In an election season like the present, the Alfred E. Smith Dinner seems conspicuously dated.

Not unlike the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner, in this year of the Outsider (or is it the year of the Deplorables?) last week’s event appeared more than ever as but another occasion to showcase the incestuous relationship between the members of the Government/Media elite.

Donald Trump’s appearance would have threatened to compromise his reputation as the anti-Establishment candidate had it not been for the fact that some of his remarks regarding his opponent managed to elicit loud boos from, well, the very Establishmentarians against whom he’s been railing for the last year-and-a-half.  His enemies in the national press and the professional politicians for whom they routinely apologize still haven’t figured out that in assailing Trump, they only vindicate him in the eyes of the tens of millions of his supporters.

Such has been the impact of Trump’s candidacy that it would be only slightly hyperbolic to divide the timeline of our political universe into B.T.P (Before the Trump Phenomenon) and A.T.P (After the Trump Phenomenon).  The problem with the GOP nominee’s legions of detractors in the halls of power is that they lack either the ability or the will to recognize that the force of Trump’s break out candidacy has thrust us from one epoch to another. Both Republican and Democrat Regimists in D.C. and the national press now live within a time warp.

At no point in our history has the Regime’s hegemony been as vulnerable as it is at the present moment.  Courtesy of the Trump Phenomenon, i.e. the movement that’s coalesced around Trump’s candidacy, the electorate has been able to confirm what it has long suspected.  For perhaps the first time ever, even those voters who only engage in politics every four years know about such things as the faux-democratic nature of the primary process, the deception and hypocrisy of “conservative” politicians and media personalities, and the nakedly partisan nature of self-styled “journalists.”

Voters now know of the “alt-right” and, by implication, the “alt-left.”

Voters know of Wikileaks, private servers, compromises of national security, and hacked emails revealing corruption after corruption within the Clinton campaign specifically, and the DNC generally.

For a long while, indignation has been fomenting among much of the American citizenry.  Among those Americans—mostly whites of the middle and working classes—this indignation has been as acute as it has been justified.  These are the Americans who could usually have been counted upon to vote Republican.  After years of having been taken for granted, millions began sitting out elections.  The resistance on the part of Republican establishmentarians to Trump’s candidacy has vindicated their suspicions that the GOP is but another wing of the very Regime whose interests are diametrically at odds with those of their own.

And Trump’s candidacy itself, while giving voice to their frustrations and their hope that the powers-to-be just may succumb to defeat, has catapulted them back into the political fold with a vengeance.

Hillary Clinton didn’t misspeak at all when she referred to “half” of Trump’s backers as “deplorable” and “irredeemable.”  She didn’t misspeak when she accused them of every politically incorrect phobia and “ism.” At the same time, the Deplorables are all too aware that Clinton’s remarks hardly reflect idiosyncratic sentiments on her part.  Quite the contrary: Clinton was merely expressing the shared judgment of her class, the Regime.

The Deplorables have always suspected that both Democrat and Republican regimists have long regarded them as, well, deplorable. The Regime’s scorched Earth treatment of Trump and, by implication, his supporters, transformed this suspicion into knowledge.  Clinton’s comments made this knowledge explicit.

Here’s the point: Win or lose, but especially if he loses, Trump’s army of Deplorables promises to grow.  As much as the Government-Media Axis would like to turn back the hands of time, we are now living in a post-Trump epoch.  The toothpaste, as we say, is out of the tube.

Trump supporters, including and most tellingly women and young teens, had been attacked and beaten for no reason other than that they were Trump supporters. As we now know courtesy of Project Veritas, assailants were not infrequently rental thugs dispatched by the DNC.  No one is going to tolerate this any longer.

When thugs threatened to wreak similar havoc in Cleveland during Trump’s convention, thousands of armed bikers and truckers—“Bikers for Trump” and “Truckers for Trump”—poured into the city to assist the police in patrolling the streets.  There were no incidences. Even now, former soldiers and police officers have taken up arms along our southern border to function as the wall that Trump insists he will build to arrest the massive influx into the United States of illegal immigrants.

By two-to-one, active military personnel support Trump over his opponent.  A Border Patrol Agents’ Union of 5,000 members, for the first time in its history, endorsed a presidential candidate when it endorsed Trump.  The Fraternal Order of Police, the largest police union in the country, did the same.  So too does the NRA endorse Trump.

With some 300 million guns, there are more legal guns in America owned by private citizens than there are private citizens who own guns.  Most of these gun owners are disposed to sympathize with Trump.

If Trump loses, all of these folks will take it as a given that it is because the election has indeed been “rigged” against their candidate.  Insofar as the Regime’s propagandists in the national press long ago threw off so much as the pretense of objectivity when covering this presidential race, they have been working overtime at cooking its outcome.  For the Deplorables, this is as plain as the noses on their faces.

Neither Trump nor any other person connected with his campaign is calling for anything like armed revolution.  But the elitists in the Regime, if they wish to avoid the latter, should proceed cautiously.  It’s this writer’s hunch that a sleeping giant has been awoken from its decades-long slumber.  Just a little more prodding on their part promises to usher in a day in the not-so-distant-future when those in the Regime will ache in retrospect for the gentleness of Trump.

A powder keg could be on the verge of exploding.