Welcome to Princetonians for Trump, a small, anonymous group with deplorable growth potential – and no formal affiliation with a school once known as The College of New Jersey, a name still endlessly useful in dissociating ourselves from it, here as in real life offline.

We enjoy appreciating Donald Trump in diverse intellectually inconsistent ways, including: as a showman and a font of mirth; as a liberator from ideology; and as a chastening and a harbinger of chastening yet to come that Princetonians deserve even more abundantly than do the οἱ πολλοί.

Donald is a brilliant comedian who got elected president by innovative and incisive mockery of ideological idols. He mocked idolatry not only of free trade and multiculturalism, jointly the “politically correct” ideology of globalism, but also of democracy, which folks who are not ideologues love not as a god but as a tool. Well before 2016, vast numbers of Americans had lost faith in those idols. However, no American politician before Donald had thought to challenge those idols in the only way by which idols can non-violently be dethroned, namely by mockery.

Donald not only thought of mocking them; he devised extraordinarily effective ways of mocking them. He ran the first unabashedly “politically incorrect” presidential campaign. He also innovated the technique of telling countless transparent small lies in mockery of one big lie, namely the idolatry of democracy preached by U.S. elites as they destroyed democracy’s economic and cultural foundations. Anyone who imagines that most folks who voted for Trump were unaware that he had lied incessantly during the 2016 campaign has failed to get the joke. Donald’s campaign ended, after his election-night victory speech, by playing The Rolling Stones’ “You can’t always get what you want, but … you get what you need.” That evinced greater skill at self-mockery than any president since Lincoln has shown, while conveying Donald’s core message that ideological wishful thinking does not change reality.

Donald’s greatest triumph as a comedian has been to strip the idols. The folks who couldn’t imagine that someone who didn’t share their worldview could win the Republican nomination, much less the general election, when in fact half the county didn’t share their worldview, were ideologues – blinded to reality by avoidance of cognitive dissonance. Donald exposed them as ideologues by winning successive primaries, the nomination, and the general election. Countless members of America’s ruling elites had publicly proclaimed each of those events impossible, not in any empirical sense (i.e., not based on election-eve polling), but in the sense of “unthinkable” due to the cognitive dissonance entailed in trying to imagine widespread dissent from self-evident truth. For half the country, watching the ideologues confront their exposure as ideologues on election night was memorably hilarious. Saddeningly, nearly all of them remain ideologues, unable to imagine that their pseudo-democratic globalist ideology will not inevitably triumph, committed to demonizing dissent from it, and incapable of learning from their experience in 2016 any lesson other than that the faithful must redouble their efforts and root out heresy wherever they may find it.

Donald seems a spontaneous natural comedian, often regrettably unaware of how brilliantly comedic he is and of how central comedy is to his success. Were he consistently conscious of that, he would resist the temptation to try to act “presidential,” to which he sometimes succumbs. Ideological idols cannot be toppled by acting “presidential,” which entails acting reasonable. Ideologies are closed belief systems against which reason is useless and only mockery or force can prevail. We can make do without a president; the federal government can fly on autopilot. However, we desperately need a comedian-in-chief if we are to escape non-violently from strangling by ideology.

Policies, ideologies, nations and forms of government are transient, but love of laughter is as old as mankind. The more we are exposed by media to our head of state and government, the more skill in entertainment becomes emotionally compelling as a criterion by which to choose the holder of that office, as our election of Bonzo’s co-star and The Terminator attest. And the more our public discourse is confined by ideology, the more skill in mockery becomes intellectually compelling as a criterion by which to choose public office-holders well-positioned to induce loss of faith in ideology by mocking it.

Donald is just the start of what we deserve and shall receive. The brilliant showman has a star-studded and fast-growing worldwide cast of supporting actors, including Milos Zeman, Victor Orban, Mateusz Morawiecki, Robert Fico, Peter Pellegrini, Sebastian Kurz, Matteo Salvini, Jair Bolsonaro, Marie Le Pen, Markus Söder, Frauke Petry, Geert Wilders, Nigel Farage, Janez Janša, Nebojsa Medojevic and, globetrotting amongst them, our own much-missed Steve Bannon. The show shall go on.

“Whom the Lord loves, He chastens.” For what we now receive, may our hearts be unfeignedly thankful, for the non-comedic way of toppling ideological idols is far less pleasant and seems likely to be attempted if the comedic way fails. The worldwide evolution and persistence of unitary cultures, nations, borders and restrictions on trade, finance and migration is no mere accident that will go peacefully into the night. It may be defeated; our addiction to ideology is millennia-old and unfathomably deep. However, even if reality rarely prevails in its endless conflict with ideology, it does impel the spawning of new ideologies to replace discredited ideologies, offering us an ever-more-varied menu of deliciously risible ideologies jointly far more amusing than any single ideology could be.

Whether one loves or loathes Donald, one can appreciate him as a comedic alternative to something way nastier and all too likely if he fails.

From observing the impoverishment of non-slaveholding whites in the southern U.S. by Southern elites' mass enslavement of Africans, nineteenth-century historians including George Bancroft and Theodor Mommsen gleaned the insight that the Roman republic had ended in large part because its ever-richer patriciate’s growing use of foreign slaves drove Italian plebs into poverty, into Marius’ new professional army, and into the pro-plebian political movement successively led by the Gracchi, by Marius, by Catiline and by Caesar. In context of ever-richer contemporary U.S. elites’ growing use of cheap foreign labor by free trade and mass immigration in recent decades, we might appreciate the 2016 election as analogous to what might have happened in Rome in 65-63 BCE if Catiline had been a brilliant comedian rather than an inept conspirator, and appreciate Donald both as a non-violent alternative to future analogues of Pharsalus and Philippi and as their harbinger if he fails.

Princetonians for Trump hope to enhance such appreciation of Donald among a community that the U.S. increasingly has resembled in recent decades as the U.S. has become more socially and economically stratified and more indifferent to working people. We hope also to enhance Princetonians’ appreciation of Princeton as a microcosm of all that has inspired tens of millions of blue-collar folks to vote for Donald, and so to enhance Princetonians’ appreciation of their own leading role in bringing us so brilliantly comedic a ruler. To this redemptive calling – as Jonathan Edwards might point out if he could rise from his grave on Witherspoon Street – Donald’s orange wig and black humor seem visible signs of Princetonians’ election.

The old school tie