The Boring Stuff Matters Most

Bird flu has crossed into multiple people now. A lady in Wyoming is hospitalized. In Texas, there are now forty-eight cases of measles in a town. In Kansas, there is a tuberculosis outbreak. Though small, it keeps flaring back up.

National Institutes of Health employees and CDC employees are losing their jobs. One of the CDC groups hit with job losses examines outbreaks of food-borne and contagious illnesses.

Democrats, through the course of Joe Biden’s Administration, repeatedly alleged things were not his fault. Corporate greed caused inflation. Trump propping up Putin caused the Ukraine war. The Middle East exploded because the Middle East exploded. Biden had no culpability for anything domestically or abroad.

But, you break it, you buy it; you get the job, you own the job.

The public blamed Biden despite the press, who lectured Americans for four years about how good the public had it. Now, Trump is the incumbent. He is no more to blame for a measles outbreak in Texas than Joe Biden. Still, Biden did not appoint a vaccine skeptic as Secretary of Health and Human Services, nor did Biden lay off massive numbers of federal employees related to public health.

The public is smart enough to know that Trump is not to blame for high egg prices. But if they continue, he will be blamed because he wanted the job and is now the incumbent.

Democrats and the press will work to pin every health issue on Donald Trump in a way they never would Biden. Trump, unlike Biden, will own the layoffs of employees as Democrats try to convince Americans that those government functions were and are necessary for their safety. If things go south for Trump, you can easily foresee a rebound in the public’s appetite for a big government to protect them.

Let’s not kid ourselves. Time and time again, Americans choose safety over liberty, and should the bird flu spread or other domestic calamities happen, Trump will shoulder the blame if he does not respond decisively.

The boring part of governance is the most important part of governing.

You and I can get excited about ephemeral executive orders, wokism in retreat, and DEI on the way out. You can cheer about the Gulf of Mexico now being the Gulf of America. None of that stuff will protect Republicans in the midterms from a voter backlash, and none of that stuff will protect J.D. Vance in 2028.

Basic, boring good governance will be the salve that no one sees, but everyone intuitively votes for. It will be necessary in the coming years as war and economic headlines risk sinking the Trump ship of state.

Over the weekend, Trump tweeted, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” MAGA immediately expected people on the right to defend the statement. Some boastfully pointed to the left and proclaimed that the left’s behavior led to this, and they should expect no one on the right to give in. Anti-MAGA insisted if you do not denounce it and fight against Trump, you are not only endorsing it but standing on the wrong side of history. Normal Americans were just flummoxed because football was at an end, and they needed something to watch. Personally, I suspect Trump monetized his Twitter account and knows exactly how to get a rise out of the Left, so they focus on his tweet and not other things.

The online right is convinced there is no need to touch grass, and the 2024 victory proves that what happens online is the reality that matters. Democrats felt the same way after the 2022 midterms.

The right risks Twitter becoming as much a bubble as it was for Democrats in 2016, as they lost to Trump the first time and as BlueSky and MSNBC have become for the left now.

When everyone in the bubble tells you all is well, your behavior is unimportant, and owning the other side is all that matters…well, we saw what happened when the left thought that.

The left got so busy advancing their culture war and fighting the right that they forgot about all the boring parts of governing. Now, still high on their supply from the election, MAGA risks the same.

Come the midterms, if the boring work of competence in government has failed, remember the Democrats who claimed all the bad things were not their fault when they were in charge. Incumbency makes the bad things your fault, and the incumbents, controlling everything right now, are the Republicans.