Commentary: Trump’s Reelection Effort is Becoming the Hero’s Journey

Minnesota Sun Staff
Trump Speech
by Scott McKay

 

I’ve got to give Jeremy Boreing, who currently serves as CEO of the Daily Wire, credit for the concept you’re about to hear. Boreing was partnered with conservative independent media star Bill Whittle in a company called Declaration Entertainment, which was exploring a business model not dissimilar to the crowdfunding platform that Angel Studios is maximizing to produce conservative content, when he gave a speech to a Heritage Foundation “Resource Bank” conference held in New Orleans about a decade ago now.

Boreing’s talk was an exhortation to conservatives to produce cultural content.

He was there promoting the venture he and Whittle were involved in at the time, to be sure, but his points were larger. Boreing noted that the oldest and greatest story in all of human culture is that of the hero’s journey — the adventures, struggles, and overcoming of adversity by talented, driven individuals who change their stars and make the world a better place.

Boreing noted, and very correctly so, that the hero’s journey is a quintessentially conservative story. That’s especially true in an American conservative context, where the focus is on the greatness that can be achieved through the multiplication and compounding of countless individual real-life heroes’ journeys in a free society that encourages pluck, determination, hard work, and creativity.

The story of Jesus is the ultimate hero’s journey. But so are the stories of Hercules, Sinbad, Horatio Alger, Steve Jobs. Luke Skywalker and Indiana Jones.

Boreing said that the leftists who run Hollywood don’t really want to tell the hero’s journey story, but occasionally they have to in order to keep the lights on. The example he used, which was quite current at the time, was 300, the stylized Zack Snyder film starring Gerard Butler as King Leonidas of Sparta, depicting the heroic stand that 300 of his best men made against an overwhelming Persian army at Thermopylae. 300 is, of course, one of the greatest action movies of modern times and had the box office receipts to prove it. It’s a celebration of all the best virtues of the Western masculine archetype — courage, self-sacrifice, unshakable commitment to a righteous cause, loyalty, honor, and so forth.

Leonidas didn’t survive the ordeal, but what he accomplished even in defeat lives on thousands of years later — and because of that stand at Thermopylae and the time it bought the Greeks, they ultimately defeated King Xerxes at Marathon. He’s better known than those Greeks who ultimately won the victory, such was his heroism.

Boreing noted that there was a sequel to 300 that starred, ridiculously enough, Eva Green as the villainous Persian general in a follow-on campaign. It performed poorly compared to the original, and for obvious reasons — its plot was a massive departure from the hero’s journey. The producers had a winning formula, and they strayed from it for the simple reason that their values were not the same as those of King Leonidas, and they insisted on signaling their own virtues rather than those of the audience and the Western civilization that houses us all.

I’m recounting all of this because Boreing is precisely right that the greatest story is a profoundly conservative one.

And due to everything being done in the political realm by the ideological fellows of those who destroyed the 300 franchise because they couldn’t celebrate our common Western values, perhaps the greatest example of the hero’s journey in the history of American elections is being created this very year.

Trump and the Hero’s Journey

The polls are beginning to show pretty clearly that Trump is the people’s champion. He’s certainly not the champion of the elites — no one treated by the federal government or the legal system in the most prestigious state in the union (at least, that’s what New York used to be, before its current masters turned it into a hellscape unworthy of commerce) could be said to have the imprimatur of the rich or the ruling class.

Of course, the hero’s journey is often — usually, perhaps — a comeback story. Trump has that in spades: turned out of office in an election fraud with irregularities (to be kind) by a cackling, arrogant, moneyed, and privileged ruling caste in Washington and elsewhere; derided and hounded as an “insurrectionist” with no evidence of his having had anything to do with the violence on Jan. 6, 2021; betrayed by his presidential employees with respect to COVID-19; slandered by the intelligence community as a Russian plant when what was planted was the notion of such collusion; and targeted for a campaign of lawfare so profoundly unreasonable and offensive to any sense of fair play that Trump has become a sympathetic feature among many who were exhausted by his first term. No political candidate has ever had to overcome so much.

I can’t tell you how many people I’ve talked to lately who say they wanted to move on from Trump, who might have voted for Joe Biden in 2020 because they grew weary of what they saw as the chaos during Trump’s first term or who were Ron DeSantis supporters for similar reasons, but who have nevertheless come home to Trump due to a sense of injustice at his treatment.

Those indictments by Joe Biden/Barack Obama stooge Jack Smith in Miami and Washington, D.C., the Fani Willis circus in Atlanta, and the fiascoes in New York stung the nostrils of most of the country. Initial sentiment showed up in polling that were Trump convicted in any of these cases, it would be devastating to his reelection efforts. That seems to be fading as the public finds out more about that of which he’s been accused — and, worse, what America is finding out about the judicial system in the jurisdictions where these lawfare campaigns are being waged.

That civil trial in front of the alarmingly creepy Arthur Engoron in New York, where that state’s attorney general Letitia James (who reminds even Americans who agree with her ideologically of the hostile and incompetent gate agent at the airport refusing to provide any meaningful assistance for a missed connection or a lost piece of luggage) is attempting to steal hundreds of millions of dollars of Trump’s property for the sin of valuing collateral advantageously for bank loans he paid back, was a signal to America that we have real villains among us.

And that Trump is the enemy of those villains.

They’ve propped up Biden as a puppet president despite the obviously clear fact that he’s non compos mentis, and American prestige is lower than it’s been since the 19th century. They’ve annihilated law and order in all of our cities and in the governments they control. They’ve staffed up the IRS, the most hated agency of the entire federal government, specifically to go after their political detractors. They’re busily attempting to jail every one of the protesters on Jan. 6, 2021, despite the fact that the vast majority of them committed either no criminal acts or are guilty of no worse than trespassing — while at the same time the Black Lives Matter, Antifa, noxious pro-Hamas demonstrators, and violent pro-abortion mobs have been free to conduct campaigns of property destruction and worse with abject impunity.

They’re standing idly by as a massive wave of migrant invaders — including what can only be seen as a real invasion of Chinese military-age men actively deployed here by a hostile and aggressive regime — washes across our southern border in flagrant violation of our laws, soaking up welfare dollars, housing, jobs, and other social goods while bringing with it deadly fentanyl and other drugs to plunge our society into chaos.

Against that backdrop, almost anyone rising in opposition would look like a hero. The fact that it’s Trump who’s doing so gives this an epic classical flavor.

He’s the aging — but not aged or infirm; that’s Biden — warrior of the country class, bearing all the scars of past battles and defeats. He’s the man who has won his wisdom hard and promises the completion of the renaissance unjustly denied him by that vituperative cabal victimizing the people with inflation, illegal immigration, global insecurity, and national demoralization. He’s against what seems to be the whole world but is really just a hollow and decaying elite who increasingly lie, cheat, and steal as a creed.

The villains’ behavior has been so boorish, so on the nose that even the three leftists on the U.S. Supreme Court couldn’t buy in. On Monday, the court came back 9–0 against the obnoxiously stupid attempts by the state of Colorado to keep Trump off the ballot based on a tortured reading of the 14th Amendment’s prohibition of “insurrectionists” serving in federal office.

This set off the Left to engage in what can only be described as villainous behavior. For example, here is Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, who has a very creepy and villainous Fairuza Balk thing going on:

And then there is this snarling mental defective:

Not to mention this comic-book malefactor:

They’ve set this thing up so that it’s falling into the well-worn path of the hero’s journey. And the public is beginning to see it. The promise of the hero is multifaceted, as it includes such goodies as the common virtues being affirmed and the notion of redemption being served. But what’s almost always most attractive in the hero’s journey story is that the bad guys get what’s coming to them.

And Trump’s campaign is starting to become that, without him even talking about it, due to the actions of the villains.

I don’t know Boreing, and I haven’t talked to him about this subject, but I suspect he’d say those bad storytellers on the Left are playing right into his old narrative. They don’t want to tell the story of the hero’s journey — and they certainly can’t tell it with Biden. And now they’ve left it to Trump to act out. Possibly to their greatest regret.

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Scott McKay is a contributing editor at The American Spectator and publisher of the Hayride, which offers news and commentary on Louisiana and national politics, and RVIVR.com, a national political news aggregation and opinion site. Scott is also the author of The Revivalist Manifesto: How Patriots Can Win The Next American Era, and, more recently, Racism, Revenge and Ruin: It’s All Obama, available November 21. He’s also a writer of fiction — check out his four Tales of Ardenia novels Animus, Perdition, Retribution and Quandary at Amazon.
Photo “Donald Trump” by Dan Scavino Jr.

 

 

 

 

Appeared at and reprinted from The American Spectator

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