Trump’s Shock and Awe Campaign Is Our Conservative Dream Come True
Kurt Schlichter Jan 27, 2025

As we survey the shattered, smoldering ruins of leftists’ dreams in the wake of Donald J Trump’s campaign of annihilation, it’s understandable if we pause for just a moment to appreciate exactly what has happened. We’ve talked and dreamed about this scenario for years, but now it’s happening right in front of our eyes. It’s beautiful, man. It’s like the jungle exploding in a fireball in “Apocalypse Now.” We love the smell of napalm in the morning. It smells like victory.

No mercy, no quarter, no hesitation. Two ideologies walk into the Thunderdome, and one walks out.

There used to be norms, and then the Democrats decided not to honor the norms but demanded that we still do. And during Trump 1.0, we did. We pretended that there were still guardrails, that there was still truth and honor in our institutions, and that’s why so many establishment Republicans believed we should treat hoaxes like the Russiagate lies with more than just a summary dismissal and ruthless mockery.

We naively tried to honor the dead norms, pretending that the regime media was actually trying to report the truth rather than slavishly parroting the Democrat narrative. Well, we learned after Trump 1.0. During Trump 2.0, we’re not pretending anymore. There’s nothing to pretend. It’s a new day. It’s a new dawn - a dawn of the dead ideology of leftism. We’re going to nuke the site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.

This change didn’t just happen. People didn’t just spontaneously figure out what time it is. This all began about 15 years ago, with the rise of the Tea Party and the appearance of a cultural colossus, Andrew Breitbart. Andrew always knew what time it is. He always saw through the lies. He saw through the Potemkin village facade of institutional integrity. And he wasn’t playing by their rules. His critique of, and attack upon, the regime media was an essential component of what we’re seeing now. If it weren’t for Andrew, we’d still be in a morass of managed decline and utter failure, probably having just ended the second term of Hillary Clinton and watching her being replaced by someone even more evil. Instead, we’re trashing DEI, sealing the border, no longer indulging weird perversions, and terrifying the GOP establishment into fixing the Pentagon with a former Marine corporal casting the tie-breaking vote.

We don’t feel noways tired…of all the winning.

If you want to understand what happened, you must read the new book by my friend Larry O’Connor. It’s called “Shameless Liars: How Trump Defeated the Legacy Media and Made Them Irrelevant,” and it’s essential reading if you want to know how we got here and why. It’s good that Larry is getting this down on paper for posterity because this is history, folks. It’s history that you won’t read in the regime media or the institutional press. Larry has gone around the gatekeepers to tell this story. That’s the heart of what Andrew Breitbart taught us. We can’t submit to their cultural control. We can’t rely on others to tell our stories. We have to tell them ourselves. We have to take command of the narrative and use it as a spiked suppository against our enemies.

Also, I hear it’s got a forward by another incredible writer, so it’s got that going for him, which is nice.

You know Larry from here at Townhall and from his various radio, TV, and Internet shows. He was there from the beginning, right at Andrew’s side. Like Andrew, Larry is a child of the 80s, hence the Easter eggs of cultural references on that period I’ve sprinkled across this column. Larry and Andrew grew up under Ronald Reagan here in sunny Southern California, where everything was possible and there were no limits. You’ve got to understand how America this America was – it was America to the max. And Larry is telling this story to help us get back to that.

Donald Trump wants to get back to that glorious America, too. The regime media, the lying dirtbags that they are, try to portray his magnificent inaugural address as a dark and grim litany of horrors. Of course, it was exactly the opposite. It was sunny and optimistic, looking forward to a bright future of possibilities as opposed to limitations. Sure, he delivered hard truths to the assembled Democrat losers who were forced to sit there and listen as he went through a litany of their failures. He actually cut it short – he could’ve gone on for hours telling them why they suck.

And boy, do they ever suck.

That’s the thing about the left. They always fail. Always. There are no exceptions. There’s no generally prosperous and free leftist jurisdiction out there. There are a few leftist feudal states, like California, where you have a few people at the top of the pyramid who live very well and a bunch of people at the base living on the edge of chaos and bankruptcy. Did you see Trump schooling the California pols at that roundtable? He knew what he was doing; they were clearly out of their depth. If you want success for everybody, rich, poor, and in-between, you have to go to Texas or Florida. Donald Trump’s greatest crime in his first term was demonstrating that we don’t have to fail and that there is an alternative to the Democrat prescription for misery.

Everything they touch turns to Schiff.

Larry demonstrates how they couldn’t have taken, or stayed in, power without the collaboration of the regime media. As kids, Andrew, Larry, and I grew up when you had three networks. After a while, CNN came along and started a media revolution. But the innovative CNN of pioneering Gulf War coverage became the stale, grubby CNN of today, with its Don Lemons, Jake Tappers, and other communist weirdos. Can you imagine somebody putting Brian Stelter on air in the ’80s? We would have reached through the TV screen and given Tater a wedgie.

As Larry describes it, the media has completely betrayed its claim to be an assembly of neutral truth-tellers dedicated to informing the public. Instead, it’s just a motley collection of mediocre propagandists telling lies, and not very convincingly. No one believes them, listens to them, or watches them anymore. It would be sad if it wasn’t so hilarious. Their suffering gives us joy.

Maybe the journos can learn the code.

Larry points out that without the self-destruction of the regime media – well, we conservatives should take a little credit for helping to push them over a cliff like they famously depicted Republicans pushing granny – we wouldn’t be here testing the theory that we will eventually get tired of all the winning. Trump could not have done this if the regime media had remained effective. But they aren’t effective. They’ve committed ritual suicide, and we’re all there for it.

That made Trump’s shock and awe possible. That made Trump able to ignore the notions, norms, and obsolete guardrails that prevented other Republicans from taking firm and decisive action to rip out the DEI deep state root, stem, and branch. Trump is in the Oval Office again, this time wielding power without excuse or apology the way a Democrat would wield it. This is unprecedented. This is unbelievable. And this is unstoppable. We’re not going to hesitate. We’re not going to quit. We’re going to wipe out all their dreams and laugh at them as they fall to their knees, raising their hands in the sky, and howling, “Noooooooooo!”

It’s all shock and awe for the next four years, with the pedal to the metal because we can’t drive 55. Regime media, take a bow. You made it all possible because you stink. So, go get Larry’s book “Shameless Liars,” and revel in the story of how the mighty fell and how we patriots won.