By Jonah Goldberg
Saturday, August 13, 2016
This is an honest question: Does Sean Hannity want
Hillary Clinton to be president? I don’t get it.
And, to borrow a trope from President Obama, let me be
clear about being clear for clarity’s sake: I’m not referring to the entirely
valid, 100 percent correct, indisputably sound argument that it was batsh*t
crazy to nominate this guy in the first place. What’s done is done and Sean
Hannity will no doubt one day receive the Golden Hair Helmet for his
Stakhanovite effort to get Donald Trump the nomination. Let no one forget his
yeoman service in the cause to blow up the Republican party and empty a septic
tank into the ground water of the conservative movement.
The Presidential
Lie
But, again, that is not what I have in mind.
For more than a year Trump and his choir assured everyone
that he would indeed “pivot” and become more presidential.
As he told Hannity: “At the right time, I will be so
presidential that you’ll call me and you’ll say, ‘Donald, you have to stop
that, it’s too much.’”
“As I get closer and closer to the goal, it’s going to
get different,” he told Greta Van Susteren in February. “I will be changing
very rapidly. I’m very capable of changing to anything I want to change to.”
As I wrote last week, this was always a lie (and a
ridiculous thing to say even if it weren’t). Trump can no more promise to be
presidential than a leopard can promise to be a top-loading washing machine
that runs on good intentions when in energy-saver mode (did I get that phrase
wrong?).
But as 8 trillion eggs on Twitter keep telling me, what I
think doesn’t matter. But Sean
believed it. Hannity even suggested in that interview that the real Trump – the
one Hannity has known for years — is the presidential one. Hannity in effect
seconded Trump’s own assurance that Trump could change instantly into a
mainstream, mature candidate whenever he wanted.
Many honest and decent people pocketed this IOU of
presidentialness. In fact, this promise of a new, disciplined Trump seemed to
be the only thing that kept Hugh Hewitt off suicide watch.
Never Mind
Since last week’s “news”letter, Trump has now stated
unequivocally that he won’t change his style one bit. Either his
a**hole-at-the-end-of-the-bar routine pays off or it doesn’t. “At the end, it’s
either going to work or I’m going to, you know, I’m going to have a very, very
nice long vacation,” Trump told CNBC. A couple days before that, he basically
said the same thing to Fox Business. And, as if to underscore that point, that
same day he went and made his “joke” about “Second Amendment people.”
When I heard that, I wanted to call Hugh’s producer
Duane, and suggest that he confiscate Hugh’s belt and shoelaces.
So here’s the thing. As Hugh and other reluctant Trump
backers have conceded countless times, if Trump doesn’t change he will lose.
Badly. Even his fanboys know this – which is why the “stabbed in the back”
tantrums against Trump opponents are intensifying.
For instance, in his most sincere “I’m really serious you
guys!” voice, Sean Hannity says he will hold conservative Trump opponents
“accountable” for Hillary’s victory. No really.
Republicans who are sabotaging DT
will get the HRC they deserve. And yes I will hold them accountable. https://twitter.com/jrubinblogger/status/763721683551129601
Sean Hannity 4:17 PM - 11 Aug 2016
Maybe he can get some kind of tribunal going? “The Trial
of the NeverTrumpers with Sean Hannity” would surely make for some boffo
ratings.
Selling to the
Sold
But here’s the thing. And I do not mean this as an insult
to Sean (though if he wants to take it as one, I won’t lose too much sleep over
it): No one who doesn’t already love Donald Trump is listening to Hannity (or
Laura Ingraham, never mind the lower echelons of Donald Trump’s praetorian
guard) about the topic of Donald Trump. No one. (Just as no one who went all-in
for Cheeto Jesus is paying any attention to me either — which is fine. The Big
Sort of the Trump era is useful in this regard.)
Sean’s threats and bullying are for the entertainment
benefit of an audience that doesn’t need threats or bullying – they’re already
in love with Trump. Except as an exercise in masochism, why would someone
horrified by Trump watch Sean’s nightly Trump Hour brought to you by special
guest director Roger Stone? Except maybe for the health updates on Hillary
Clinton?
There are simply no gettable Trump-skeptical voters
paying attention to Hannity or the other Trumpian party enforcers. The tantrums
directed at the #NeverTrump crowd are for internal consumption, blame shifting,
conscience-easing, and maybe to lay the groundwork for a purge of the new
national-populist GOP.
But the really important point is that, the “let’s root
out the kulaks” zeal enflaming the folks in Breitbart World notwithstanding,
the simple fact is that Trump isn’t losing because of the #NeverTrump brigades.
He’s losing because millions of people who don’t know or care about people like
me don’t like the guy or are nervous about him.
Bill Kristol, Jonah Goldberg, Kevin Williamson, Jim
Treacher, Guy Benson, Ben Shapiro, Erick Erickson, John Podhoretz, Steve Hayes,
George Will, and Peggy Noonan (on the odd-numbered weeks when she doesn’t like
Trump) could endorse Trump tomorrow and he’d still be drowning with
college-educated Republicans, women, minorities, et al.
Why? Because he’s making a fool of himself, daily. It’s
as if he lost his car keys in his rectum and he’s looking for them face first.
I get that this is very hard for some people to hear.
It’s a bit like the clichéd Jewish mother who just doesn’t understand how
anyone could not love her boy. As Mrs. Seinfeld put it to Jerry, “How could
anyone not like you?”
I watch Trump talking like he should be pushing a
shopping cart under the West Side Highway, and think, “How can anybody take
this guy seriously?” But, hey, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.
Winning by Losing
Which brings me back to my question: Why does Hannity
want Hillary to win?
Rather than hold Trump to his promise to pivot, Hannity
is defending Trump’s shtick.
Hannity hosts a nightly infomercial for a product the
customers have already bought. Why not expend some energy trying to change the
product so that others will buy it, too? Would that be too much like asking the
crowds at the Coliseum to downgrade their lust for spectacle? Do you think
Trump’s hardcore supporters are so selfish that they won’t tolerate even a
little sanity and sobriety from the nominee, if only to beat Hillary?
Give these people some credit for Pete’s sake. I’ve seen
a bunch of interviews with attendees of Trump rallies who say they’d like to
see more discipline from Trump. I know they
want to defeat Hillary.
The simple fact is this: Trump will not win unless he
changes. He needs to reassure the skeptics. He needs to win-over people not already
won-over. He needs new, serious, material. But like an aging has-been rocker,
he’d rather keep playing his greatest hits at Indian casinos and state fairs
than actually put in the work and pivot.
But Hannity doesn’t seem to care. Trump is sabotaging his
own campaign every single day, and yet his supporters put the blame on everyone
else and cheer Trump on. They are Trump’s worst enemies because they are
enabling him and by enabling him, they are sabotaging Trump’s campaign. If
Hannity really loved Trump, he would play Ben Affleck to Matt Damon’s Will
Hunting and tell him he owes it to himself and the country to be more than what
he is.
Hannity should pull Trump aside and tell him, “The best
part of my day are those few minutes every morning before I look at the
newspaper or turn on the TV, when I think, ‘Hey, maybe today’s the day Donald
Trump doesn’t beclown himself.’”
So, again: Why, Sean? Why? Doesn’t Trump listen to you?
Didn’t you believe him when he promised you all those times that he can and
will pivot? If you did, why aren’t you angry with him for lying to your face
and your audience? Why are you happy to let him continue to pander to crowds
that will already vote for him rather than make the slightest effort to
persuade a constituency that would put him over the top?
Do you think Trump is lying when he says he could be
presidential if he wanted to? If so, isn’t that a source of concern? I mean, if
he can’t act presidential for 24 hours as a candidate, are you confident he can
be presidential for four years? Why
not publicly ask him to try to be a serious person for a week? Let’s see if he can do that. Hey, I’ll tell you what.
If he can manage that I’ll reconsider my #NeverTrump position.
Unless, the issue is that you know he can’t be presidential, so you don’t want to risk asking him
to be. Or maybe you just prefer having stuff to gripe about every night to the
amen corner? Or maybe, deep down, you realized just how massively you screwed
up – and screwed us – by backing this guy and you’d rather pass the buck
elsewhere? Or maybe you just want Hillary Clinton to win?
I’ll take my answers off the air, as they say.
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