Wednesday, November 6, 2024

Takeaways from Donald Trump’s Historic Presidential Comeback

By Philip Klein

Wednesday, November 06, 2024

 

There will be a lot to say about Donald Trump’s incredible victory in the coming days and weeks, but as I sort through the results in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, I thought I would offer a number of initial takeaways.

 

It’s the greatest comeback in the history of American politics. 

 

This is the most obvious point. Love him or hate him, there is simply nobody who has pulled off anything close to resembling what Trump has just accomplished. Some people may have previously cited Grover Cleveland’s victory in the 1892 election or Richard Nixon’s comeback in 1968, but what Trump accomplished was closer to what would have happened had Nixon won the White House again after having resigned. After his loss in the 2020 election and the January 6 Capitol riot, few believed that Trump could come back four years later and win not only a Republican nomination, but the presidency. Add to that where Trump was in the party after his chosen candidates tanked in the 2022 midterms, throw into the mix the indictments, impeachments, sustained low approval ratings, the entire media being against him, the fact that he essentially had to beat not one but two Democratic opponents in the same year, and it is just astonishing what he was able to accomplish.

 

Harris couldn’t fool enough of the people. 

 

While Trump brought an unprecedented level of baggage to the race, Vice President Kamala Harris couldn’t ultimately get past the fact that she was trying to pull a fast one on the American people. President Biden refused to face reality and drop out of the race when there could have been a normal primary to replace him. So Democrats tried to plop in one of the most unpopular vice presidents in history in Harris despite the fact that she never won a single primary. She tried to coast on good vibes and joy over the summer, not doing any interviews or explaining how she changed her positions on a litany of issues. She tried to claim she was a change agent while touting her experience in the Biden administration and admitting she couldn’t think of anything she would have done differently than him. Ultimately, voters saw through the phoniness. 

 

Trump’s performance with Hispanics has upended immigration politics. 

 

Trump won 45 percent of Hispanic voters, according to CNN exits, which would be a record performance for a Republican if it holds. For much of the past 30 years (since the backlash against California’s Prop 187 that sought to limit services to illegal immigrants), the prevailing view has been that Republicans would need to soften on immigration policy or risk losing a growing demographic for generations. Yet Trump ran on mass deportation and sealing the border, and earned record numbers of Hispanics — eclipsing George W. Bush and John McCain. 

 

Progressivism, and wokeness, has proven to be political kryptonite for Democrats.  

 

After 2016, Democrats convinced themselves that all the energy was with the socialist movement of Bernie Sanders and so most Democratic candidates in the next presidential election, including Harris, raced to get in their good graces. Biden resisted in the primary, and yet after becoming president, decided to govern from the left — signing trillions in spending that fueled inflation, reversing successful immigration policies, pushing unconstitutional executive orders to reward favored constituencies (e.g., student-loan relief), and so on. When she became the nominee, Harris was saddled not only with Biden’s failed left-wing policies, but a litany of positions she took when courting socialists in 2019 — banning fracking, confiscating guns, scrapping private health insurance, providing prisoners with gender transition treatments, etc. These provided fodder for Trump’s most effective ads. 

 

The Obama coalition is dead. 

 

There’s been a lot of focus on how Trump’s success represents a break from the Reagan era of the Republican Party. But this election offered further proof that the coalition that elected Obama to the White House twice (which paired wealthier and college-degree voters with supersized support from minority groups) is not easily translatable when the candidate isn’t Obama. The Democrats can win unmarried women and wealthier college grads, but they have a real problem with married couples, the middle class, and men. Meanwhile, their ability to generate minority turnout by cranking up the charges of racism has reached diminishing returns. 

 

So much for the damaging MSG rally and late Kamala momentum. 

 

The media coverage at the end of the race centered on the idea that the MSG rally was a massive blunder by the Trump campaign, that a tasteless joke would cost Trump Puerto Rican votes, and that late deciders were breaking toward Harris. But there is no evidence that any of this is true. Trump won voters who decided in the past week by eight points, and he narrowed the Democratic advantage among Puerto Ricans in Florida (where there is a large enough sample size) by about 30 points. And as for the viral Ann Selzer poll showing Harris up three points in Iowa that supposedly pointed toward the salience of the abortion issue and Democratic gains in the Midwest? Trump won the state by 14 points. As long as we’re citing results that contradict media narratives, get this one: Voters who said that democracy is “very threatened” went for Trump 50-48. 

 

Harris blundered by trying to appease pro-Hamas voters. 

 

Exit polls showed that 61 percent of voters thought U.S. policy toward Israel was “about right” or “not strong enough,” and yet Harris spent much of the campaign trying to placate the 32 percent of voters who believe that American support for our ally is “too strong.” Despite all her efforts, it turned out that in Dearborn, Mich., the pro-Hamas contingent went for Jill Stein anyway, helping Trump to a plurality

 

Polls got the big picture right, but still can’t pick up shy Trump voters. 

 

The instantly infamous Selzer poll aside, were you to have looked closely at the polls in the closing weeks of the election, you would have come away with the following general impression: The race was close in a number of states, but if they all tipped in the same direction, it could end up in an Electoral College landslide even as the popular result remains close. This is roughly what’s happened, with the close states tipping in Trump’s direction. That said, for the third presidential election in a row, Trump has overperformed the polls, suggesting that despite the best effort of pollsters, they still haven’t figured out a way to pick up the “shy” Trump voters.

 

Tim Walz was a bust.

 

When Walz was picked, pundits gushed over how this slice of authentic rural Midwestern folksiness was going to help Democrats make inroads among rural voters. Yet not only did the Democratic ticket do worse among rural voters than Biden did, Harris did worse than Hillary Clinton among this group. 

Trump’s Victory Is the Most Remarkable Political Comeback in American History

By Mark Antonio Wright

Wednesday, November 6, 2024

 

The 2024 election will be discussed from a million angles. In the days and weeks ahead, the knives will come out in the ranks of the losers. Post-mortems will be written, and the arguments will be fought out over what could have been different or which strategies should have been tried. The data will be analyzed and over-analyzed.

 

All that will be necessary and very interesting because the very foundations of the two major-party coalitions have been shaken and the tectonic plates of American politics have shifted. However, we shouldn’t forget the singular fact of the 2024 election: Donald Trump has just completed the most remarkable political comeback in American history.

 

His achievement is more impressive than Richard Nixon’s in 1968. It’s more important than Grover Cleveland’s in 1892. I don’t think there’s any question now that Donald Trump is the most consequential American political figure of the 21st century so far.

 

He arrived on the partisan political scene not more than 15 years ago. But in that short time, Trump has decisively closed the Obama era in American politics, which began with what many on the left thought was a permanent realignment in 2008. With his reelection in 2024, Trump has defeated Barack Obama’s successor’s successor and his ideological heir, Kamala Harris. I think it’s fair to say that Trump has also, in a second try, defeated Joe Biden by forcing him out of the race last summer. Trump has now — twice! — climbed the Blue Wall and dismantled the Obama coalition in the crucible of a general election.

 

Neither the Democratic nor the Republican Party will be the same going forward — even if, no, there is nothing permanent about any of the so-called “permanent” realignments in our politics.

 

My hope, of course, is that some good comes out of this most recent coalitional realignment. Sometimes a good shake-up is necessary. I’ve been open about my skepticism of the direction of the Republican Party under Trump, but I do think there is a chance that this reelection could open a path towards political dynamism and renewal, possibly or even probably in ways that no one could predict right now.

 

Donald Trump, after his reelection, certainly deserves a shot at trying, along with the goodwill of his countrymen.

 

But all that’s for the future. For now, it’s worth marveling at Donald Trump’s simply stunning political achievement.

Why Didn’t the Democrats Steal It This Time?

By Mark Antonio Wright

Wednesday, November 06, 2024

 

Let me get this straight: In 2020, when Donald Trump was the sitting president of the United States and controlled all the powers of the executive branch, including the Department of Justice, federal law-enforcement agencies, and our foreign and domestic intelligence services, the Democrats — conspiring from Joe Biden’s Delaware basement — managed to steal the election out from under him.

 

But, in 2024, after the events of January 6, 2021, and after four years of Democratic lawfare, at a time when the Democratic Party is desperate to keep Trump from power, a Democratic president sits in the White House, Democratic governors hold office in the critical swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, and the unified voice of the mainstream press and its allies in government busy themselves with explicitly calling Trump a fascist and an existential threat to American democracy, the Democrats decided to not steal the election from Trump?

 

How can that be? Why not? It simply doesn’t make any sense. Is there a logical explanation for why the evil and nefarious Democrats and the all-powerful Deep State would decide to let Trump walk back into the White House this time around? Why would they allow him to potentially sweep the crucial swing states and challenge their candidate for the national popular vote?

 

There’s no way that, in ’20, a critical mass of the American people decided to fire Trump for his antics, his erratic behavior, and his association with the anomie and exhaustion of the pandemic era, while, in ’24, they decided to fire Biden and Harris over inflation, woke extremism, and chaos at the border and give Trump another chance, is there? I’m just not sure that I can believe that Americans in the last two elections would vote, as they usually do, to punish the incumbent party for its lackluster economic stewardship and give the out-party a chance at fixing things.

 

That couldn’t possibly be the case, because — c’mon — there’s just no way that Donald Trump and his minions in 2020 would have stooped to lying to the American people in order to assuage the bruised ego of a single man. There’s no way that grifters in right-wing media would have amplified that message in an effort to deliver fan service to their audiences. And there’s just no way that so many election truthers on the right would have bought Trump’s 2020 lies hook, line, and sinker.

 

So, can someone please explain to me why the Democrats and their goons didn’t steal this election? Were they just feeling generous? What gives?

A New Nightmare Scenario Emerges

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, November 05, 2024

 

In remarks to the New York Times, Western political officials confirmed the rumors swirling around the national-security community over the last several days indicating that Russia is behind an attempted terrorist attack on commercial airliners in Europe.

 

“Russia has been plotting to place incendiary devices on cargo planes in Europe and even performed a test run this summer, setting off fires at shipping hubs in Britain and Germany,” the Times reported on Tuesday.

 

The incendiary devices were planted at DHL shipping hubs in Leipzig, Germany, and Birmingham, England, the Western officials said. The fires caused minimal damage and no injuries, they said, but the blazes raised the frightening specter of bombs potentially being loaded on aircraft.

 

That experiment may have been a prelude to something far more destabilizing: an operation aimed at “destroying planes on American runways, setting off bombs at U.S. warehouses or even blowing up aircraft midair.”

 

That plot, had it been carried out, would have instantly established a state of war between the Russian Federation and the NATO alliance, the formalities notwithstanding.

 

The dire implications of this development are hard to overstate. Despite its recent, albeit limited, battlefield successes in Ukraine, Russia’s halting and unsteady response to the Ukrainian incursion into Kursk Oblast and the introduction of North Korean forces into the conflict are suggestive of a more unstable dynamic inside the Kremlin. “I think the Russian intelligence services have gone a bit feral,” Richard Moore, the former head of the U.K.’s foreign-intelligence service, speculated ominously. The West takes for granted its stable deterrent relationship with Russia, a belligerent but rational actor. This plot calls a lot of the assumptions that underwrite that status quo into question.

 

“Feral” or otherwise, an attack like this on the United States or its allies by agents linked to the Russian government would not be plausibly deniable for long. Nor would Western public officials be able to talk their respective constituencies out of the panic it would produce. Relatively covert acts of espionage — from sabotage and vandalism to targeted assassinations — are subversive and unacceptable but nevertheless discreet. Unlike such acts, the attack that the Times’ reporters outline would not be so discriminating. It would sow terror, and it would demand a response.

 

Whoever is responsible for this provocation, they are operating under the assumption that the West can be terrorized into placid compliance. With its regular deference to its paralyzing fear of escalation, the Biden administration has given those Russian actors every reason to believe their assessment is an accurate one. And as the Biden White House enters its lame-duck phase, the temptation to take advantage of the transition period will prove hard for anti-American actors abroad to resist.

 

Be it through skill, luck, a combination of both, or the intervention of fate, Western intelligence services benefited from auspicious good fortune here. But skill only goes so far, luck runs out, and our enemies only have to succeed once. And Russia is growing more and more comfortable with risk.

CNN Anchor’s Name Games

By Seth Mandel

Monday, November 04, 2024

 

Back in September, as I was writing about an anti-Israel hoax spread by a medical professional in Gaza, a particular term she used caught my attention. The story arose from an interview that the journalists Ryan Grim and his co-host Emily Jashinsky conducted with a Canadian nurse in the war zone. In the recorded interview, the nurse, with Grim’s and Jashinsky’s encouragement, spread a debunked claim that Israel was planting exploding tuna cans so that hungry Gazan children would be maimed or killed while foraging for food.

 

Although it should have been recognized as false immediately—it’s a fairly ridiculous accusation—weapons experts in the U.S. and Europe quickly put it to rest. (A France24 fact-check was particularly thorough.)

 

What had caught my attention but what I didn’t think worth mentioning at the time was that in the video and transcript, the nurse says that she thinks the alleged exploding food containers were left in residential areas “when the IOF is, you know, raiding homes and stuff.”

 

The IOF is an abbreviation for “Israeli occupation forces.” It’s a derogatory term used by anti-Israel partisans to refer to the Israeli military. Generally, people who use it see Israel as an illegitimate state—as you can see from the context, the term is used to describe Israeli troops of any kind.

 

I thought of that nurse’s interview again this afternoon when I watched CNN’s Christiane Amanpour interview a Palestinian and Israeli filmmaking team who oppose the demolition of unauthorized Palestinian structures built on an IDF training plot. (Israel’s Supreme Court approved the demolitions after it was proved that the structures were built well after the site was designated for the IDF.) A clip making the rounds showed Amanpour saying to the Arab member of the duo: “I understand why you would want to film what’s happening to your own villages from the settlers and the Israeli occupation forces.”

 

The term is rarely used by mainstream journalists, for obvious reasons, unless they’re directly quoting parties to the conflict and NGOs. It has been used to describe Israeli forces in Lebanon over the years, though in those cases it was referring to an actual military occupation, not IDF forces conducting antiterror raids in places in which they are not stationed and certainly not in Gaza.

 

What struck me when I watched the interview from the beginning is that Amanpour was the first to use the phrase—she introduced “Israeli occupation forces” into the conversation.

 

The phrase is a tell. Anyone who changes a subject’s name to a derogatory nickname made up by that subject’s proclaimed enemies is not practicing straight journalism. That is why you usually see “Israeli occupation forces” in opinion columns, not news reporting. Amanpour has had a long career as a star news correspondent, and she now anchors a “global affairs” show.

 

Her behavior throughout the war has raised ethical concerns. Amanpour has reportedly complained about CNN’s strict use of its fact-checking team for war-related reporting. Her confrontation with CNN brass seemed to work, as she then aired a segment on a “mass grave” in Khan Younis that was blamed on the Israelis but turned out to have been dug by Palestinians. In October, she ran a segment that appeared to use staged footage and fabricated scenes in Gaza.

 

Her use of “Israeli occupation forces” is revealing, just as it was in the case of the nurse. When someone uses made-up names in their reporting, it’s not shocking to find other inaccuracies in their work. But the obligations of Amanpour and the nurse differ. The nurse isn’t pretending to be a journalist. Is Amanpour?

Tuesday, November 5, 2024

A Political Testimony

By Jay Nordlinger

Tuesday, November 05, 2024

 

The world shifts, and politics along with it. You know this when you are young, from books. Later in life, you may see it for yourself, firsthand. This is both interesting and unsettling. Dislocating.

 

I always had conservative inclinations, I suppose. When I was in college, they took political expression. I entered college in 1982. I became a convinced conservative, of the Reagan stripe. Through reading, sure — but also through the observation of events.

 

“The facts of life are conservative,” said Margaret Thatcher.

 

What does that mean, “conservative”? It means different things to different people. I have a speech on this — about 6,500 words. (I will spare you this speech now.)

 

About 20 years ago, Michael K. Deaver, the longtime Reagan aide, asked some of us to contribute to a book to be called “Why I Am a Conservative.” In my own contribution, I took pains to say that I was a Reagan conservative, in acknowledgement of other stripes. I would not want to offend, say, Wendell Berry.

 

When the book came out, it was titled “Why I Am a Reagan Conservative.” Because of my little essay? I never asked.

 

Anyway, as I was saying: In college, and thereafter, I followed events very closely: events national and international. But there was reading, too — a lot of it.

 

Very important to me were William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review and Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary. And Robert L. Bartley’s editorial and op-ed pages at the Wall Street Journal.

 

George F. Will, Thomas Sowell, William Safire, Irving Kristol, Charles Krauthammer — I read these men, in their various publications, day after day.

 

Paul Johnson, David Pryce-Jones, Robert Conquest — I learned about the world from them. History and its lessons. Raul Hilberg, Lucy Dawidowicz, Martin Gilbert — they, among others, taught me about the Holocaust.

 

I read lots of prison memoirs. Fear No Evil, by Natan Sharansky. Against All Hope, by Armando Valladares. Solzhenitsyn, of course. Simon Leys taught me a lot about China. I read about Vietnam and the boat people.

 

There was Milton Friedman, and Michael Novak. Could capitalism be moral? Oh, yes. Edward C. Banfield, James Q. Wilson, Charles Murray — I learned a lot about society from them.

 

Who else? Bill Buckley used to say, “Inclusio unius est exclusio alterius.” To include one is to exclude others. I owe so many debts — to Raymond Aron and Jean-François Revel; Jeane Kirkpatrick and Mark Helprin; Richard Pipes and Bernard Lewis; Walter Berns and Donald Kagan.

 

These people are with me, mentally, every day. Amazingly, I got to know many of them — most of them, in fact — later in life. The last words Kagan said to me, in an e-mail, were “Long may you wave.”

 

Long may they wave.

 

What are my political beliefs, in brief? I will jot a list. Feel free to sing along.

 

Limited government. The rule of law. Constitutionalism. Individual rights. Civil society. Free enterprise. International trade. Equality under the law. Equality of opportunity. Federalism. Military preparedness. American leadership in the world (in the nation’s own interest). Colorblindness. E pluribus unum (versus identity politics or Balkanization). And so on and so forth.

 

Liberal democracy is a precious thing, in need of protection — vigilant protection. In need of conservation. Authoritarians of various hues are always trying to upend it.

 

Something else: We conservatives laid great stress on character — character in office, character in life. Peggy Noonan wrote a book called “When Character Was King.” It was about Reagan. Bill Buckley gave a speech titled “When Character Counted: The Importance of Ronald Reagan.”

 

“Character” was on our lips constantly during the Clinton years — especially during that president’s second term. Were we opportunistic? That question is purely rhetorical, as you know.

 

Regardless, we were right.

 

***

 

I was a Republican — big-time. I once wrote a piece about myself with a slightly self-mocking title: “A Hopeless R.” I cast my first vote in 1982 — for the Republican gubernatorial nominee in Michigan, Richard Headlee. (He lost to the Democrat, Jim Blanchard.)

 

Bill Rusher used to say that a philosophy, or political outlook, needed a vessel. “Think of conservatism as the wine,” he would say. “The Republican Party is the bottle.”

 

(For 30 years, Bill Rusher — William A. Rusher, or “WAR” — was the publisher of National Review.)

 

In 2016, I thought the Republican presidential field was splendid — a bouquet of conservative goodness, by and large. I was for my friend Ted Cruz. But I admired many others: Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Bobby Jindal, Chris Christie, Carly Fiorina. Just about the only ones I could not accept were Rand Paul and, especially, Donald Trump.

 

Trump won the nomination going away. He clinched it on May 3, in the Indiana primary. I withdrew from the Republican Party that day. I explained myself in the next issue of National Review.

 

There had been a hashtag on Twitter — a trend: “ExGOP.” My piece in NR was titled “ExGOP: The shock of disaffiliation.” It was a shock indeed, to me. I had been a Republican for a lot longer than Trump had.

 

Here are two sentences from my piece:

 

In my view, Trump is grossly unfit to be president, in both mind and character — especially the latter. Even if I agreed with him on the issues — even if I thought his worldview sound — I would balk at supporting him, owing to the issue of character.

 

This was a common view among conservatives at the time. Only later was it a dissenting, if not a heretical, one.

 

Shortly after Trump clinched the nomination, I ran into an eminent Republican at a gathering. “How are you?” he asked. I answered, “Unsettled, frankly. I’ve left the Republican Party. Can you believe it?” The Republican looked at me meaningfully, gravely, and said, “You didn’t leave the Republican Party; the Republican Party left you.”

 

That man remained a Republican. He spoke at the convention two months later. Nonetheless, I appreciated his remark to me (and felt it to be true).

 

About Trump’s term in office — first term? — there are countless things to say. Did he nominate Federalist Society judges? Yes. Did he move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem? Yes.

 

Good, good. But . . . will mention just a few other things, perhaps standing for the whole.

 

There is a theory — deriving from the QAnon movement, apparently — that goes like this: President Obama and Vice President Biden conspired with Iran to fake the death of Osama bin Laden. Then Biden, specifically, had members of SEAL Team Six killed, in order to cover up the conspiracy.

 

In October 2020, someone on Twitter tweeted this theory around. The tweeter called himself “Oscar the Midnight Rider 1111.” Donald Trump retweeted Oscar the Midnight Rider 1111.

 

Trump, remember, was president of the United States.

 

In a televised “townhall,” he was asked about this. “I know nothing about it,” said the president. “That was a retweet. That was an opinion of somebody, and that was a retweet. I put it out there. People can decide for themselves. I don’t take a position.”

 

This is not my idea of a president, or a leader, or a man.

 

On May 18, 2019, Joe Biden launched his campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. In the course of his remarks, he said, “Are we a nation that embraces dictators and tyrants like Putin and Kim Jong-un?”

 

Four days later, on the 22nd, North Korea’s official “news agency” issued a broadside against Biden, calling him, among other things, a “fool of low IQ.”

 

On May 25, President Trump issued a tweet:

 

North Korea fired off some small weapons, which disturbed some of my people, and others, but not me. I have confidence that Chairman Kim will keep his promise to me, & also smiled when he called Swampman Joe Bidan a low IQ individual, & worse. Perhaps that’s sending me a signal?

 

Concerning the firing off of “small weapons”: These missile launches may have been trivial to Donald Trump. But they were not so trivial to the South Koreans and Japanese. The president’s advisers were right to be “disturbed.” (One of those advisers was John Bolton.)

 

Concerning “Swampman Joe Bidan,” etc.: The conservatives I knew, pre-2016, would have been aghast at what Trump did. You may not like Democrats. But to chortle with a murderous, anti-American dictator over a former vice president . . .

 

Throughout his presidency, Trump fawned over such dictators. In October 2020, I wrote a long and detailed piece on this subject. Here are a few highlights (or lowlights):

 

About Kim: “A great leader. Very honorable.”

 

About Putin: “a great guy,” “a good person,” “a terrific person.”

 

About Xi Jinping: “A great leader. He’s a very talented man. I think he’s a very good man. He loves China, I can tell you. He loves China. He wants to do what’s right for China.”

 

In a bitter twist of fate, Trump made these remarks about Xi on the day that Liu Xiaobo died. Liu was a political prisoner in China. He received the Nobel Peace Prize (in absentia, of course). He was a man who really loved China, and wanted to do what was right for China. He paid for it with his life.

 

“How come you don’t support Trump?” people ask me. How could I possibly do so? He is antithetical to many of the things I have always valued in the public arena, and the private one, too.

 

Trump lost the 2020 election to Biden. But he did not concede it. He has not conceded it yet. And he did everything he could to overturn the election.

 

When the secretary of state in Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, refused to falsify the vote, Trump said, “He’s an enemy of the people.” He said this in the White House on Thanksgiving Day.

 

On January 6, a mob of Trump supporters, whipped up by the president himself, attacked the Congress for the purpose of stopping a constitutional process — which they succeeded in doing, for some hours. All the while, the president was watching the mayhem unfold on television.

 

We all have different ideas of leadership.

 

One of the Republican senators, Lindsey Graham, said, “Trump and I, we had a hell of a journey. I hate it being this way. I hate it being this way. All I can say is, count me out. Enough is enough.”

 

A few weeks later, Graham was back at Trump’s side, in Palm Beach. In 2024, the Republicans nominated Trump for president for the third time in a row. Never before had the GOP nominated anyone for president three times in a row.

 

***

 

Earlier this year, I was in Alabama, giving some talks about William F. Buckley Jr. After one of them, a man came up to tell me about a formative experience in his life. When he was in college, he saw WFB debate Governor George Wallace. He decided that he was a Buckley conservative, not a Wallace populist.

 

I said to him, “Wallace won, didn’t he?” The man nodded soberly: “Yes.” He has won for now, at least.

 

Trump and his movement combine aspects of both George Wallace and Henry Wallace. I say this because of the considerable sympathy for Vladimir Putin and the sneering hostility to the Ukrainian people and their struggle to keep their country.

 

Last week, I wrote a piece about how today’s Right has come to sound like the Left we knew — especially in foreign policy, but not only so. Representative of this phenomenon is JD Vance, the GOP’s nominee for vice president.

 

Talking to Steve Bannon in December 2023, he said, “There are people who would cut Social Security, throw our grandparents into poverty. Why? So that one of Zelensky’s ministers can buy a bigger yacht?”

 

That is straight Kremlin propaganda: the claim, the lie, that President Zelensky’s cabinet ministers have stolen U.S. aid to purchase yachts for themselves. The BBC ran a sad, telling, and vexing report: “How pro-Russian ‘yacht’ propaganda influenced U.S. debate over Ukraine aid.”

 

Also, what Vance said about would-be Social Security reformers and the impoverishment of grandparents: That has been a Democratic talking-point for decades. And to hear it from the mouths of people thought of as “conservative Republicans” . . .

 

But back to Putin and Russia. The last essay Charles Krauthammer ever wrote, he wrote in the summer of 2017. “The Authoritarian Temptation,” he called it. (He adapted his title from Jean-François Revel, who in 1976 published his book The Totalitarian Temptation.)

 

Krauthammer was concerned — alarmed, even — by “a curious and growing affinity for Vladimir Putin, Czar of all the Russias.” This affinity was “most pronounced on the right,” he said. He found it “jarring,” “head-snapping.”

 

On the campaign trail this year, Donald Trump has let it all hang out. He does not merely criticize illegal immigration, and pledge to curb it. He demonizes immigrants. He makes a collective bogeyman out of them. “They are poisoning the blood of our country,” he keeps saying. “They are poisoning the blood of our country.”

 

Like most conservatives, I am a “restrictionist” on immigration. Anyone who is not for open borders is a restrictionist. But “poisoning the blood of our country”? This is not the way conservatives talk, I think — I mean, American conservatives. Rightists elsewhere are a different story.

 

Reagan spoke of this matter of “blood.” Addressing the United Nations in 1985, he said,

 

America is committed to the world because so much of the world is inside America. After all, only a few miles from this very room is our Statue of Liberty, past which life began anew for millions, where the peoples from nearly every country in this hall joined to build these United States.

 

The blood of each nation courses through the American vein and feeds the spirit that compels us to involve ourselves in the fate of this good earth.

 

An earlier Republican president, Lincoln, spoke of “blood” as well. Actually, he did so in 1858, before he became president. Immigrants are “our equals in all things,” he said. They have no connection to the Founders “by blood,” but they certainly have a connection to the truths enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. They can claim these truths “as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh, of the men who wrote that declaration.”

 

Between Lincoln and Reagan, there is an affinity. That third Republican president is entirely different.

 

Trump is a name-caller, inveterately. Elaine Chao, who served as his transportation secretary, is “Coco Chow.” Nikki Haley is “Birdbrain.” And so on. “He’s got the biggest stomach I’ve ever seen,” Trump said. He was talking about Senator Jon Tester. “He’s got the smallest neck I’ve ever seen.” He was talking about Congressman Adam Schiff.

 

We all have our own tastes, when it comes to political style and everything else.

 

Mike Pence is not supporting Donald Trump this year. Pence was his running mate two elections in a row. He was Trump’s vice president. His life was endangered on January 6. Pence did an important thing, obeying the Constitution rather than Trump.

 

Lots of Republicans and conservatives are refusing to support Trump this year. These include two of his former defense secretaries, two of his former national security advisers, and one of his former chiefs of staff. (In addition to his former vice president, of course.)

 

Over and over, Donald Trump has described the rioters or insurrectionists of January 6 as “patriots,” “political prisoners,” and “hostages.” He did not start describing them as “hostages” until after October 7 (2023), when Hamas attacked Israel.

 

Yet there is a view on the right that January 6 was the work, not of Trump-supporting “patriots,” but of Antifa, or Black Lives Matter, or “the Deep State.” On social media, there is a meme showing the storming of the Capitol and saying, “January 6 will go down in history as the day the government staged a riot.”

 

You know who has circulated that meme? Donald Trump.

 

***

 

Since the summer of 2015, there has been a simple and basic question: Is Trump fit to be president, in mind and character? Tens of millions say yes, tens of millions say no.

 

The rule of law is fundamental. Our national norms are important. My bet is this: If Kamala Harris loses the election, she will concede, and she will also attend the inauguration as the outgoing vice president. That is what Americans do. If Donald Trump loses the election — things will be very different.

 

He did not attend the inauguration of his successor, remember. But the outgoing vice president, Pence, did. In my eyes, he acted like an American both on January 6 and on Inauguration Day.

 

I began my piece today by saying, “The world shifts, and politics along with it.” Some of this shifting is justified (though it will happen regardless). We citizens ought to take fresh looks, and alter our views where necessary or desirable. Jimmy Carter liked to quote a high-school teacher of his, Miss Julia Coleman: “We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles.”

 

People like me are often accused of “Reagan nostalgia” or “zombie Reaganism.” The principles and values we espouse long pre-dated Reagan and they will outlive all mortals. They are sometimes popular, sometimes unpopular. But they are right and true, in the eyes of those of us who hold them.

 

A few years ago, a friend of mine spoke at an event. Afterward, a woman went up to him to engage him in conversation. My friend related the conversation to me, at length. I will give the nub of it.

 

This lady expressed her antipathy to me. “I used to love him, but he’s changed so much.” “Oh?” said my friend. “He seems to me one of the few who have not changed. He’s the same thinker, writer, and person he always was. Solid as a rock.”

 

“Yes,” said the lady, “but when the rest of us changed, he stayed the same. Therefore, he’s the one who changed.” “Madam,” said my friend, “I cannot argue with that.”

 

It is natural to change, I suppose, and I hope I have changed in fitting ways. We want to be broader, deeper. We may find ourselves “sadder but wiser.” When it comes to the essential things, however, I can report this: What struck me as true when I was young, still does.

 

Early on in my piece, I quoted Margaret Thatcher, and will do so again (making me a “zombie Thatcherite”?): “You turn if you want to.”

 

I like a slogan from a motel chain. Indeed, I love it, not just as a slogan but also as a thought, a concept, a decision, a practice: “We’ll leave the light on for you.” Yes. Leave the light on. Let it shine, all through the night, year after year. That is the best one can do.

Boiled Frogs

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, November 04, 2024

 

Last week, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg compared waiting for the election returns to waiting for the results of a biopsy. It’s a fine metaphor, vivid in capturing the dread of this moment, but it’s inapt.

 

We’re not waiting for a diagnosis, we’re waiting for a prognosis. We know there’s a malignancy. What we don’t know is how bad it’ll get.

 

If Donald Trump wins, Americans will find out the hard way how abusive a term-limited authoritarian egged on by yes-men and emboldened by criminal impunity in wielding his core powers might be. We’ll also learn how far the salt-of-the-earth patriots of the American right—most of whom are supposedly voting for nothing more malicious than lower grocery prices and a stronger border—are willing to go to rationalize that abuse.

 

My suspicion in both cases is: Further than we think.

 

If Trump loses, on the other hand, Americans are assured of a coup attempt. If you’re reading this on Tuesday evening, it might already be in motion.

 

The one and only certainty in this election is that Trump will declare victory on Election Night, whether or not the results support that. His opponent expects it, as do most voters. They know the man; they recall how he reacted to losing the last time; they’ve heard, presumably, that he’s already begun bleating about fraud in states like Pennsylvania in case things don’t go his way.

 

One might assume that his supporters would be harder to dupe with claims of cheating in 2024, having been sold that bill of goods once before, but I think the task will be easier this time than last. Trump is polling much better than he was four years ago, when he nearly pulled a momentous upset, and right-wing propagandists have capitalized on that to reassure Republicans that the race is in the bag—if the votes are counted fairly.

 

For many Trump voters, a second defeat will come as a true shock, inexplicable except through ulterior means, which is just how their hero and his cronies want it. Those voters will react badly.

 

Republicans in office will react badly too. A second “rigged” election following an additional four years of radicalization on the right, from top to bottom, will lead some who resisted the coup plot of 2020 to join the coup plot of 2024. Trump will demand that they do everything possible to overturn the results, knowing that prison awaits him if they fail. How Congress will proceed on January 6 if the GOP controls the House and Senate, with the right-wing base in revolt, is as unclear as the outcome in Pennsylvania 24 hours from now.

 

One way or another, then, the country is doomed to suffer a wrenching crisis. It will happen immediately if Trump loses or in the longer run if he wins, but it will happen. No matter the outcome, the pre-election daily dread Michelle Goldberg described will be followed by months of daily dread as January 6 approaches or years of daily dread as Trump’s presidency plays out.

 

My Election Day thought for you is this: We deserve every bit of it. The frogs have boiled.

 

Just deserts.

 

I’ve written before about Kevin Williamson’s warning to National Review readers on the day Trump locked down his party’s nomination in 2016. “Americans and Republicans, remember: You asked for this,” he said. “Given the choice between a dozen solid conservatives and one Clinton-supporting con artist and game-show host, you chose the con artist. You chose him freely. Nobody made you do it.”

 

Kevin meant that as an admonishment but I’m offering it as a consolation. Doesn’t it make you feel a little better to realize that we asked for this?

 

Everyone knows the misery of learning that misfortune has befallen an innocent acquaintance. A neighbor’s child is diagnosed with cancer; a friend’s spouse dies in an accident. You could tear your hair out in anguish when you hear of it. The grief is one thing, but the injustice of it is unbearable. Bad things happening to good people will shake your faith in the moral order of the universe.

 

But bad things happening to people who make immoral choices? There’s always some satisfaction in that. You might feel a twinge of compassion for a bank robber who’s shot during a heist or for a wife-beater who’s roughed up in prison, but there’s no sense of moral outrage. The order of the universe is affirmed: If you behave maliciously, you will—and should—suffer. And your suffering will be a lesson to others not to follow the path you chose.

 

We’ve made an immoral choice by delivering Donald Trump to the brink of victory. What kind of universe would this be if we didn’t pay for it?

 

The singular fact of this campaign is that, for the first time in his three runs for president, we have hard proof of how dangerous he’s capable of being as president. In 2016 and 2020, his authoritarian pretensions were mostly the stuff of Never Trump speculation; then, day by day for two months after he lost to Joe Biden, he went about proving that we’d actually underestimated him. He’s now a convicted criminal with dozens of felony charges still pending against him. And he makes no bones about his intentions in a second term, talking openly about “retribution” against “the enemy from within” and promising supporters that his next administration will be “nasty.”

 

You don’t need to write a newsletter for The Dispatch to predict that he’ll try to overturn this election if he loses or will misuse his powers as president to persecute his opponents if he wins. You need only to have been alive since November 2020 and had access to a television set.

 

Yet despite the fact that we all know he’ll put the country through hell, win or lose, he’s polling better than he ever has and is viewed more favorably than he’s ever been. Republicans could have dispensed with him after January 6 or in this year’s presidential primary, and general election voters could have handed Kamala Harris a polling lead sizable enough that even Trump fans would have trouble believing the inevitable claims of cheating after a defeat. They didn’t. 

 

Every opportunity to mitigate the damage he continues to cause has been squandered. We chose this disaster, knowingly and deliberately.

 

Sustaining the political leadership of a man who’s been described as a fascist by even his most eminent former advisers is the most despicable abdication of civic duty by the electorate in the history of the United States. We’ve chosen unfit presidents before, and a few sinister ones, and once chose a man whose victory forced Americans to question their basic moral compatibility—the right choice under the circumstances. Never have we been this close to choosing someone who meets all three criteria, though. With malice toward all, with charity for none: That’s what we’re on the brink of electing.

 

The name of this newsletter comes from the old saw about how frogs supposedly react to heat. If you drop a frog into a pot of boiling water it’ll hop right out, the theory goes, but if you drop it into a pot of lukewarm water and gradually turn up the flame it’ll acclimate incrementally and boil to death. It’s not true, incidentally, but as a metaphor for desensitization it’s irresistible. I don’t know what other conclusion to reach about Americans on the eve of this election than that tens of millions of frogs who’ve been stewing in Trump’s sludge since 2015 have finally boiled.

 

And they’re not going to hop out of the pot in a second term, no matter how hot it gets. The political significance of Trump battling Kamala Harris to a dead heat is that half the country has now committed itself to the proposition that a squalid, menacing, incoherent caudillo selling magic beans is a more responsible choice to govern America than any Democrat. Anyone who’s sufficiently far gone to believe that is also too far gone to experience buyer’s remorse when, not if, Trump executes his next coup attempt or behaves corruptly as president. 

 

In fact, unlike in 2016, you rarely hear members of the American right scoff anymore when doomsayers like me predict civic catastrophe if Trump takes office. How could they? They were watching TV on January 6 like everyone else. They know the risk of calamity is real; they’ve either embraced it, as the more feral populists have, or they’ve made peace with it as an acceptable trade-off for lower taxes or more Border Patrol or granting Israel a slightly freer hand or whatever. Trump’s partnership with the right will now truly have no limits, for either side of the bargain.

 

If, in spite of all that, you want to believe there’s some moral red line he might approach in a second term that his voters won’t permit him to cross, I’d ask you this: Who will be policing that line, supposedly? There’s hardly any resistance left to Trump and Trumpism among right-wing institutions, including and especially among right-wing media. Even within Bill Buckley’s magazine, one of America’s most thoughtful platforms for conservatism and historically the scourge of the John Birch Society, I struggle to think of more than one or two writers (God bless Jay Nordlinger) who plainly prefer to see Trump’s freakishly Bircherite campaign defeated tomorrow.

 

Nearly all the frogs on the right have boiled and maybe just enough in the center for him to win. Anyone who can rationalize supporting him after January 6 can and will rationalize whatever he stoops to next. As you and I suffer through it, let’s resolve to accept no excuses later from those who support him for the perfectly foreseeable results of the immoral choice they’ve made.

 

The past and the future.

 

That’s the best I can do for a consoling thought on Election Day eve—we deserve what we get now. And I do mean “we.” I deserve it too.

 

I’ve worked in right-wing media for a long time. Even in the early days, people who read me would have told you I was nine parts RINO to one part populist. But that’s still one part too many.

 

I regret, and will always regret, that I didn’t recognize until very late what the conservative movement was becoming. I plead stupidity, not malice: Not until Trumpmania exploded in 2015 did it dawn on me that adherents of populist conservatism were happy to jettison the conservatism so long as the populist demagoguery got turned up to 10.

 

Whatever minuscule contribution I may have made toward us arriving at this moment, I’m sorry for it. All I can do to atone is make another minuscule contribution toward trying to lead us away and accept that, whatever Trump has planned, I’m part of the “we” that has it coming.

 

As for the future, a few foolishly optimistic Never Trump types have told me they believe a Trump defeat on Tuesday might be the end politically not just for him but for Trumpist populism writ large. I’m skeptical.

 

For Trump, it really might be the end. He’ll want to run again in 2028, if only to preserve the monarchy he’s built atop the GOP, but he’ll be 82 and he’s already slowing down. And the end of Trump probably means the end of the very particular coalition he’s built. Other Republicans who’ve embraced the Bircherite elements of his program but who lack his charisma, celebrity patina, and comic timing have fared terribly down ballot, by and large. Trump is larger than life. Kari Lake and Doug Mastriano are not.

 

So, no, the Trump coalition isn’t sustainable. But it’s easy to imagine Republicans processing another narrow defeat this week by convincing themselves that the problem, ultimately, was the messenger rather than the message and that a new, bigger coalition can be built by carrying Trumpism forward.

 

A couple fewer jokes about Puerto Rico in the home stretch and another year or two of distance from the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, and who knows? Maybe Trump wins this race after all. The seminal lesson of this election will be that proto-fascism is not per se disqualifying in a right-wing candidate; many voters who don’t support it in principle will at least overlook it in the name of electing a candidate whom they prefer to the alternative on immigration or inflation or what have you. Authoritarianism is just another policy issue to be weighed against all the others, it seems.

 

In that sense, this election will almost certainly be a disastrous defeat for classical liberals and a triumph for postliberals regardless of the outcome. Unless Kamala Harris wins by a landslide, there will be no way to claim credibly that the electorate repudiated Trump’s brand of politics. And no one foresees a Harris landslide. (Well, almost no one.)

 

The future of the right following a defeat on Tuesday, then, will probably be an argument over which Trumpist postliberal is best positioned to grow Trump’s coalition, not whether postliberalism itself is an electoral dead end. It obviously isn’t.

 

Some will favor J.D. Vance or Ron DeSantis as nominee in 2028, believing that a brainy wonk who doesn’t scare the horses with violent fantasies about his enemies is the secret sauce. Nominate one of them and suburbanites who’ve been shifting left will come scrambling back to the GOP, more than offsetting the losses among diehard Trumpists who won’t turn out for a pale imitation of their hero.

 

Others will counter that Trump’s populist movement requires a celebrity figurehead with media chops, charisma to burn, and an appetite for scandalizing the ruling class. Low-propensity voters like the spectacle of culture war by way of pro wrestling that politics became during the Trump era. Only a demagogue more talented than Vance or DeSantis will be able to re-create that for them—and if that demagogue is smarter than Trump, his facility in discussing policy might reassure suburbanites just enough for some to take a chance on him. Guess which potential nominee this bloc will prefer.

 

You can have your authoritarianism gonzo and provocative or you can have it soft-spoken, quasi-respectable, and “cerebral,” but authoritarianism is what’s on the menu for Republicans in 2028. Frogs do not un-boil. Conservatives should understand that and plot their political futures accordingly, with dignity, instead of humiliating themselves with dreck like this to show that they’re still team players on a team that no longer exists.

 

If nothing else good comes from Tuesday night, let that awareness come from it, at least. There is no meaningful constituency left for classical liberals on the American right. Something like 95 percent of self-identified Republicans will vote for a candidate who palpably has no respect for the constitutional order and, of that group, 95 percent will excuse or justify everything he does in a second term that proves it. Don’t be one of them, and don’t ever forgive them for not jumping out of the pot before they boiled.