Terrence R Keeley

Scott Bessent is eminently more qualified than Howard Lutnick to run the U.S. Treasury. Scott understands markets, economics, people, and geopolitics better than anyone I’ve ever interacted with. Markets have already anticipated a Bessent choice. Lutnick is not Trump’s answer.

WHY TRUMP WON While the legacy media has a meltdown searching for hitherto undiagnosed psychoses in the electorate to explain its embrace of a Hitlerian strongman, the truth is much simpler than their fictions. This election is a reminder that after all the manufactured drama and overheated rhetoric, politics is still about issues. Whether you agreed with him or not, Trump ran a substantive campaign based on issues like the border, inflation, crime, and war. Harris ran on vibes, celebrity endorsements, name-calling (“convicted felon”, “fascist”), debunked hoaxes (“very fine people”), and platitudes (“democracy”). She would neither defend the Biden-Harris record nor say what she would do differently. When she did talk about specific issues, they were often stolen from Trump (child tax credit; no tax on tips; border funding). On the one issue where Democrats had an advantage, abortion, Trump deftly got ahead of the issue by rejecting a national ban and removing problematic language from the GOP platform. Harris wore out the issue by blatantly lying about Trump’s position and by exhibiting her own party’s extremism (nobody needed to see an abortion truck at the DNC). While Trump expanded his coalition with MAHA (health) and DOGE (government efficiency), Harris concluded her ersatz campaign by going all in on demonizing her opponent, pretending Madison Square Garden was a Nazi convention. The fact that voters saw through it should be reassuring, even if you don’t agree with the result. Voters want to know how a candidate will give them a better life and, increasingly, they have learned to tune out the rest as noise. While the legacy media creates excuses and impugns the motives of voters to explain why Trump won, the reason is simple: Trump is the candidate who spoke to voters’ concerns directly. It’s the issues, stupid.