By Jonah Goldberg
Saturday, October 15, 2016
If understatements were a capital offense, I’d hang for
saying, “Things are not going well for the GOP.” (If some of the trolls in my
Twitter feed have their way, I will hang regardless.)
So, congrats to those of you deserving congratulations.
Operation Destroy the GOP and Salt the Earth upon Which It Stood is going
swimmingly! Technically, that would be ODGOPSEUWIS, but let’s call it ODGOP
(pronounced “Odd-Gawp”) for short.
The final phase of ODGOP kicked into high gear on
Thursday. Prior to last night’s speech, President Obama had largely played
along with the Clinton strategy of isolating Trump from the rest of the GOP.
Obama in early August:
This is different than just having
policy differences. I recognize that they profoundly disagree with myself or
Hillary Clinton on tax policy or certain elements of foreign policy, but there
have been Republican presidents with whom I disagreed with but I didn’t have a
doubt that they could function as president. I think I was right and Mitt
Romney and John McCain were wrong on certain policy issues, but I never thought
that they couldn’t do the job.
But Thursday in Ohio (of course), Obama turned the knife
like it was a Phillips-head screwdriver wielded by Otto von Tendorp, a
fictional serial killer who kills his opponents with a Phillips-head
screwdriver he turns very slowly.
“You claim the mantle of the party of family values, and
this is the guy you nominate,” Obama said.
From there, it got worse.
From the Washington
Post:
“But so the problem is not that all
Republicans think the way this guy does. The problem is, is that they’ve been
riding this tiger for a long time,” Obama said, referring to those who
questioned whether he was born in the United States, those who called him “the
antichrist” and subscribers to other conspiracy theories. “They’ve been feeding
their base all kinds of crazy for years, primarily for political expedience.”
“People like Ted [Strickland]’s
opponent, they just stood by while this happened,” Obama said, referring to
[Republican senator Rob] Portman. “And Donald Trump, as he’s prone to do, he
didn’t build the building himself, but he just slapped his name on it and took
credit for it.”
“This is in the swamp of crazy that
has been fed over and over and over and over again,” Obama said to applause.
“So the point is, if your only agenda is either negative — negative is a
euphemism, crazy — based on lies, based on hoaxes, this is the nominee you get.
You make him possible.”
Now, I’m happy to disagree with some — and just some — of
this. It’s not like the Left’s base isn’t fed its own brand of crazy from time
to time either. It’s not true that birtherism is all the GOP has been about.
It’s not like Obama is exempt from blame for this sorry state of affairs after
spending his whole presidency trolling his political opponents and defying
constitutional norms. And it’s certainly not true, as he said last night, that
the “central principle” of the Republican party is to “make it harder to vote.”
That’s ridiculous, irresponsible rhetoric.
But the point here isn’t to rebut Obama on the merits.
Less than a month out from the election, arguing with Obama makes about as much
sense as challenging my cat to a game of Battleship
(first of all, she cheats, as befits her feline nature). The point is it’s all
fair game.
Wahhh, the Media
But let me concede a few things. Yes, the Mainstream
Media (MSM) is biased against Republicans. This has been true since, if not the
Mesozoic Era, then at least 1960. Yes, the media is particularly biased against
Donald Trump. But this is not quite the outrage Trump’s spinners want to make
it. Not only is Trump an exceptionally unworthy presidential candidate on the
merits, but he does everything he possibly can to maximize the endemic problems
of liberal-media bias. Thanks to his lizard-brain narcissism, he would rather
have awful headlines about himself and be the center of attention than have Hillary
Clinton steal the limelight. LBJ liked to say, “Let’s not step on our d**ks” on
this or that issue. Trump is like one of those Italian barefoot peasant women
who make wine by stomping on grapes all day, except instead of grapes it’s
d**ks as far as the eye can see and Trump is wearing very expensive shoes.
Yes, absolutely, the WikiLeaks e-mails provide countless
vulnerabilities that might have destroyed Hillary’s candidacy if she were
running against any conventional Republican. But it’s not liberal-media bias
per se that causes the press to pay outsized attention to tales of sexual
misconduct; the press always pays attention to sex. The Lewinsky scandal got a lot of media attention. You could look
it up.
It was inevitable and obvious that this lecherous
adulterer who bragged in print about cheating on his wife would have these
skeletons in his enormous, gold-and-velvet-lined closet. But no one needed to
be a master sleuth or even a run-of-the-mill opposition researcher to know
this. You know why? Because this guy said so! When accused of being a sexual
predator by Howard Stern, Trump said, “That’s true!” — and then he laughed (in
front of his daughter, whom he has affectionately called “a piece of ass”).
Trump has told little girls that he would be dating them soon. If you want to
write that all off as jokes, fine. Well, he also said that he couldn’t run for
political office because of his attitude toward women:
“I think women are beautiful — I think certain women are
more beautiful than others, to be perfectly honest — and it is fortunate that I
don’t have to run for political office.”
This is apparently a disgusting recurring theme in Donald
Trump’s life. You know what? I think women are beautiful. I also think some are
more beautiful than others, too. But just because you find women beautiful
doesn’t allow you to act like a blind guy and treat women like they’re the
Braille edition of Playboy. But
that’s precisely what he said he did in the Access
Hollywood tape. He said he’s attracted to beautiful women and therefore he
has an inherent right to search them for contraband.
The Real Outrage
Here’s the thing, though: Even if you wanted to think the
best of a man who disparages war heroes but insists that dodging the clap was
his “personal Vietnam,” a serious political party would have still demanded that he submit to an internal
opposition-research investigation. Read John
Fund’s piece in National Review
from Thursday. Trump refused to let his own campaign do an inventory of his
skeletons. The guy who hires the best people was implored by the people he hired to do this basic form of due diligence and
he refused. And now we’re supposed to be shocked that the Clintons found the
skeletons in question? Or that the press is eager to report on them? Or that
Newt Gingrich and Kellyanne Conway are left looking ridiculous and blindsided?
My God, what planet do you live on?
So yes, the coverage of Trump is an outrage. But the
outrage it exposes is how grotesquely unfair and partisan the press was to
previous Republican nominees. The Trump campaign is getting the coverage it
deserves (and is asking for!), and that highlights how the coverage of past
candidates was so extraordinarily unfair. Take for example, the bowel-stewed
hysteria over Mitt Romney’s “binders full of women” comment. Romney said — and
did — exactly what feminists and
liberal reporters should applaud. He wanted to hire qualified women. So he
reached out to women’s groups for suggestions. They sent him lots of
recommendations. Binders full of them. And then he hired many of the women
listed in the binders. What a monster!
Or consider the claims that Romney was a racist. How
stupid does this garbage look now?
Let’s Talk about
Sex Baby
So let’s talk about these allegations against Trump. I
think they’re true. Maybe not all of them, but certainly enough of them, not
least because they conform to what Trump confessed
to in an unguarded moment. But also because we can be sure that at least some
of them were given to the media by Democrats who would have made sure to vet
them.
I honestly can’t get my head around the fact that Hillary
Clinton’s closing “argument” in this election is sexual harassment. Bill Clinton’s lifelong enabler has managed to
turn this topic into a deadly weapon against a Republican nominee. This is like
Godzilla turning public safety into a winning issue in the Tokyo mayoral race.
But even harder to fathom: the logical Mobius strip of
Trump’s argument. Hillary Clinton is evil because she attacked Bill Clinton’s
accusers (never mind that Trump was on her side of the argument when it
mattered in the 1990s). That argument could fly, except for the fact that,
almost in the same breath, Trump says his accusers are malevolent liars. He
told the crowd to “just look” at one of them as all the proof required to know
that she’s a liar. Translation: “If she were hotter, it’d be totally believable
that I forced myself on her.” To simultaneously defend Trump on these charges
while attacking Hillary Clinton requires contortions not seen outside the pages
of Plastic Man.
Next of the NNN
Obviously, I don’t know for certain that Donald Trump is
really trying to lay the groundwork for a cable-TV network, though a lot of
smart and informed people I know think that’s the case. If you’re looking for a
theory to explain what Trump and Campaign CEO Steve Bannon — the former head of
Breitbart News — are doing, it makes
a hell of a lot more sense than this fanciful notion that he’s trying to become
president. Since the convention, only once did he make any serious effort to
expand his losing coalition to a larger, winning coalition: His tone-deaf,
ridiculous, and utterly fake appeals to black voters. “Our African-American
communities are absolutely in the worst shape they’ve ever been in before,”
Trump said. “Ever. Ever. Ever.”
Put aside how utterly absurd this claim is (rent Roots if you don’t know what I mean) and
how understandably offensive it is to a lot of black people, it was never
intended to win black votes. The campaign had this idea that white suburban
women would be swayed by Trump’s “concern” for blacks. He failed — which should
have been obvious from the start.
And that’s it. For the rest of the campaign he’s been
whipping up his 38 percent of the electorate into a kind of frenzy. Some people
think he’s betting that he can dampen turnout generally, while spiking his base
to win the election. Maybe. Or maybe that’s the rationalization they throw out
there to distract from the more realistic goal: the launch of Nutter News
Network. Read the transcript of Trump’s speech from Thursday railing about the
globalist corporate-media conspiracy. It might as well be the mission statement
for Bannon’s new enterprise, a network that stands up to the global cabal
siphoning off our vital bodily fluids (in between commercials for water
deflouridizers and gas masks). Why has Trump done scores of interviews on Fox
and virtually nowhere else the last two months? Because he’s not interested in
winning over undecideds, independents, or swing voters — you know the sort of
thing serious presidential candidates do. No, he’s reselling the same product
to people who’ve already bought it so he can take the customers with him after
the election.
Why is Trump constantly saying that if he loses it will
be because the election was rigged? Why is he wasting precious time attacking
fellow Republicans, a move guaranteed to shrink his coalition even further?
Because he wants the faithful to be permanently alienated from the rest of the
political culture and utterly reliant on him. In fairness, it’s also because he
can’t tolerate the idea that people will reasonably conclude that he’s a loser
and choker so he has to lay the groundwork for the claim the other side
cheated. But that narcissistic insecurity just makes him all the more
susceptible to Bannon’s manipulation. He was such a Bannon puppet yesterday you
could almost see Bannon’s fingers moving in the back of Trump’s mouth.
You Blew It Up!
So here we are.
All of the idiotic arguments his cheerleaders made a year
ago have been exposed as the magical-thinking B.S. they always were. He can win
blue states! Name one. He’s expanding the GOP coalition! Really? Then why are
Republican Senate candidates outperforming Trump in almost every battleground
state?
Many of the same people who said that we have to unify
the party to beat Hillary Clinton now say that dumping Trump — the only
possible way to defeat her (and that’s extremely unlikely to work) — would be
treasonous and were the first to scream that Trump voters should screw the
down-ballot candidates because Paul Ryan said he wouldn’t defend Trump anymore.
If you honestly want to limit the damage Hillary Clinton will do to this
country, the one and only obvious thing you should be doing is voting to keep
the Republicans in control of Congress. If you think the GOP won’t fight
Hillary hard enough, fine. But do you think a Democrat-controlled Congress will
fight her at all?
I feel like Charlton Heston screaming at the Statue of
Liberty on the beach. You people blew it all up. You embraced a man who has no
serious allegiance to the ideals you got rich peddling and who had a
vanishingly small chance of winning in the first place — even if he had been the disciplined candidate
he deceitfully vowed he would be. Trump is now an albatross on the party and he
will leave a Cheeto-colored stain on both the GOP and the conservative movement
for years to come.
If you want to limit the damage you’ve caused to the party,
vote for Republicans down ballot. Vote for Trump too, if you like. I don’t
care, he’s going to lose anyway. But I’m going to vote for Evan McMullin so I
can look myself in the mirror and maybe, just maybe, leave us something to
build on after the catastrophe. (Though I tremble at the thought, I’m ready
to risk the wrath of SMOD for withdrawing my endorsement of him.)
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