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Mattis-Bezos 2024?

October 25, 2018

An interesting tidbit on levels of institutional trust in the United States:

As John Robb notes, the GOP's most-trusted institutions are the military (1) and Amazon (3). But it's worth highlighting that the same is basically true for Democrats: The two most-trusted institutions for Democrats are Amazon (1) and the military (3).

The fact that the military remains one of the most trustworthy institutions in the United States is no surprise: The U.S. military is an all-volunteer force doing incredibly difficult work in incredibly taxing environments with a minimum of complaining and high level of competence. The worst military scandals have to do with the fact that we don't take good enough care of the military once they're done fighting. They take care of their bad seeds and promote their good seeds. The military is great and the secretary of defense, General James Mattis, is the most-respected person in the entire government, a warrior-poet with a social conscience who has no compunction killing bad people with extreme prejudice.

You know who else loves the military? Jeff Bezos! As I mentioned earlier this week, Bezos has scuttled efforts by weak-kneed millennial sorts burrowed away in the Amazon empire who want to stop the greatest business in the history of businesses from working with the military, ICE, and other important government agencies. Given the fact that almost two-thirds of American households already fork over a fair amount of money for access to Amazon Prime, it's no wonder Bezos's company is so well respected.

Now, look: I see no reason why either of these great Americans would want to do something as foolish and petty as run for president. They've got it pretty good! Mattis gets to run the military he loves and serve as the protector of the troops who protect us. Bezos gets to provide goods and services to Americans all over the country, run a movie studio, eat octopus for breakfast, and go to the moon.

I'd suggest this as a ticket for 2020, but I can't imagine Mattis would have any interest in leaving the Trump administration and then running against his former boss. He's probably too honorable a guy to do something that would be perceived as stabbing him in the back. But in these troubled times of hyper-partisanship and domestic worry, perhaps these two American heroes would be willing to give up their glamorous lives and run as a third-party unity ticket in 2024. It's a ticket that would appeal to moderates on both sides of the aisle, a ticket that could reunite this terribly divided country. Sure, Stupid Socialist Twitter will whinge about the military-industrial complex finally unifying in the White House officially. Granted, Stupid MAGA Twitter will whinge about globalism and tech cucks taking over.

But these two extremes are actually a pretty small strand of the electorate! The mushy middle—the sort of folks who want nothing more than their stuff to come in two business days and their military to stay on that wall, keeping us safe—is far larger. This silent majority has been looking for someone to pull the country out of the grotesque quagmire it currently finds itself in. Perhaps the answer has been in the polling all along?