The Hero’s Journey Ends Today, But How?

This column has noted, multiple times over the course of this year, that the 2024 presidential election has taken on the character of the literary trope of the Hero’s Journey. And today, the final chapter in that story will be written by the American people.

If you’re unfamiliar with what the Hero’s Journey means, it’s pretty simple: The New Testament is an example of the Hero’s Journey. The Star Wars–Luke Skywalker saga is the Hero’s Journey. Bilbo and Frodo Baggins were also good examples. Paul Atreides in the Dune books and movies is another.

The hero begins as something desirable and ends as something more, usually something great. Along the way, he’s presented with massive, perhaps insurmountable obstacles, and he has to change and grow to overcome them. Who he was at the beginning of the journey was not enough to succeed; he must become more.

And the Hero’s Journey is also marked by villains. Often, the villains make the story more than the hero does. The evil nature of those in the hero’s way is what makes the journey most compelling, because without that, this is just some partisan story.

Along the way, Donald Trump became more than he was at the beginning of this cycle. And that is why he must complete the journey and become the 47th president-elect of the United States when the results are announced tonight.

(I’m assuming they’ll be announced tonight. If they are not, it is a clear sign that the evil forces with which this hero has done battle are not vanquished.)

To be honest, there was a time following the disappointment of the 2022 midterm elections when a compelling argument could be made that America needed to take much of what Trump offered in his first term, preserve it, perhaps improve on it, and then move on to something newer, younger, and stylistically more appealing. That was the value proposition that Ron DeSantis, and a few others, brought to the table in the GOP primaries.

For a time, DeSantis was highly competitive with Trump in early polling. His campaign had a few flaws that showed up as Trump leaned on him with aggressive rhetoric and vigorous trolling, but what killed DeSantis’ bid to embark on his own Hero’s Journey, at least in this cycle, were the villains.

This election has always been about the villains. As was the 2016 election. The 2020 election should have been, but with the fog of COVID and the massive amounts of public deception obscuring the voters’ choice that year, there wasn’t the clarity we have now.

The clarity began to come when the Biden administration sent the FBI to raid Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago. Then he was indicted in New York, Atlanta, Miami, and Washington. Trump was sued, essentially for rape, by a woman who couldn’t even identify what year the supposed attack happened. Then he was hauled into court for “fraud” over a dispute over real estate valuations offered as collateral for business loans major banks underwrote and issued — and those loans were paid back. In each case, it was clear the judicial system was weaponized against him by corrupt Democrats in partisan jurisdictions where Republicans can no longer get a fair trial.

As an aside, I don’t know that Daniel Penny is a Republican, but I imagine he is one if he’s at all political. Penny was the ex-Marine who defended New York subway passengers from a crazed homeless drug addict threatening to kill someone, and he’s being put on trial for having done so. Penny is reputed to have killed the homeless man, but it turns out that he was very much alive when Penny finished with him but in the throes of a drug overdose.

Testimony in legal proceedings last week determined that first responders refused to give the homeless man mouth-to-mouth because of a fear of getting hepatitis. This after Penny has spent countless thousands of dollars defending himself in court to date; New York prosecutors knew all along that he wasn’t prosecutable, and yet they persist.

This is the jurisdiction where the majority of Trump’s legal troubles come from.

When attempts to take away Trump’s fortune and freedom sagged, then came the slander.

Trump has been slurred as a dictator and a Nazi. He’s been tarred as Hitler again and again by Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, the entire “mainstream” legacy corporate media, and every two-bit Democrat politician from the D.C. swamp and across the blue islands of urban America. The level of rhetoric thrown his way in this election cycle is like something from the very beginnings of American democracy, when John Adams’ and Thomas Jefferson’s camps accused each other of rape and pillage with utter alacrity. Never in the media age has anything so irresponsible been unleashed on a major party political candidate.

And with a very specific purpose: to gin up potential assassins.

Of which two emerged: one on a rooftop in Butler, Pennsylvania in mid-July, the other on a Palm Beach golf course just before Trump arrived on the fifth green. Both would-be assassins fit the mold of losers radicalized by anti-Trump propaganda.

You’d have thought the two assassination attempts would have cowed Trump’s enemies, lest they give away their obvious casting as villains. You’d be wrong. They’ve doubled down since.

And to prove their commitment to the “democracy,” they accuse Trump of threatening, they staged a coup in their own party, throwing out Biden after Trump annihilated him in an early debate and installing Harris as their candidate. She’s run a fact- and truth-free campaign fraught with lies, obfuscations, and evasions, claiming to be the candidate of joy while running on anti-Trump fear, rejecting old stances in a mishmash of campaign rhetoric that convinces no one that her radical days are over, and hiding from real interviews as often as she could while disqualifying herself when she couldn’t.

The Kamala Harris campaign has been an exercise in political villainy in both great and petty things — baiting and switching conventioneers and event-goers in Chicago and Houston with promises of Beyonce concerts, employing ActBlue money of dubious — and quite possibly foreign — origin in the most expensive campaign effort in American history, deluging the public with attack ads calling Trump names and employing, in “We Can’t Go Back,” a campaign slogan that is utterly sinister in its background message.

“We Can’t Go Back” is a threat of street violence in the event Trump wins the 2024 election. Harris’ threat that if Trump wins, there will be no more elections is projection at best and a preemptive declaration of war more likely. The Left offered a taste of civil unrest in Trump’s first term; now, with his second coming close at hand, there is little indication of restraint in the coming days if they don’t get their way.

The villains have shown themselves.

But so have the heroes.

And this cycle has offered us not just Trump’s journey. He isn’t doing this alone.

When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suspended his third-party campaign and threw his lot in with Trump, something a year ago none would have predicted, this campaign stopped being about just Trump. It stopped being about the basic ideological fight. It started to become our national Heroes’ Journey. Kennedy’s running mate, Nicole Shanahan released a compelling web ad outlining just how deep and wide the movement to elect Trump promises to be today:

This is the best Trump ad to date. We are never going to have a team like this again. Go and vote. Leave it all on the field and win! pic.twitter.com/9O5Hx6ku3B

— Michael Sebastian (@HonorAndDaring) November 3, 2024

Kennedy, who threw away his family’s Democrat legacy to cross the aisle and work to save the country.

Tulsi Gabbard, who switched parties when it became obvious that the neocon chicken hawks were now lined up on Team Harris after two decades of endless wars and national disgrace at their hands.

Elon Musk, the single greatest American capitalist alive today, who threw $44 billion of his own money into saving free speech by turning Twitter into X, and, having seen the utter corruption and tyranny of which the Biden–Harris Deep State was capable, has now thrown massive resources at rebalancing American elections thrown so out of whack in 2020 (and, to a lesser extent, in 2022).

Vivek Ramaswamy. JD Vance. Glenn Youngkin. Riley Gaines. Kevin O’Leary. Scott Jennings. Tucker Carlson. Charlie Kirk. The list of people putting their careers, fortunes, and reputations on the line for the Trump team is endless. So much passion transcends a personal love for Trump. He’s become more than he was. He’s now a symbol for the ordinary, commonsense American, tired of the corruption and abuse at the hands of our ruling elite. His scars are our scars, and his quest is now our quest.

To his credit, Trump has shouldered that burden. He’s become much more disciplined on the campaign trail. He speaks much less of himself and much more of regular America. He talks of policy more than he has. And rather than waste time trying to slug it out with the Propaganda Press, Trump has gone to the American people where we are, doing countless podcasts and independent media interviews where his message can be distributed without the warping and distortions so inherent at ABC, CBS, and the other alphabet soup networks.

Trump outworked Harris, and Trump earned the victory he should achieve today. While Team Harris called the American people garbage, Trump showed his love for the country.

We’ll find out if America loves him back.

And if the results are free and fair and uncorrupted, we’ll see that America does. The Hero’s Journey will thus conclude as the Hero’s Journey must.

And then another journey, that of reviving the America we love, can then begin.

Subscribe to The American Spectator.

The post The Hero’s Journey Ends Today, But How? appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.