Will Trump, at last, own the libs?

What has changed:

If you want to paint a bold, dominant personality as contemptible, you have to convince people that it’s all for show, and he’s actually, secretly, a coward — insecure and hollow. Hence all the talk about “bone spurs”.

But whatever else might be said about him at this point, Trump clearly has physical courage. Even the media commentators tut-tutting about him “putting his people in danger” and “sending a combative message” acknowledged that Trump wrestling his security to make a gesture of defiance to the crowd was an impulsive, unfakeable signal.

This probably moves the needle for some undecided voters in Pennsylvania — but as others have pointed out, there will be many news cycles between now and the election, and undecideds can barely remember what they had for breakfast.

The permanent ramifications of the shooting will be for Trump’s base and his allies.

Over the last year or so, many of my smartest and most capable friends have said that they’ll vote for Trump, but they won’t get involved with his administration, because they’ve concluded that he’s not all that serious about the fight, and they don’t want to spend the next decade getting subpoenaed over “what they knew and when they knew it” when the deep state takes their vengeance.

To a certain extent this is self-fulfilling prophecy, as Trump has been forced (both in his administration and his campaign) to work with the existing Republican machinery, which is not only incompetent and disloyal but also shares my friends’ concerns about getting prosecuted to oblivion when this is all over.

As of this weekend, though, it’s very difficult to argue that Trump “doesn’t have it in him” — at least in terms of raw thumos and political instinct — and it’s equally obvious that if he doesn’t win (more than just the election), they’re going to kill him.

Much like Biden’s commentariat looking around and realizing there’s nothing more to be gained from defending him, it looks like we’re seeing a preference cascade toward public and organized support for Trump — in the short run among voters, but more importantly among donors and potential staffers.

The friends I’ve spoken to since the shooting are still realistic about the risks of getting involved, but there’s a growing sense of possibility — and if we can win, then we have a responsibility to try.

What has not changed:

First: no matter what “facts” may emerge in the coming days — or decades — you will likely never know the truth of what really happened on July 13th.

And it doesn’t actually matter. Whether it was “stochastic terrorism” or explicit conspiracy, the security services are no longer responsive to human control.

The machinery that is supposed to deliver actionable information to decisionmakers — both the intelligence services and the media (but I repeat myself) — have become hopelessly corrupt.

Even if they wanted to tell you the truth at this point, there would be no way to make you believe them.

Second: there will be no national rapprochement. The media is already blaming the shooting on Trump himself, and celebrities are publicly calling for more attempts. (You can frame this as “satire” or whatever — but the “known-to-the-FBI” mutant schizos who carry out these operations will not see it that way.)

Curtis Yarvin is always saying that the goal must be to “own the libs” — in other words, to dominate them so conclusively that you actually exercise sovereignty over them — so that they cannot threaten you, and you have no reason to threaten them.

It’s possible that Trump could get there, but it will be a long road and it will extend well beyond the election in November.

At EXIT, we’ve been talking about parallel institutions for years; but like all of us, Donald Trump needs “new guards for his future security”.

The depth of the purge required to clear out the rot in America’s federal law-enforcement, regulatory, and military bureaucracies would amount to a coup d’etat — even if they obeyed orders to arrest each other, there’d be practically no one left to do the arresting.

But for all the talk of Big Army’s DEI bungling in recent years, the cream of America’s warrior caste are still around, and they are still the most dangerous individuals on the planet. They still know how to protect a high-value target, how to properly secure an area, how to gather and interpret intelligence. They want to use their skills and serve their country, but they don’t want to abet a hostile usurper regime, and they don’t want to die for Taiwan or Ukraine.

Trump’s personal security detail could become a rally point for the best of the best.

The attempt on Trump’s life demonstrated that his destiny is now inextricably bound up with the destiny of the country. If he can’t secure his own person, independent of the machinery of the state (which either cannot or will not protect him), there will be no security for the rest of us.

This vertical escalation of hostilities doesn’t mean that lower-intensity attacks like lawfare, debanking, and cyber-attacks are off the table, either. His personal security includes the security of his data, the money that pays his men, and the lawyers who keep them out of prison. (Is it a coincidence that the Secret Service is tasked with investigating financial and cyber-crime, as well as protecting the President?)

In short, to preserve his own life and liberty, Donald Trump is going to have to rebuild the machinery of the state.

This may seem like a tall order if you imagine USG as a unitary organism, a Goliath, but it really isn’t — it’s a very porous, distributed hive of competing constituencies whose terms of cooperation are increasingly incoherent. Donald Trump’s constituency is easily the largest and most unified.

If he survives the various attempts on his life and efforts to delegitimize his victory in the coming years, Donald Trump will have an epochal opportunity to absorb and reallocate America’s human capital. The best talent in the world has been sidelined in dozens of critical fields, and he can put them back to work.

There are also many competent, basically patriotic functionaries of the state who have resisted him up until now because he represented a threat to stable government. In 2016, he tried just telling them what to do, and they ignored him — because they saw him as a dilettante, a short-timer, and they had their careers to think about.

We can complain about this, but his inability to force them to comply was ipso facto evidence of his unsuitability to rule them. They were game-theoretically right to ignore him — so he had to change the game.

As he continues to build capacity without their help, and the old regime torches its legitimacy failing to bring him down, he increasingly becomes the only viable steward of good order — not just as a matter of perception but as a matter of fact.

Exit and Voice are not opposites.

Trump’s credible capacity outside the system increases his leverage within the system.

Likewise: if you know how to make a living outside the corporate world, you can of course choose to leave — but you also enjoy greater maneuver and risk-tolerance should you choose to stay.

If you are free to move your tax money out of the public schools, you can exercise that option — or you can exercise your de facto firing authority over your local public school bureaucrats, and bring them to heel.

If millions of Americans secure their own wealth with cryptographic bearer assets, they can abandon the traditional financial system — but this will also inevitably force the transformation and reform of the traditional financial system.

Voice is meaningless without the freedom to Exit. If you cannot say “no”, your “yes” is irrelevant.

This is the kind of capacity we are building at EXIT.

You can’t own the libs if you don’t own your income, your wealth, your personal security, your children’s education. As long as these things come hand-to-mouth at the sufferance of people who hate you, you will live like a mistreated zoo animal, and any talk of political action will remain hallucinatory cope.

Entrepreneurship, community-building, and mutual aid is the path to sovereignty. Sign up for our next cocktail hour to get to know your local guys, or apply for full membership at exitgroup.us.

EXIT News

• On last week’s full-group call, we discussed what we learned from National Conservatism Conference last week in Washington, DC. More commentary to follow.

• On this week’s full-group call, we will discuss the ramifications of this weekend’s shooting on our personal security and EXIT plan.

• At the request of donors and participants, and in acknowledgement of the volatility of everyone’s schedules after the election, the upcoming Natal Conference will be postponed to March 2025.

  • Specific date is being negotiated with donors, venue, and guests, so please subscribe at natalism.org for updates.

  • Several new speakers have agreed to appear, including Robin Hanson, Bryan Caplan, Scott Yenor, Daniel Hess (More Births), Jeremy Carl, Gale Pooley, and Carl Benjamin. More coming soon!

• We will be hosting our first meetup in Columbus, Ohio this weekend. We’ve got a lot of family men in the Midwest so we are planning to make this an outdoor, all-ages activity.

  • If you are a member and you haven’t RSVP’d yet, please notify DB or myself ASAP.

  • If you’d like to attend the cocktail hour for subscribers (adults only, please), register below the paywall. These are a great opportunity to meet your local guys and see if the full group is a good fit for you.