With the incessant buzz surrounding Kamala Harris and her new running mate Tim Walz, it’s easy to forget that Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt last month and came out on top. The investigation of how a shooter came so close to killing the former president is still underway with no end in sight.

It’s also easy to forget how desperate the Democrat were in their rhetoric. They routinely cast Trump and his supporters as fascists threatening democracy. Even the shooting hardly deterred them from using this language. If it happened to motivate certain deranged individuals to take a shot at Trump, then it was Trump’s fault for sounding so fascist in the first place.

Even though the Democrats still recite the “threat to Democracy” line, its function has changed from an overt political attack to a self-evident unifying mantra among leftists. Now the argument against Trump has become much more ridiculous and rooted in “vibes”: Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance are now “weird” downers while Harris and Walz are joyful and funny.

Whether there really is a vibe shift favoring Harris and the Democrats, as current polls seem to indicate, or whether it’s all fake as astroturf, there has definitely been a vibe shift in the campaign. Although she has yet to go off script, Harris and her party are trying to win hearts and minds instead of destroying Trump with rigged trials at courts and radicalized psychopaths. Clearly, the latter strategy has backfired, showing the Democrats to be corrupt and incompetent, which means a pivot is in order.

And if this is the case, then Trump and the GOP has a good chance of winning this coming election.

For so many years, leftists have come to depend so much on accusing Trump of being Hitler that they have lost the ability to make any other argument. Their dominance over media and nearly every other public institution has made them intellectually soft and lazy. Whether it was disinformation (an intentional lie), misinformation (an accidental lie), or malinformation (an intentionally misleading truth), they could always count on others to echo and reinforce their messaging. If a tree fell in the woods and no one was around to hear it, or maybe just some conservative lumberjacks who cut down the tree themselves, the Left has always been powerful and influential enough to silence it.

And, if the assassination on Trump succeeded, no one should doubt that they would have been able to silence the outcry of conservatives just as well. The shooter would have been declared a right-wing extremist who was inspired by Trump’s hateful rhetoric to “accelerate” America’s descent into fascism by assassinating the former president. Questions about security breakdowns would have been ignored or obscured, if not outright censored (thanks to Murthy v. Missouri), and conservatives would be browbeaten into abandoning the MAGA agenda and nominating Nikki Haley as their presidential candidate. Then Biden would creepily whisper to Americans, “I told you so,” take a nap, and handily win reelection.

Only two factors prevented this outcome: Trump surviving and the Elon Musk taking over Twitter. The former has allowed Trump to secure his legacy with a successor who was even more offensive and dangerous to the Left than himself, and the latter enabled Americans to break through the propaganda. Thus, unlike with Covid or January 6th where there was no contingency plan and no way to question the narrative, Americans now have both.

This means that the Trump-is-Hitler argument has about as much as weight as the argument that Covid is an extremely deadly virus straight out of nature that could only be stopped with multiple face masks and multiple jabs of the MRNA vaccine. Even if the radical leftists will accept both arguments at face value (according to a classmate, the shooter wore a “COVID mask mask well after they were required”), nothing about them is convincing. Any normal person on the right or left can read what people are saying, know that they’re not crazy, and see the demagogues for what they are.

However, because they have nothing else (Bidenomics? Abortion? Weirdness?), Harris and the Democrats will crank up the volume (and cringe) of their campaign as much as possible, doing their best to drown out the voices that have questions about her record, policies, and the fact that she became the Democrat nominee for president without winning any votes. Absolutely nothing qualifies her for the role of president, and thus far, everything about her has been vapid synthetic media hype.

But this won’t work anymore. The spell has been broken. As Harris, Walz, and the corporate media get blackout drunk on their own heavily spiked Kool-Aid, it is Trump and Vance who come off looking presidential and serious. Trump, not Biden or Harris, will be the Great Unifier, as this year’s RNC showed. He might have yelled “Fight!” before leaving the scene, and it’s critical to note that all his supporters have interpreted it as a reassurance, a call to peacefully push back against the violence, corruption, and incompetence plaguing the country.

Some conservatives are fretting about Trump’s unusual equanimity right now, as he seems to be holding his punches in general. But this is as it should be for a man who has transcended the political pandemonium. Unlike earlier campaigns, Trump has many other voices and advocates who can argue and pushback on each new narrative.

In many ways, he’s always won: the Democrats lost their leader, and is scrambling to save its brand. Even if Harris and Walz succeed in reviving the hopes of the base, the Democrat Party has clearly lost its luster and legitimacy. It used to be the party of the educated, the working class, and oppressed minorities. Now it’s the party of oligarchs, ideologues, and insufferable pariahs. The whole thing feels cheap and hollow, and most self-respecting Americans are finally reconsidering their vote. More than anything else, this cheapening is what accounts for the current political shift happening in Silicon Valley, where the nation’s smartest people are finally becoming more self-conscious about supporting an obvious midwit avatar who has no clue what’s going on.

Rather than panic, conservatives should continue to follow the example of Trump and remain confident. Optimism is not complacency, and the truth is on their side. The propaganda has lost its effectiveness, and they actually have a leader.