Beautiful, elegant, strong—when Sarah Huckabee Sanders glided out on stage on Night 2 of the Republican National Convention, I could not help but think of the film Carrie. In it, the shy wallflower emerges as the beautiful prom queen moments before she’s sabotaged by two mean and bitter people who want nothing but her total humiliation.
But of course, they don’t realize what they just stepped in as Carrie turns to them, flips the switch that turns on her supernatural powers, and enacts her revenge.
It’s one of the best scenes in film history made when Hollywood could still make great movies, and Stephen King wrote great books rather than endless anti-Trump tweets.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders didn’t need to set the place on fire. Her success is her best revenge, as she’s now the Governor of Arkansas, the first woman to hold that position. Take that, bitter leftists.
What a moment that was. They did everything in their power to crush her, to humiliate her, to shame her, to destroy her. And guess what? It failed spectacularly, just as it has with Trump.
I remember back in 2018 when Michelle Wolf told unfunny jokes, selling a version of Sanders that doesn’t, in fact, exist. Her words stung, and Sanders’ reactions reflected that. Even though I was a loyal Democrat back then, I loudly criticized Wolf and my Democrat friends for defending her.
And when she was refused service at the Red Hen, a thing that happened in the Jim Crow South or Nazi Germany, Stephen Colbert did his usual sociopathic ranting disguised as humor.
I always thought we were the guys, I said. Are we the side that now mocks the way women look? Oh, she’s supporting Trump; they told me back then. She is normalizing a fascist. She deserves what she gets.
It was blatant hypocrisy from the side that proclaims tolerance and love. But there they were, as mean as Nancy Allen in Carrie.
That’s who you are now, I told them. You’re the mean girls. It was verbal abuse disguised as comedy, but it still wasn’t enough. Look at how far they had to go in an attempt to destroy her, destroy Trump, and defeat the grassroots movement known as MAGA.
Maybe that assassin wasn’t killing Trump because he thought he was Hitler. But did it matter that much? It seemed to manifest their collective hatred, with nowhere to go except pulling the trigger. Too bad you missed means two different things, depending on which side you’re on.
If you can imagine, we’re at the moment where people on Twitter are arguing over whether it’s cancel culture to fire someone who said they were upset that Trump was almost assassinated but happy that one of his supporters died.
For the record, no, I don’t support firing some dumb woman who works at Home Depot because she wrote a disgusting Facebook post. But I also would not want someone with a dark heart like that working for me.
We should never let them off the hook for who they were and what they did, especially to people like Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who did nothing to deserve it except work for Donald Trump.
I heard her tell the same story about Trump she recounted at the RNC on a podcast a few years ago—I don’t remember which one—and it humanized Trump in my eyes. It made me think differently about him, and I understood their relationship better. For Sanders, Trump is a ride-or-die, as she explains here.
That wasn’t the only bright spot of the night, but it was the most remarkable. Nothing has ever felt as satisfying as watching her living her hot girl summer phase - an invisible EFF YOU to the haters.
It was a night for powerhouse mama bears who have lost their loved ones either to high crime or the fentanyl epidemic, something the Democrats seem to care nothing about. Oh, those people in the red states, they don’t matter, the racists.
Like Madeline Brame, who blew the roof off the joint and earned the rare standing ovation from Trump.
And Sara Workman:
And Anne Funder:
Real people, real problems. Your move, Democrats.
Meeting the Moment
As good as Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley were, there is no way they could have met this moment, this Fourth Turning in history. They are strong leaders in their own way, but they seemed ready for a Republican race at any other time except this one.
There is a reason Trump drove the Left insane and why they believed they had to wage war against him and half the country. I was part of it. I was among the so-called “resistance.” I know what it felt like to have everything we built and worked for disappear instantly when Hillary Clinton did not win.
It would take me four years to finally get it. It was never about Trump. It was us. It was the world we made that no longer allowed for people like Trump or those who supported him. They had no power, and yet, they threatened us? Why?
The populist movement led by Trump was prepared to dismantle the whole sand castle the Democrats built that said America was rotten to its core and could only become truly great if they reversed the power hierarchy, prioritized minority groups, and ignored the majority.
How many elections will Democrats have to lose before they get that message about the silent majority? They still haven’t gotten it. They want to purge or cancel all of those not fully on board, and they’re willing to pull out the big guns, so to speak, to preserve their power.
Watch this video of the media and how they called Trump a “fascist” and a “threat to Democracy.”
Trump not only meets the moment. Trump is the moment. This campaign ad sums it up.
There was no way Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley could take on the Leviathan in its current state. The fight was always Trump, and the problem for the GOP was that no matter how much the Liz Cheneys, the Mitt Romneys, and the Paul Ryans wanted Trump gone from their Grand Old Party, the Democrats needed him as an ongoing threat to hold power. They went to war on him, and in so doing, they helped make him who he is today, and sealed their own fate.
But coming up close behind Trump, another man who gets this moment, Vivek Ramaswamy, who lit up the arena with his speech.
Like Trump, Ramaswamy is a slash-and-burn leader. He understands the stakes, and he understands the fight.
An Empire in Collapse
Everywhere you look in America, you see the failures of the Democratic establishment. They didn’t get that message in 2016, or in 2020. By the looks of it, they haven’t gotten it now. It’s like that line from Citizen Kane, ‘You’re going to need more than one lesson, and you’re going to get more than one lesson.’
We have so much news now that cycles through the churn every day. We have so many journalists who put on their critical thinking caps so as not to be sucked in by one party or another. That’s their job. But sometimes, it’s easy to miss the magic when it appears when everything seems to come together at once, and we can feel things shifting. We can feel hope taking root, and we dare to dream of something better for ourselves and our children.
No one illustrated that feeling better than Ms. Sanders. Her confidence, pride, love for Trump, and hope for the future were exactly the kind of steady hand that reflects the new Big Tent MAGA.
No, Mitt Romney wasn’t there. Paul Ryan, Liz Cheney, Mike Pence, or any of the Never Trumpers. That old GOP is gone, and it’s never coming back.
As for the Democrats, they can’t compete with what the Republicans are offering America now. They will have nothing to sell but fear at their convention. One million abortions last year, a ten-year high, wasn’t enough. There must be more. Democracy is under threat, and only they can save it and, of course, Project 2025, a psy-op for the mindless robots in the party I used to call home.
Watching Night Two of the RNC, I could see clearly why the pendulum swings. If I live long enough, I’ll see it swing back. The last time anything like this happened was in 1980, when the Democrats were out of power for a generation.
The Democrats will keep coming if Trump wins to regain some power in 2028. But they should use that time to do what they’ve never done: figure out what went so wrong for them that the center of their entire movement became the destruction of Donald Trump.
They failed. They can’t offer hope, only despair, and dark hearts have no place in a bright future.
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Sarah Huckabee Sanders Gets the Last Laugh