Daniel Boone, that daring pioneer of the American frontier, ever eager to cross thresholds into uncharted territories, wrote, “I never was lost in the woods in my whole life, though once I was confused for three days.”
Three days of circuitously wandering in the woods, hitting dead end after dead end, each time recalculating in hopes of discovering a path out of the forest, seems to me a period best described as being lost. Utterly.
Not so for a rugged pioneer like Daniel Boone, nor for a rugged politician like Donald Trump, freshly emerged after four years of wandering in a deep wood planted and booby-trapped by the Deep State, now home again at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Boone claims he never felt himself lost. Only confused. How so? Because he was fully confident in himself, that his skills and stamina, his soul’s gravel and grit, were up to the task.
Likewise, Trump faced what appeared to be permanent political exile with full confidence in himself, in the MAGA movement and in the America people, at no time assessing his political future to be lost.
Trump believed in himself, that he could and would escape the Deep State’s thick forest, made deeper and darker by a complicit mainstream media endorsing the ridiculous indictments and trials engendered through DOJ and FBI malfeasance, raining down nonstop accusations of Trump being Hitler and a danger to the democracy, inspiring potential assassins to take their shots at the MAGA pioneer before he could reach the edge of the woods, surviving only by that “Millimeter Miracle” of God’s grace.
Pioneer-spirited leaders like Trump, when facing uncertainty as they seek to cross a threshold into the uncharted, must trust their own abilities.
Confused? Absolutely.
Lost? Not for even a moment.
I think of Trump’s face during Alvin Bragg’s preposterous trial before Judge Merchan, stranded in an icy cold New York courtroom. Observers noted how pitiful his face appeared, completely lost, forlorn.
Watch him, though, at the end of the grueling day of the trial’s contrived stupidity, emerging from his motorcade to enter a Harlem bodega to a cheering crowd, the people’s reaction charging him anew with fresh energy as he realized how clearly the people also realized, and were repulsed by, the judicial unfairness they were witnessing, its wrongness glaringly apparent.
Like Daniel Boone, Donald Trump sensed that this lostness was temporary merely, that the moment called not for panic, but for boldness.
And for preparation. Trump treated the Biden years as his liminal zone, a threshold into something better, a four year space for reevaluating past miscalculations so that, once emerged from the forest, as he always believed he would, he would be better prepared, infinitely more capable than he had been in 2017 to meet the challenges of the White House adventure he embarked upon last week.
Trump wasn’t alone in his wandering. The entire nation aimlessly wandered during the Biden years. Biden’s COVID-caused catastrophe of a presidency may now be recognized as merely the portal, the doorway into Trump 2.0.
In virtually every arena, domestic and international, Biden led the nation to wander as in a wasteland. Open borders inviting chaos and crime. Long-admired institutions compromised by TDS, leaning hard into third-world weaponizing of law in order politically to decapitate a key rival. Gender confusion leading to pronoun absurdities while endangering women’s spaces and sports. Inflation eating away all the while, stirring the average American’s desire to escape the forest into which Democrat policies had led them.
Biden’s foreign policy was worse, disastrous decisions in Afghanistan and Iran plunging the world into chaos on two important fronts – Russia/Ukraine and Israel/Hamas shattering the progress of Trump’s first administration and birthing conversation of a potential world war.
Leftist America remains in the forest of confusion, of course. Wokeism, almost by definition, redefines the dark forest into something desirable. For the woke, darkness is light and lost is found.
Tolkien was wonderfully correct when he wrote, “Not all who wander are lost.” That’s true, as Trump’s last four years exemplifies.
Sometimes, though, those who wander are just that. Lost. Especially the wandering the wokeism celebrates, since it is bereft of common sense.
Such progressive lostness was evidenced in Bishop Budde’s turning a National Cathedral sermon to the nation into an eye-to-eye conversation with the newly sworn-in president, asking mercy for frightened transgenders and illegals while ignoring the plight of children having healthy body parts lopped off and of innocent lives taken by illegal aliens amid a border flood of fentanyl.
For Bishop Budde it was no doubt a sublime moment of woke self-flattery, imagining herself heroic by labeling Trump merciless, even as his policies are guided to benefit all Americans.
Her preaching was received well by her supportive choir, of course. Not so much, though, by a nation beleaguered by four years of wilderness wandering under Biden, resulting in such urgent and burning passion to emerge from Biden’s dark woods that Trump increased his 2024 support among virtually every segment of American voters, even those whom the bishop imagined herself representing in her inappropriate and selfish chiding of the president.
Mostly, though, her preaching will be seen for what it was. Selfish and inappropriate. Mark it up to common sense making a return.
Ironic that Trump could lead such a charge toward common sense, when common sense might have dictated to Trump that he retire in 2021 to a life of luxury, in which case Biden could have called off the dogs. No trials. No raids. No assassination attempts.
Makes sense to me. Common sense.
Trump, though, had promises to keep, so he forged ahead, adventuring down the forced false paths of Deep State narratives while successfully sidestepping trap after trap, making his way home the White House with the poetic determination expressed by Robert Frost: “The woods are lovely/dark and deep/but I have promises to keep/and miles to go before I sleep/and miles to go before I sleep.”
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