C.A.A. On Vacation

 The C.A.A. will be on vacation the the U.S. for Thanksgiving as of tomorrow, Friday, November 18th. They may be sporadic updates during the vacation. Regular updates will resume on Saturday, December 3rd. 

America Needs a Conservative Party

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, November 16, 2022

 

So far, 2022 election postmortems have focused on the degree to which Donald Trump’s mimics—with their prickly demeanors, conspiratorial paranoia, and adherence to stolen election narratives—cost the GOP winnable races. That’s justifiable, given the underperformance of those candidates compared with more conventional Republicans up and down the ballot. But the GOP’s Trumpy candidates were not evaluated on personality alone. They took with them into their races both the baggage Donald Trump brings to the table and his populist platform.

 

In 2022, the rise of populist Republicanism muted the distinctions between the two parties and foreclosed any prospect of voting for a party that will preserve as much or more than it will transform. Indeed, the bipartisan consensus around the notion that America could use a radical overhaul has led the country’s two major political parties to mirror each other in ways that are utterly redundant.

 

For example, America doesn’t need two parties dedicated to fiscal profligacy. In October, by dint of the fact that his party didn’t introduce another multi-trillion-dollar Covid relief bill in 2022 and instead passed something it decided to call the “Inflation Reduction Act,” Joe Biden insisted that Democrats were now the “fiscally responsible” party. It’s a laughable claim, but it’s understandable why he’d stake it out. With the GOP having sacrificed its reputation for frugality, the mantle of fiscal prudence is up for grabs. Democrats cannot simultaneously attack the few honest brokers willing to acknowledge the imminent insolvency of America’s entitlement programs or its unserviceably large interest burdens and still claim to be the party of green eyeshades. But nor can the post-Trump GOP.

 

Critics of pre-Trump Republicanism long observed that the GOP was only ever the party of fiscal prudence when it was out of power. In power, Republicans spent as big as their liberal counterparts. But hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, the virtue here being prudence. In abandoning the hypocrisy with which it was duly charged, the Republican Party has given up a contrast with the Democrats that served it well in times of uncertainty and hardship. If both parties are profligate and don’t care who knows it, why would voters endorse pale pastels over bold colors? In Republican-led states, conventionally conservative prescriptions for growth–low taxes, a navigable regulatory environment, and the freedom to fail–are proven concepts. Moreover, given the GOP’s intention to present itself as the anti-inflation party merely because its augmented presence in Congress represents an obstacle before big-spending Democrats, the reversion to a conservative mean will require fewer rhetorical contortions along the way.

 

Likewise, America doesn’t need two parties committed to the country’s withdrawal from the world stage. Again, Republicans thought they might benefit by default, having failed to preside over the humiliating, bloody debacle Joe Biden engineered in Afghanistan. In retrospect, it’s unclear why. Donald Trump retailed his intention to do the same thing, and (we subsequently learned) he tried to execute a withdrawal similar to Biden’s but with even less preparation.

 

In the interim, the Republican Party has made itself into a tribune for the unpopular view that the U.S. should abandon Ukraine to the depredations of its would-be Russian conquerors. Republican infotainment addicts are bombarded almost nightly with a McGovernite view of America’s malign role in geopolitical affairs—a view shared primarily by the last few genuine McGovernites who still call the Democratic Party home. Trump-trained Republicans have increasingly come around to the notion that the American-led world order isn’t worth preserving. So, the banal and thankless task of maintaining the advantageous status quo falls to their counterparts.

 

Speaking of the unfashionable, counterrevolutionary act of preserving the status quo against the forces of radical change, the United States needs a party responsive to its pro-life constituents that also reckons with the political realities of the post-Dobbs environment. Anti-abortion activists who might once have thought they could impose their vision of society on their neighbors by fiat have endured enough rude awakenings by now that only the comatose could miss them. A healthy political party would internalize those unmistakable signals and respond accordingly.

 

A conservative party is not without moral convictions, but nor is it allergic to the persuasion and incrementalism that effects durable changes to the social contract over generations, not election cycles. The verdict in Dobbs overturned a half-century of predictability. Progressive partisans and their emissaries are just as out of step with the American mainstream when it comes to abortion, but they maximized the advantage of being the party that promised to restore the status quo. Republicans believe Dobbs restored a more durable, republican social covenant. But without an emphasis on liberty and the sovereignty of the individual, it looks to the uncommitted observer–with no living memory of pre-Roe conventions–like radicalism.

 

Of course, America does not need two parties animated by paranoia. Among Democrats, the story of the United States is a Balkan tale of inter-tribal warfare. Rich vs. poor, corporate America vs. the little guy, the white majority vs. everyone else, and so on. It is an account of historical grievances and the long march toward justice, with the promise of victory culminating in the comeuppance to the vanquished. This outlook provides fertile soil in which conspiracy theories could flourish, which is why the Democratic Party has until recently been the traditional home of election-denial and constitutionally dubious power grabs designed to punish the ill-defined plotters.

 

The long, bitterly aggrieved memory this outlook requires was imported into his adopted party by Donald Trump, and it flourished like an invasive species. But this is not an outlook that can long survive in a political coalition that prizes individual agency above all else. An outlook that views government as a tool to even the historical scales rather than what it more often is, an obstacle to human flourishing and a means of preserving more conflicts than it resolves, will embrace paranoia.

 

When America had a conservative party, it also had a boring party. Contrary to conservatism’s critics, the boring party was not without ethical convictions, strong policy preferences, or the will to shape the nation in its own image. Nor was it bereft of success stories, however reluctant its critics are to admit. Today, the country has two very lively parties, and lively parties are unpredictable parties. Both seek fundamental transformations to the American compact. Both take a dim view of the choices you’ve made for yourself and their aggregate effects. Neither can muster much enthusiasm for America’s institutions of self-governance or the mechanisms of entropic social organization that constitute themselves in the absence of a guiding hand.

 

To some extent, that is the natural disposition we would expect from the technocratic party—the party of reform, revitalization, and renewal. It’s alien to a conservative party, which is perhaps why conservatism can seem passé. To hear the most passionate Republican office seekers tell it, the nation is in a state of existential peril that only revolutionary action can reverse. There is no American political party dedicated to taming the reactionary impulses that fall in and out of fashion among the gentry classes. Our political culture is defined now by two factions in a constant state of reinvention, and they’ve come to look a lot like each other in that regard.

 

As liberals become progressives and conservatives become populists, Americans look upon this perpetual identity crisis and see a nation without grownups secure enough in their convictions that they might maintain them for more than a few months. America needs a grown-up party. America needs a conservative party.

The Shamelessness of the Failed Senate Rebellion against Mitch McConnell

By Christian Schneider

Wednesday, November 16, 2022

 

And if your mission is to troll your way to the presidency in 2024, you don’t need a powerful, dignified master of Senate procedure leading you.

 

After Republicans butt-fumbled away their chance to retake the majority in 2022, fingers immediately began pointing at McConnell, the GOP’s longest-serving leader.

 

“First we need to make sure that those who want to lead us are genuinely committed to fighting for the priorities & values of the working Americans (of every background) who gave us big wins in states like #Florida,” wrote newly reelected senator Marco Rubio, urging that today’s leadership vote be postponed.

 

Missouri senator Josh Hawley declared the midterm elections the “funeral for the Republican Party as we know it,” calling the party “dead.” Presumably, he did so while holding a bloody knife. It was Hawley, after all, who was last seen cheering on a mob of Trump supporters who may not have seen him because they were busy trying to hang Vice President Mike Pence. It was Hawley who chose to feed Trump’s conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, leading voters such as those who stormed the Capitol to believe that the election had been stolen — and almost certainly helping to cost the GOP control of the Senate. So naturally, it is Hawley who’s now playing the child who murders his parents and expects sympathy from the court because he’s an orphan.

 

Finally, on Tuesday, Florida senator Rick Scott announced a long-shot bid to replace McConnell as Senate Republican leader — the first challenge McConnell had faced since assuming his perch atop the caucus in 2007. “I believe it’s time for the Senate Republican Conference to be far more bold and resolute than we have been in the past,” Scott wrote in a letter to his colleagues. “We must start saying what we are for, not just what we are against.”

 

These are the words of a group of unserious senators who have no interest in actually governing over the next two years. As members of the minority, Senate Republicans should have only one role, which is to sit in their seats and say the word “nay.” They should exist to block the Democrats’ bad ideas from making their way to President Joe Biden’s desk. Instead, McConnell’s detractors plan to govern through a historical Senate process known as “lib-owning,” which doesn’t require the institutional strength and knowledge possessed by their longtime leader.

 

Of course, McConnell easily held off their challenge on Wednesday, because there are more than enough Republican senators who appreciate the steady hand with which he has guided them over the years. But clearly, too many others have forgotten the phenomenal job he’s done. After all, three conservative justices have McConnell to thank for their places on the U.S. Supreme Court. And Donald Trump, though he’d never admit it, has McConnell to thank for every one of the big legislative victories of his presidency, from his historic tax cut to the First Step Act reducing sentences on nonviolent criminals.

 

(Trump, because he had little to no idea how Congress or the federal government worked, desperately needed McConnell’s experience. As Maggie Haberman reports in her new book, even after four years in office, Trump still believes the Senate minority can block any bill by simply refusing to show up for the vote.)

 

Perhaps McConnell’s critics want a leader who reflects a version of the party that is more populist, never mind that their “populism” doesn’t seem all that popular. Or perhaps their failed effort to replace him is rooted in his long-running feud with Trump. During the former president’s second impeachment, McConnell all but put up a neon sign inviting prosecutors to go after Trump for his post-election activities. Since then, Trump has hammered away at McConnell, at one point saying the minority leader has a “death wish” and referring to his “China loving wife, Coco Chow!” (McConnell, of course, is married to Taiwanese-American Elaine Chao, who served as secretary of transportation in Trump’s own administration.)

 

Fittingly, Trump’s acolytes are now blaming McConnell for the caucus’s electoral losses, because he chose to pull funding from lost-cause candidates such as Blake Masters in Arizona and Don Bolduc in New Hampshire. (Bolduc ended up losing by nine points, and Blake Masters lost by around five points.)

 

The criticism of McConnell’s resource-allocation choices is particularly risible coming from Scott, given that Scott led the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and thus bore primary responsibility for electing more Republicans to the Senate this cycle. During the GOP primaries, Scott argued against intervening in contested races to help nominate more-electable Republican candidates. Democrats, on the other hand, were more than happy to put money into helping the least-electable Republicans win their primaries, a strategy that appears to have worked.

 

It wasn’t McConnell’s fault that Republican primary voters picked such awful candidates during the primaries. McConnell did not trick Bolduc into being an election denier. McConnell did not father Herschel Walker’s love children (as far as we know). He did not force Mehmet Oz to drink a plastic cup of wine at a football tailgate party.

 

As McConnell himself put it in the lead-up to Wednesday’s vote, “We under-performed among independents and moderates because their impression of many of the people in our party, in leadership roles, is that they’re causing chaos, negativity, excessive attacks. And it frightened independent and moderate Republican voters.”

 

It is not as though McConnell has been perfect. But when he has erred, it has been in going too easy on Trump. Perhaps the former insurrectionist-in-chief would now be ineligible to run for president in 2024 if McConnell had applied more pressure on his colleagues during Trump’s second impeachment trial. The Republican Party’s long-needed separation from Trump would be complete, and the rebirth of the “dead” GOP Hawley and so many others helped kill would already be under way.

 

And therein lies the bottom line: Whatever McConnell’s mistakes, it is indisputable that the insurgents who tried to topple him today bear 100 times more responsibility for the party’s current dire straits than McConnell does. What they were essentially asking their colleagues to do today was elect a leader who would encourage the caucus to troll its way back into the public’s good graces.

 

Fortunately, their colleagues chose the competence and experience that will make the 81-year-old McConnell the right leader for as long as he wants the job.

The Tragedy of Kari Lake

By Dan McLaughlin

Tuesday, November 15, 2022

 

There were elections Republicans lost this year that were always going to be uphill battles, such as trying to take out blue-state incumbents Kathy Hochul, Tim Walz, and Michelle Lujan Grisham. There were races in which Republicans trailed in the polls and had to hope that a big red wave would carry them over the line, such as the Senate races in New Hampshire and Washington. Neither of these things were true of the Arizona governor’s race, which should have been a layup in a midterm with an unpopular Democrat in the White House. Kari Lake ran for an open seat, aiming to replace two-term Republican governor Doug Ducey, one of the very best and most conservative governors in the country. Republicans have won the last three Arizona governor’s races by margins ranging from 11.8 points to Ducey’s 14.2 points in the Democrat wave year of 2018. Until now, Janet Napolitano, elected in 2002 and 2006, is the only Democrat elected Arizona governor since 1982. The Democrat nominee, secretary of state Katie Hobbs, was a colorless functionary so inarticulate that she refused to debate Lake.

 

In spite of back-to-back losses in the Senate (a streak extended to three in 2022) and Joe Biden winning the state by 0.3 percent in 2020, Arizona remains a red state in every meaningful sense. Republicans have controlled both houses of the state legislature for two decades, and appear to have retained control this year. Before 2022, Democrats hadn’t elected a state attorney general since 2006 or a state treasurer since the 1960s; the state treasurer’s race this year was a Republican blowout, the attorney general’s race still too close to call, but likely a very narrow Democratic pickup. Before 2018, Democrats hadn’t won a Senate race in the state since 1988. Before 2020, Bob Dole in 1996 was the only Republican to lose Arizona at the presidential level since 1948 — and 1948 was also the last time a Democrat won a majority of the popular presidential vote there. From 1968 through 1992, Democratic presidential candidates never cracked 40 percent in Arizona; from 2000 through 2016, they never cracked 45 percent. In the House, Republicans have held onto six of the state’s nine seats, winning the popular vote across those House races by a margin of 56.9 percent to 43.1 percent. Two Republican incumbents ran unopposed, but even if you arbitrarily assume that Democrats would have taken a third of the vote in each of those deep-red districts, Republicans would still have won the statewide vote for the House by 51.3 percent to 48.7 percent. Exit polls showed an electorate that was 33 percent Republican, 27 percent Democrat, 36 percent self-identified conservatives, and 22 percent self-identified liberals.

 

All of this is to say that there should have been no obstacle to Lake winning, if she was able to get enough traction to get her message out to voters. And she did. Many years as a local TV anchor gave her much higher name recognition than her opponent. She had enough money to get heard. She took the lead in the polls in mid September in the RealClearPolitics average and held it to the end, breaking 50 percent and leading at the end by 3.5 points. In the FiveThirtyEight average, Lake took the lead in mid October and held it to the end, leading by 2.4 points at the close of the campaign. By any standard, Arizonans saw and heard enough of Kari Lake to make a choice.

 

Along the way, she even wowed many skeptics. It was impossible not to get the occasional thrill watching Lake demolish hostile media interlocutors and connect with ordinary voters. As a campaigner, her talents are undeniable. The Atlantic dubbed her “the new face of the MAGA movement,” and talk began of her as a potential 2024 running mate.

 

Yet she blew it, losing by 0.8 points. According to the exit polls, Lake lost independent voters by seven points, and lost 9 percent of Republicans and 8 percent of conservatives, while Hobbs lost only 4 percent of Democrats and 2 percent of liberals. Lake did well among Hispanics, winning 47 percent of their vote, but carried white voters by only 50 to 49, a paltry margin for a Republican, due largely to a seven-point deficit among white women and a whopping 17-point deficit among white voters with college degrees. Among the 57 percent of Arizonans with an unfavorable view of Donald Trump, Lake lost 82 percent to 16 percent. Yet she also lost 12 percent of voters who disapproved of Biden. Forty-one percent said that Biden was not a factor in their vote, and Lake lost those voters by 38 points. Sixty-three percent said that Biden legitimately won the election; Lake lost those voters 76 percent to 22 percent. Seventy-three percent said they had faith in Arizona elections; Lake lost those voters by 25 points.

 

Lake would have won, in other words, if she had run about as well as a generic Republican in Arizona, and the decisive margin of her defeat came at the nexus of educated, conservative-leaning, and in some cases Republican white people, especially women, who disliked Trump, didn’t believe the 2020 election was stolen, and don’t think Arizona elections are rigged. And yet, Lake introduced herself to that electorate as a “stop the steal” candidate and never escaped its baggage. Mark Finchem, the “stop the steal” candidate for Arizona secretary of state, lost by nearly five points; so did Trump sycophant Blake Masters in the Senate race.

 

In retrospect, Lake’s defeat may well have been baked in the cake from the start by going all in on the “stop the steal” stuff. As we have now seen, that is poison in a general election in any competitive state in the union. But it got worse. Lake then went out of her way in the last week of the campaign to insult John McCain voters and tell them she didn’t want their votes. This was an act of staggering stupidity. You don’t have to like McCain’s politics to recognize that the man never once lost an election in Arizona. In 2000, he beat George W. Bush in the Arizona primary by 25. In 2008, he beat Barack Obama there by 8.5 points. He beat primary challenger J. D. Hayworth by 23 in 2010, and primary challenger Kelli Ward by 13 in 2016. He won his last general election six years ago with 53.7 percent of the vote, running five points ahead of Donald Trump in Arizona. The number of potential Republican voters over 30 in Arizona who have never cast a ballot for John McCain is practically nil. You couldn’t dream of constructing a majority of the general electorate out of people who never once voted for McCain. But Lake, who was a Democrat during McCain’s political career, just didn’t understand that, or got too high on her own supply to care.

 

In the end, the tragedy of Kari Lake is not that some missteps robbed us of a generational political talent, but that a person possessed of obvious political talent never had the sense or judgment to deserve public office in the first place.

Different Year, Same Guy, Same Stuff

By Jim Geraghty

Wednesday, November 16, 2022

 

Donald Trump came down the escalator in Trump Tower to announce he was running for president 2,711 days ago. That’s seven years, five months, and one day. Other than two-term presidents, rarely has one figure dominated American political and public life for such a long stretch.

 

Everybody already knows what they think of him. Very few Americans seem inclined to change their minds about Trump. His agenda is the same as before: Build the wall. Root out the “deep state.” He’s a victim. “Make America great and glorious again.” It is that same old narcissistic view of the world through a fisheye lens, where all good things come from him and his self-described “very stable genius,” and all bad things are somebody else’s fault. On Election Night last week, Trump summed up his worldview succinctly: “If they win, I should get all the credit, and if they lose, I should not be blamed at all.”

 

If the Republicans nominate someone else, such as Ron DeSantis, in 2024, at least the country will be debating what policies to enact. If the Republicans nominate Trump, we’re in for at least another two years of, “What do you think of the latest crazy thing Trump said?” And conceivably, if Trump wins the 2024 presidential election, we could be having those same arguments for another 2,258 days — or six years, two months, and five days, until Inauguration Day, 2029.

 

Donald Trump is 76 years old now, and he will be 77 when the GOP holds the first primaries of 2024. If he wins the GOP nomination, he will turn 78 on June 14, during the general election. If Trump wins the presidency and serves another full term, he would be 82 years old in his final year in office. If elected, Trump would be five months older than Joe Biden was when Biden took the oath of office. If Trump fans think Joe Biden is too old to effectively serve as president and it shows, they will need to come up with a good argument to replace him with another soon-to-be octogenarian.

 

Dan McLaughlin points out that in every exit poll conducted in every state, more voters dislike Trump than like him. He is “viewed unfavorably by a solid majority of the midterm voters nationally (by a 19-point margin of 58 percent to 39 percent), and in every state polled, even places such as Texas (52 percent disapproval to 45 percent approval), Ohio (53 percent to 44 percent), and North Carolina (53 percent to 43 percent) that he won two years ago.”

 

Bernie Sanders and Terry McAuliffe said they welcome Trump’s return as a presidential candidate, because his presence in the public eye helps Democrats and hurts Republicans. GOP governors reportedly applauded Chris Christie’s recent call for the party to move on from Trump. Republicans who actually have to run things are tired of cleaning up Trump’s messes, of averting their eyes from his unhinged rants on social media, his tantrums, his insufferable public self-pity, his glaring lack of interest in public policy and the details of governing, the endless drama and constant circus surrounding him.

 

Mark Wright concludes that “Trump looked tired, subdued, and low energy. The Mar-a-Lago crowd looked listless and bored, too. They shuffled their feet and milled about. They slipped off to get a drink or use the head mid-speech. . . . Trump is old. His jokes are dull. His act is tired. There’s no excitement or sense of the mischievous unknown.”

 

Rich Lowry observes that “it won’t make much of a difference because larger forces are at play, but it was a mistake to tease his announcement prior to the election, a mistake to go through with it tonight, and a mistake to do it in an uninspiring venue in front of an uninspired crowd.”

 

And Isaac noticed that the Fox News anchors talked over portions of Trump’s 63-minute speech.

 

The editors of National Review, as a whole, declared, “The answer to Trump’s invitation to remain personally and politically beholden to him and his cracked obsessions for at least another two years, with all the chaos that entails and the very real possibility of another highly consequential defeat, should be a firm, unmistakable, No.”

 

False Alarm! Cancel the NATO–Russia War!

 

Yesterday, after the first reports of a Russian missile landing in Poland and killing two people emerged, I wrote that the circumstances sounded like a time for NATO’s Article Four — meet and discuss the next move, preparing to respond as an alliance if necessary — rather than NATO’s Article Five, which means treating an attack on one member as an attack on all members. Unsurprisingly, this led to people comparing me to Barack Obama ignoring a “red line,” that I’m a “castrati,” that I want to give “the totalitarians the Rhineland and the Sudetenland,” and so on.

 

The day offered a good lesson on why no one should rush to judgment on matters of war and peace:

 

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Wednesday that the explosions in Poland on Tuesday that claimed two lives were probably caused by a Ukrainian missile defending against Russian strikes.

 

“This is not Ukraine’s fault; Russia bears the ultimate responsibility,” Stoltenberg said of the Russian-made missile that hit Polish territory. Polish President Andrzej Duda also said Wednesday that there was no indication that the missile blast was an intentional attack.

 

I hope people generally keep track of who’s always rushing to judgment and who’s always flying off the handle. The social-media world incentivizes hot takes and being the first to draw a sweeping conclusion. But that’s often a foolish, reckless, and self-destructive way to go through life.

 

Should Cocaine Mitch Stay or Go?

 

I think Mitch McConnell has, by and large, been an effective leader of Senate Republicans since he stepped into that role in 2007. One of the reasons I think that is because being an effective leader for Senate Republicans is not just a matter of going on television and saying things Republicans like to hear. It means listening to your entire caucus, understanding what they want to do and what they need to do, grasping the unique political dynamics of their states, and being able to balance the needs of, say, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Susan Collins of Maine. The objective is to force the opposition to take as many tough, internally divisive votes as possible and minimize the tough, internally divisive votes for your own side. You have to figure out where you can work with a Democratic president to get something done, and where you need to draw the line and dig in your heels.

 

When you’ve been around long enough, you recognize that grassroots conservatives are almost always frustrated by whoever is leading Republicans in the Senate. A lot of conservatives thought Bob Dole was a centrist sellout, and then they thought Trent Lott was a centrist sellout, and then they thought Bill Frist was a centrist sellout, and for the past decade and change, a lot of conservatives thought McConnell is a centrist sellout.

 

But even those of us who think McConnell has largely done a good job must recognize that he is 80 years old, and it’s not unreasonable for Senate Republicans to wonder if it’s time for some new blood. At minimum, it’s a good idea to have a clear sense of McConnell’s successor if, God forbid, some future health issue impedes McConnell’s ability to continue in that role.

 

Now, there’s another option in the race: Senator Rick Scott of Florida, fresh off of running the NRSC in a cycle where Republicans lost competitive Senate races in Arizona, Nevada, and Pennsylvania — with Georgia yet to be resolved. Rick Scott didn’t pick the candidates in those races, and he doesn’t have far-reaching power to influence the outcome of those races.

 

But early in 2022, Scott proposed that “all Americans should pay some income tax to have skin in the game, even if a small amount. Currently over half of Americans pay no income tax.” This allowed Democrats to argue that “Republicans want to raise taxes on working families.”

 

Scott also proposed that “all federal legislation sunsets in 5 years. If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again.” From this, Democrats argued — falsely — that Republicans wanted to end Social Security within five years. Republican senators may want to discuss whether Scott, with those two seemingly innocuous reform proposals, inadvertently enabled a lot of Democratic demagoguery.

 

Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin is already endorsing Scott.

What Did Trump Gain by Announcing His Campaign So Early?

By Jim Geraghty

Wednesday, November 16, 2022

 

As you look at the reaction to Trump’s speech last night, ask yourself, do you see any strategic or tactical advantage that Trump gained by announcing his candidacy one week after the midterm elections, and before the runoff in Georgia? Is there any way his chances of winning the 2024 presidential election would have been hurt if he had chosen to announce his bid in early 2023?

 

Trump already has 100 percent or near-100 percent name ID. As noted in today’s Morning Jolt, everybody in America already knows what they think of him, and it’s not likely that many Americans are inclined to change their minds. He already has a big campaign war chest, although apparently some of his donors are already getting tired of being asked for money.

 

If Ron DeSantis chooses to run for president, he isn’t going to announce it until next year, probably not until after the state legislative session.

 

This week, Republicans are still disappointed and irked about the midterm elections — heck, they’re still counting the votes in the midterm elections! — and calculate that Trump was a drag on Republican candidates just about everywhere. Today, for what it’s worth, Nate Cohn runs the numbers and concludes Trump’s “preferred primary candidates underperformed other G.O.P. candidates by about five percentage points.”

 

Trump announced something that everybody pretty much knew, in a long, dragging, 63-minute speech that even Fox News cut away from at certain points. How different will life be for Trump as a declared candidate, compared with the past few months, when Trump did his usual weekend rallies for GOP candidates? Trump will boast that his rallies helped Senate candidates J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, Chuck Grassley and Ted Budd, as well as gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott. (It is extremely debatable whether some of those senators needed Trump’s help to win their races.) Trump also held rallies for Senate candidates Mehmet Oz, Blake Masters, and Adam Laxalt, and gubernatorial candidates Tudor Dixon, Kari Lake, and Tim Michels.

 

The Trump presidential campaign could have waited until after the Georgia runoff, or Christmas, or New Year’s. In fact, a previous president could have waited until well into 2023. Last night’s announcement suggested the candidate was impatient, bored, hungered for the spotlight again, and was seething with jealousy over the man he derided as “DeSanctimonious.”

No.

National Review Online

Tuesday, November 15, 2022

 

To his credit, Trump killed off the Clinton dynasty in 2016, nominated and got confirmed three constitutionalist justices, reformed taxes, pushed deregulation, got control of the border, significantly degraded ISIS in Syria and Iraq, and cinched normalization deals between Israel and the Gulf states, among other things. These are achievements that even his conservative doubters and critics — including NR — can acknowledge and applaud.

 

That said, the Trump administration was chaotic even on its best days because of his erratic nature and lack of seriousness. He often acted as if he were a commentator on his own presidency, and issued orders on Twitter and in other off-the-cuff statements that were ignored. He repeatedly had to be talked out of disastrous ideas by his advisers and Republican elected officials. He turned on cabinet officials and aides on a dime. Trump had a limited understanding of our constitutional system, and at the end of the day, little respect for it. His inability to approximate the conduct that the public expects of a president undermined him from beginning to end.

 

The latter factor played an outsized role in his narrow defeat to a feeble Joe Biden in 2020 in what was a winnable race. Of course, unable to cope with the humiliation of the loss, he pursued a shameful attempt to overturn the result of the election. He didn’t come close to succeeding, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. The episode ended with Trump, in a grotesque abuse of his powers, trying to bully Vice President Pence into unilaterally delaying or changing the count of electoral votes on January 6 and with an inflamed pro-Trump mob storming the Capitol while the president gave no indication that he particularly minded.

 

In the midst of this, he threw away two Georgia Senate seats in a fit of pique over Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger refusing to bend to his will. The resulting loss of Senate control allowed Biden to get trillions of dollars in spending that he wouldn’t have gotten otherwise and confirm large numbers of progressive judges.

 

Since then, Trump has maintained his grip on the party and done all he can to force it to accept his delusions and lies about the 2020 election — boosting conspiracy theorists and fanatics and targeting for defeat, with considerable success, anyone pushing back too hard against him or his obsessions.

 

Trump’s success in imposing his fixations and candidate choices on the GOP played a large role in the GOP debacle in the midterms. This political backdrop raises the possibility that his low-energy announcement speech may be a damp squib.

 

Certainly, GOP voters should give up on the idea that Trump is a winner. After securing the GOP nomination with plurality support in 2016, Trump didn’t exceed 47 percent in either of his campaigns, winning in 2016 with 46.1 percent and losing in 2020 with 46.8. This is, to say the least, a very narrow electoral path, and one must assume that with all that’s transpired since 2020, Trump is weaker than in his first two races.

 

The party’s position has significantly eroded under his hegemony. When Trump announced his first campaign in 2015, Republicans were coming off a historic wave election, which brought them to 54 Senate seats, and 247 House seats. Republicans then lost the House in 2018, lost the Senate in 2020, and blew a chance for large gains this year. Now, they are looking at 49 or 50 Senate seats, and a razor-thin margin of control of the House of Representatives. On top of this, Republicans had 31 governorships; they now have 25, and have lost crucial ground in state legislatures, too.

 

A lesson of the midterms was that association with Trump and “stop the steal” were liabilities, and no one is more associated with both of those things than Donald Trump himself. Democrats helped choose MAGA candidates that were eminently defeatable in GOP primaries this year, and nominating Trump — whom Democrats are pining to run against again — in 2024 would replicate this experience on a much larger scale.

 

Needless to say, Trump is a magnetic political figure who has managed to bond countless millions of Republicans to him. Many GOP voters appreciate his combativeness and hate his enemies, who so often engaged in excesses in pursuit of him. Once he won the nomination in 2016, they understandably voted for him in 2016 and 2020, given the alternatives. But the primaries won’t present a choice between Trump and progressives with calamitous priorities for the nation, but other Republicans who aren’t, in contrast to him, monumentally selfish or morally and electorally compromised. (And it should be added, won’t be 78 years old if elected and ineligible to serve two terms.)

 

It’s too early to know what the rest of the field will look like, except it will offer much better alternatives than Trump.

 

The answer to Trump’s invitation to remain personally and politically beholden to him and his cracked obsessions for at least another two years, with all the chaos that entails and the very real possibility of another highly consequential defeat, should be a firm, unmistakable, No.

The Trump Show in Reruns

By Mark Antonio Wright

Wednesday, November 16, 2022

 

Say what you will about the man — love him or loathe him; enjoy him or not — Trump’s 2016 campaign was, at the very least, interesting.

 

Sure, sometimes it was “interesting” in the way that watching a high-wire act is interesting and sometimes it was interesting like a train wreck is interesting. But Donald Trump really did run for president in 2015-2016 like no one else ever has or ever could. Trump tried things and got away with things and pulled stunts that no “normal” politician could have ever dreamed up. And then, when he became president of the United States, that sense of all-engrossing interest was put into overdrive because he held real power. Watching the real-estate-and-casino-mogul-turned-reality-TV-host sit in the Oval Office and run the executive branch of the federal government was pure chaos. It was unscripted. It was surreal. It was a Stanley Kubrick film come to life.

 

Tuesday night’s presidential-campaign announcement speech was anything but. Instead of high drama, it was Rocky V. It was the political equivalent a late-night rerun of an episode of CSI: Miami. Instead of the supernova of Madonna’s 1984 World Tour, it was the sad, pathetic cry-f0r-attention of the onetime Queen of Pop’s NSFW Instagram account in 2022. Trump looked tired, subdued, and low energy.

 

The Mar-a-Lago crowd looked listless and bored too. They shuffled their feet and milled about. They slipped off to get a drink or use the head mid-speech.

 

During the long middle third of Trump’s oration, the crowd’s energy sagged, only reviving, a bit, as individuals realized that the speech must — surely must! — be drawing to a close.

 

As it dragged on and on, Fox News broke in and turned to commentary, relegating Trump to the B-roll — a damning indictment and flashing neon sign that a couple of C List talking heads were more interesting and lively than the former president himself.

 

Trump is old. His jokes are dull. His act is tired. There’s no excitement or sense of the mischievous unknown. There’s not even much of a patina of malice or danger. The visuals and the “optics” — that loathsome term — of it all were tired too.

 

Sure, it’s possible that Trump may yet win the Republican nomination against a crowded primary field. It’s possible that Trump’s not yet fully done. But whatever comes next, Tuesday night will be remembered, if it’s remembered at all, as the night that Donald J. Trump exited prime time. He’s stuck in reruns now. America’s been there, done that.

 

The Trump Show has become as boring as it gets.

Does the Moment Call for NATO’s Article Four or Article Five?

By Jim Geraghty

Tuesday, November 15, 2022

 

With the report that Russian missiles crossed into Polish territory on Tuesday, and killed two people, social media is abuzz about NATO’s Article Five, which provides that “if a NATO ally is the victim of an armed attack, each and every other member of the alliance will consider this act of violence as an armed attack against all members and will take the actions it deems necessary to assist the ally attacked.”

 

But there is no reason for the U.S. and its allies to get into a shooting war with Russia over what was, as far as we know at this point, bad aim on the part of the Russians. There’s no need to blur the distinction between the increasingly typical Russian recklessness we’re seeing, and a deliberate attack against Poland and NATO.

 

If the U.S. wants to send metaphorical or literal warning shots to Russia, as an incentive to be more careful with its missiles, it can do so. (The U.S. can shut down the power in Russia anywhere it likes, or shut down Russian troll farms for a day or two — non-lethal methods of reminding the Russians that we have ways to enforce consequences for their actions.)

 

But no one in their right mind wants to start a full-scale war with Russia over two dead Polish citizens, as outrageous and unacceptable as that is.

 

Poland is much more likely to invoke Article Four, which states, “the parties will consult together whenever, in the opinion of any of them, the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the Parties is threatened.” This would be the diplomatic equivalent of a warning shot; since NATO was established in 1949, “Article 4 has been invoked seven times. This past February, Bulgaria, Czechia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Slovakia requested to hold consultations under Article 4 following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.” This would effectively say that this seemingly accidental strike into Poland wouldn’t bring kinetic or cyber retaliation . . . but the next one may very well bring a serious, unified NATO response.

Can the FBI Be Saved from Itself—And Can We Be Saved from the FBI?

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