First of all, congratulations to our new President-elect, Donald J. Trump. We try not to get sucked into the democratic fever, but it was hard to ignore an obviously great man with the right kind of vision making a serious go of it against all the corruption and dysfunction that plagues us.

We wish Mr. Trump the very best of luck. May he strike with the ruthless ferocity of the lightning, and may he be guided by the clear and wise illumination of the sun. If he is the man many think he is, all decent folk can rejoice.

But let’s be realistic and appraise the magnitude of the challenge before him. If he just wishes to be a good president in the current system, I’m sure he’ll do a fine job.

However, doing so will not halt the decline of America, and it will not truly Make America Great Again. If just being a good president is his game, there is no reason for us to get excited. We are interested because we have another vision of what a Trump dynasty might accomplish to make a serious, possibly decisive dent in the historical trend of the declining vitality of Western civilization. If he dares to make an attempt at that sort of greatness, then we have a very serious question on our hands of what will be necessary.

So, let’s start with the diagnosis, which will tell us how deep the rot goes, and thus how deeply we must cut to purify our civilization. It is not just the current elites, though many are indeed corrupt and incompetent. It’s not even the whole Protestant/Puritan/Progressive/politically-correct ideological axis centered on Harvard, though it has been the principle ideology of the forces of our decline. These things are all contributory, and will have to be dealt with, but they are symptoms generated by an underlying cancer.

The underlying cancer is the way power works in the West. Specifically, the false notions of division of power, checks and balances, liberalism, democracy, and limited government. This is counterintuitive, so we will have to explain it: when we see government overreach, tyranny, and deliberate destruction of our way of life, it is easy to think that government power as such is bad, rather than to ask why it is doing those things.

Let’s look at the why: the elites need to go to war against the civilized structure of society—a truthful and inquisitive press, a powerful economy, big old families, a strong middle class, religion, efficient training-focused education, free association, marriage, strong virtuous culture, strong communities, law and order, carefully selective high-quality and culturally compatible immigration, and so on—because each of those things, in a democratic or divided-power system, becomes a power base for their enemies, or pockets of resistance to their rule, or on the other hand can be corrupted to become a power base for the elites. Thus, the structure of society is either damaged or weaponized, as we see. This produces more or less all the direct symptoms we want to fix.

We blame this on the U.S. political system itself, because the entire premise of that system is to prevent the elite from accumulating a decisive and unified lead in political power. To see why this is a problem, let’s examine its opposite: the absolute, unlimited, divine right monarchy, where instead of being divided, power is as much as possible consolidated in a single office, the Crown.

In such a system, has the Crown anything to fear from a strong society? Not at all. No one can vote, so they can’t organize a democratic challenge. They can’t own strategic weapons, so they can’t take on the royal military. They can’t conspire without the all-seeing eye of the Crown taking notice and shutting them down or co-opting them, because the Crown is quite simply better at its core competency—gaining and defending political power—compared to everyone else. If some large sub-empire like Microsoft or Silicon Valley or Harvard gets out of hand, the Crown can formally nationalize them and make sure they are coordinated and loyal. As long as the crown maintains a decisive lead in political power, and the expertise at such, and in an absolute monarchy it has no barrier to doing so, it can simply relax and let civilization flourish, and even invest in civilization, without losing sleep, and taking drastic measures, over its security.

So this is the king-pill: that power we shall always have with us, and that it is thus much better for everyone to kneel, hail, and do the King’s will than to wear ourselves out in endless political conflict at the expense of our civilization.

The democratic republican immediately asks, if monarchy is so great, why have all past monarchies been such a mess? The answer, of course, is those eras in history where power was truly consolidated and secure, and conflict thus eliminated, were of course the finest, but that is a discussion for another time and not primarily the subject of this essay.

The democratic republican’s second objection is: what do we do when we get a bad king?

Let’s hope we get a good one. But what is a king, what is his job, and what does it mean to be bad at it? The king’s primary job is to fill the power vacuum with a single will, so that factional elites do not have to weaponize and ruin the rest of society in order to struggle to accumulate power.

His secondary job is to turn that will towards the improvement of our people, the betterment of our civilization, and the glory of God. This is also a discussion for another time, but we’ll say for now that our primary obstacle to the accomplishment of the second job is our elite’s terribly destructive incompetence at the first, driven by the underlying handicap of democracy. Without democracy, they would either consolidate power and refocus on the problem of how to run a civilization, or they would find themselves replaced by someone who could. As an additional point, this does not mean handing absolute power over to elites who have gained a certain amount of power through navigating within a political system shaped by insecure power.

As for whether the King has the right vision for the future of Western civilization, we believe that Trump is good enough, and that this is a much easier problem to leave to future generations than how to rebuild civilization.

So. Democracy is cancer. Get rid of it, and we are left with the merely herculean task of flushing the crud out of our shiny new monarchy, and strengthening our empire. Fail to get rid of democracy and the crud will pile up ever faster than we can shovel it, because our elites will find that the crud is a necessary aid to democratic rule.

In considering the the endgame of Trump’s administration, we conclude that it must be the end of democracy and the coronation of the Trump dynasty as the royal family of the world-spanning Holy American Empire. We can support nothing less in good conscience.

But how do we get there from here?

First of all, Trump will need a very strong, sufficiently large, and ideologically conditioned organization to pull off any serious change in Washington. How much he can do, whether he merely paves the way for Restoration later, or does it himself now, depends on this.

We could go into the details, but we don’t believe he has the loyal manpower, the intellectual foundation, or the mandate to do a full push for singular executive power:

He’s got his family, Trump organization people, and some other men; he’s got the fanatic loyalty of as many far-right supporters as he can vet; he’s got a good base of useful, if not entirely trustworthy for close coordination, political allies throughout the system and outside it; and he’ll get a lot of cooperation from the police, military, gun-owning public, and the Russians, if need be.

But as far as we can tell, he doesn’t have the cabal of dozens of elite and loyal statesmen he would need to actually build a new government that didn’t inherit the structural problems of the old one. If he does, they don’t have the intellectual and ideological framework of royalist political structure, royalist domestic order, and royal imperialist foreign policy, worked out in enough detail to make the kind of transition we need.

And he can’t get this stuff at this stage. Ready or not, the rocket has left the pad, and it has only what’s on board. Notice that even Putin still hires mostly his old KGB buddies for key positions. Because you can’t trust a talented man who shows up after the critical milestones of your ascent. He might just be a disloyal opportunist. Even one of Trump’s most prominent open supporters, Peter Thiel, emphasizes this in his book “Zero to One,” suggesting that startups (and what is a new regime but a startup?), should hire as much as possible only from one’s trusted friend network. As far as elite officers go, Trump is stuck with people he already has good relationships with, or he will have to compromise on loyalty. He’s a good businessman, but he’s not magic.

So he’s got who he’s got, and it’s not enough for full Restoration. Short of a Reichstag fire and a human resources miracle, all he can shoot for is to purge some corruption, push things in the right direction, repair some damage, and buy time for a more complete Restoration in the future.

Given that he’s not going to be able to become absolute ruler of America, there are two major parts of his mandate as a merely democratic president:

1. Make America Great Again. Basically, while he’s in office, he needs to do a good job. I have no doubt that he can do so, assuming he can manage to make deals with the bureaucracies. As much as possible within a democratic framework, Make America Great Again. Make some great trade deals, strengthen our international position, purge the corrupt, reboot the economy, stop crime and illegal immigration, and psychologically heal the deep social divisions produced by democratic politics. He doesn’t need our advice here.

2. Unify, deradicalize, and secure a responsible long-term elite coalition. Thinking about the slightly longer game, if Trump merely kicks the beehive and leaves the leftist elite intact and radicalized, they’ll work overtime in the areas he doesn’t directly control, and once he leaves office, to continue to subvert America and Western civilization. Mitigating this will be really tricky without being able to get rid of democracy or fully purge the elite.

Here’s an intuition for that second issue: Trump has just proved that the Left wasn’t importing enough vote-slave immigrants, that they weren’t weaponizing education hard enough, that they need to be more underhanded in subverting the ability of the civilized forces of society to hijack political power.

We can see this on Facebook and Twitter: a lot of these leftists are being radicalized. This is bad. They will come back with vengeance when given the chance.

Their retaliation will just cause more chaos and division. That’s unacceptable. So we need to prevent that from happening. The non-obvious but necessary solution is that Trump needs to leave the presidency with the political elite unified, de-radicalized, and secure, rather than divided, hateful, or broken.

It’s the same reason we oppose democracy. A unified and secure elite, that is, one that can work together amicably, and has no immediate powerful enemies, can rule responsibly. But to actually rule responsibly, they have to be into ruling responsibly, not hatefully destroying things associated with previous enemies, which means you have to get rid of those people. Thus, unified, secure, and de-radicalized.

If the elite is left divided, factions will immediately re-radicalize and start smashing up the structure of society again in their struggle for dominance. If the elite is left insecure, in that they have not closed off avenues of challenge, some new counter-elite will spring up and oppose them, and we’ll be back to the divided and re-radicalized situation were in the first place.

So, how can Trump unify, secure, and de-radicalize the elite? Move Left on key causes like economics and health care to take the wind out of their sails, rebuild the Republican Party, throw the Democrats into chaos, expose, purge, and destroy all the crooks and radicals, including non-governmental actors like the foundations and Soros, make magnanimous alliances with the rest of the elite, strategically change immigration policy, deconstruct leftist ideological propaganda and disable their propaganda organs and speech controls, build the wall, get the universities and media to play nice, sow dissent among the enemy, weaken democracy, and Make America Great Again for all Americans. We could go into infinite detail, but that’s not our job here.

Our point here is that the purpose of Trump’s presidency is not to go in there and piss people off, smash things up, stimulate the enemy’s immune system, and have fun.

No, the point is to build and rearrange whatever is necessary to temporarily stop the decline caused by democratic incentives and ideology, to buy time to put together a real Restoration. And the only way to do that is to make the elite unified, secure, and de-radicalized, so that when Trump leaves office, there is no backlash.

Trump’s new government is now hiring people like us. For those of you who will get in on that, your mission is simple: purge the radicals, magnanimously unify the elite, and learn things and meet people who can be used for a real Restoration. Don’t expect to achieve full Restoration, and don’t sow chaos and hate; that will only make things worse.

And that’s about all we can hope for with Trump. It’s been done before, after Lincoln and with FDR. I don’t know if Trump is that good, but maybe it can be done. Good luck to ye.

But whatever happens, it’s not going to be enough. Democracy and communism will not be defeated this time, and when Trump is done, if democracy still stands, all the worst of the modern world will come crawling back.

So let’s keep our heads, and keep this in mind: Trump will not end democracy and bring about the coming golden age. He won’t do so because no one was ready with a männerbund of a thousand virtuous statesmen with a full vision and plan. Therefore, if that’s going to happen, while Trump and company labor valiantly in the Potomac swamp, someone has to be building that intellectual and human infrastructure for the true Restoration in the future.

It is not immediate power we need for the long game, but wisdom, vision, virtue, and solidarity. We will not get these from Trump’s administration. These things can only be built without the distractions of power. The men of the Trump administration will be busy playing anti-communist whack-a-mole and thinking about a very different set of strategic considerations than a long-term Restoration-focused research team must be. Their work will be valuable I’m sure, but they will not have the time or attention to think about the long game.

We will continue our work in private. We will continue our research, continue to organize, and continue to network. Trump will be helpful, but our task is so much bigger than this.

And, if we are patient and prudent, and we do a good job putting together our team and Restoration vision, in a decade or two, far more power will be available to us for our true task, which is not winning elections, but finally pulling America and mankind out of the Kali Yuga and into a new golden age.

So Hail Trump, but let’s keep our heads. There’s a lot of work to do.