What once seemed like a foreign language is now the lingua franca. The world that dismissed Trump as an aberrant interloper is gone. He demolished it. His revolution enters its second decade not as a curiosity but as the new normal. And the rest of us are still trying to catch up

…. then a decade can seem like a century. and we’ve certainly lived through a lot since Donald Trump came down that escalator in Trump Tower, NYC, at this time, on this day, in 2015 to announce he was running for President of the USA, memorably parodied (not predicted) by The Simpsons shortly afterward.

The attitude of almost everybody at the time, including me, was that this was a joke, and I my opinions didn’t improve as the months went by in 2016; after he stepped on his dick (again) and gave Hillary an opening I angrily called him a “shithead loser” on Kiwiblog because I very much wanted to see her lose and thought he was screwing up the GOP’s best chance in years against a weak Democrat.

The overall attitude is perhaps best summed up by this recent comment on X:

One decade ago, during the middle of my 6th grade class, our teacher suddenly started laughing at something on his laptop while we sat on the rug, He explained to us what he had seen: a headline that said Donald Trump just entered the presidential race.

Since then it’s been a relentless pace of events falling on top of one another so fast it left commentators breathless. The craziness of the night he won in 2016, “grab them by the pussy”, two impeachments, four criminal indictments, a criminal conviction on 34 felonies, a NYC civil conviction defamation that implied sexual assault, the Russia-Collusion hoax, the Covid-19 catastrophe and “drink bleach”, the freakish 2020 election, January 6 and all the abuse of civil liberties that followed, “President” Biden and the Democrat fringe going nuts on policy, the raid on Trump’s Mar A Largo home by the Biden FBI, and of course two assassination attempts.

All of this covered by lie upon lie upon lie by the MSM as they covered lie upon lie upon lie by the Democrat Party and other Trump opponents.

Then the seemingly calmer, almost accepting nature of his extraordinary 2024 comeback win, only the second US President to have two non-consecutive terms, with the MSM and the Democrats badly damaged in the process, to the point where neither may survive.

Trump has dominated the political scene not just in America but globally during this decade. That alone is going to cause many history books to be written about him in the years to come, far more than for his opponents and likely even his successors.

As to his track record, it’s been the usual mix of successes and failures that every President accumulates, and of course he still has most of his second term to run. The successes to date that come to mind include not starting any wars and having a booming economy in his last two years. The failures were relying too much on Washington insiders and the good faith of the bureaucrats “serving” him, with the nadir being his actions during the great Chinese Lung Rot Scare, when he ran with the bad faith proposals of Drs Fauci and Birx in locking down the country. The latter was not as harsh as Britain, Australia or us, thanks to the Federal nature of the US government where it was handled differently by State and city governments – thank the Founders.

Good luck until 2029 President Trump.

================

Here’s the full announcement as it happened, and just one of the many cherries on top is that the intro song is “Rockin’ In The Free World” by Boomer, 60’s Canadian-American Neil Young, who can’t change this record now and probably vomits every time he’s reminded of this.