngest self-made billionaires, he sold his virtual reality company Oculus for $2billion in 2014.
Since then he has founded companies including Anduril, which seeks to disrupt the long-stagnant defense industry.
We still live in a country where billions of dollars are wasted on inefficient and soon-to-be-defunct military technologies. The recent wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have revealed a whole new way of war.
While the Department of Defense looks at spending billions on a new nuclear submarine that may or may not come online sometime in the 2040s, Anduril and others are seeking to adapt the US to the wars of the future.
As Luckey said in a recent interview, its not a bad idea to have people involved in the defense industry who are “deeply aligned with the idea that we need to be spending less on defense while still getting more: that we need to do a better job of procuring the defense tools that protect our country.”
Can you imagine the slough of despair that any innovator in the tech, defense or medical industries would be in if “joyful” Kamala had been elected to the Oval Office this month?
Of course that doesn’t mean that there isn’t plenty of opportunity for the Trump team or parts of it to screw up in the years ahead.
But it looks like the smartest and most successful innovators in the country are actually now in the big game. And the big game is America — and America´s place in the world.
Unifying themes
There are unifying themes around all of them.
The desire to cut away grotesque government waste. The belief that the American economy – and especially the innovation economy – needs to be freed of red-tape.
And that it would be good if Americans knew not only had a the tax system which was understandable but that their hard-earned dollars were actually doing some good.
As I say, there are plenty of directions in which all this can go. Nothing about the next four years is going to be predictable — in Washington or anywhere else.
But it should be some comfort that around the president-elect are people who not only agree with his message to Make America Great Again, but have ideas for how to do it.
Largely because they have done great things in their own sectors before.
In the days when you could still mention Christopher Columbus without causing a woke meltdown, Ira Gershwin wrote: “They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round.”
As I surveyed Kamala’s miserable video message, I thought of all the people who have been sidelined, laughed at and smeared by various “establishments” in recent years for pursuing unpopular truths. And I remembered how the Gershwin brothers finished their great song.
“Who’s got the last laugh now?”