By Ben Shapiro
Wednesday, October 12, 2016
For the entirety of the general election cycle, we’ve
heard Donald Trump and his supporters claim that conservatives have no choice but to support him. After all,
Trump said, he would appoint a fifth conservative justice to the Supreme Court
(never mind that Justice Roberts is at best a mixed bag) and build a wall
(never mind that deportations are the most critical element of any immigration
policy). Trump defenders continually beat the drums on this: Sure, you might
not be able to trust Trump, but you could
trust Hillary to do the wrong thing on such issues. That made Trump the safest
bet.
On Sunday and Monday, the Trump team itself utterly
destroyed this argument.
We know Trump doesn’t care one iota about conservatism
because he doesn’t care one iota about whether Republicans carry the Senate or
the House. In order for Trump to implement anything remotely approaching a
serious conservative agenda, he’d have to have a significant Republican
majority in both houses of Congress. No Republican Senate majority, no
Scalia-like justice. No House majority, no wall.
Trump knows that. But he’s now initiated a full-scale war
against active Republican candidates simply to gratify his ego, blistered from
a lifetime of emotional masturbation. He’s less interested in governing as a
conservative than in grabbing dissenting Republicans by the . . . well, you
know.
This weekend, after Republicans began deserting Trump in
droves in order to contain the Stand-like
political infection he’s unleashed, Trump began actively undermining Republican
chances in Congress. First, he tweeted, “So many self-righteous hypocrites.
Watch their poll numbers — and elections — go down!” This was an open call to
his supporters to unleash their wrath against vulnerable Republicans in tight
races — to get Democrats elected, in other words.
Next, Trump’s campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway,
appeared on MSNBC, where she threatened to out unnamed non-Trumpian members of
Congress as sexual abusers, or slander them wholesale:
I would talk to some of the members
of Congress there when I was younger and prettier, them rubbing against girls,
sticking their tongues down women’s throats who were uninvited, didn’t like it
. . . you know it’s true. And some of them, by the way, are on the list of
people who won’t support Donald Trump because they all ride around on their
high horse.
Then, Trump went after Speaker of the House Paul Ryan
directly. Ryan had the temerity to say on a conference call that he’d still be
voting for Trump, but that he wouldn’t defend him or campaign with him. That
led Trump to tweet, “Paul Ryan should spend more time on balancing the budget,
jobs and illegal immigration and not waste his time on fighting Republican
nominee.” Of course, Trump could spend more of his time on not being the worst
Republican candidate in history rather than bashing the man he needs in order
to pass his agenda. But that wouldn’t be Trumpian, would it?
It didn’t stop there. Trump’s campaign spokeswoman, the
effervescently excrescent Katrina Pierson, tweeted, “I can’t keep my phone
charged due to the mass volume of texts from people all over the country who
will #VoteTrump but [down]ballot not so much.” She then tried to walk that
back, but it was too late. Meanwhile, Trump’s Virginia campaign chair Corey
Stewart organized a protest outside the Republican National Committee
headquarters at which one attendee waved a sign reading “Better to Grab a P***y
than to Be One.” That was a little
much for the Trump campaign, who promptly fired him.
But the message is clear: Oppose Trump, and he’ll attempt
to burn you to the ground, even if it means handing control of Congress over to
the Democrats. Which, by all indicators, it does. Trump is losing badly. He’s
getting blown out in historic fashion according to virtually all the polls
(yes, Michael Cohen, all of them). There are those of us who have said all
along that a Trump candidacy and attempts to defend it would do serious damage
to the Republican party’s prospects for the foreseeable future — but all conservatives and Republicans have
agreed that, at the very least, Republicans must maintain control of Congress
to check either Hillary or Trump. But Trump is ensuring that his political
collapse hands total power over to Hillary. As Robert Costa of the Washington Post reported, “Trump circle
gloating. Privately mocking elected Rs who are agonizing. One laughed and said,
‘We don’t care.’”
It’s true. They don’t.
Because they never cared. Not about stopping Hillary. Not
about promoting conservatism. Trump himself said months ago he wouldn’t be too
upset if Republicans lost the Senate, because then he’d be free to cut deals
with Democrats. Trump’s a lifelong Democratic donor — including to Hillary. The
great irony of Trump’s candidacy is that his most ardent boosters see Hillary
as an existential crisis, but Trump himself doesn’t think she’s that dangerous
and never did.
So with Trump going down, why don’t his supporters
abandon him to save the resistance to Hillary?
There are two reasons. First, they’ve been told that
Trump still has a fighting chance if everyone
just pulls their oars. Talk-radio hosts on Monday spent the day lauding
Donald Trump for a strong debate performance, ignoring the poll numbers that
show Trump in freefall and Congress now up for grabs. “Now that Trump is
finally attacking Hillary,” conservative media figures say, “we can finally win
this thing. All that’s required is for those stubborn Never Trumpers to jump
aboard, and we can still pull it out!”
This is, to put it mildly, patent nonsense. The Trump
Hindenburg is already on fire, and adding passengers isn’t going to slow the conflagration.
It’s just going to ensure more destruction.
But that’s okay, according to many Trump supporters.
That’s because they’ve also been told
that congressional Republicans are irrelevant when it comes to stymying
Democrats — so the only reason congressional Republicans must be abandoning
Trump is out of some sort of bizarre sympathy for the Hillary agenda. For
Trump, therefore, the party might as well be burned to the ground. After all,
it wasn’t worth much to him anyway.
This is the perspective of key members of the Trump
campaign including Steve Bannon, who once told Ronald Radosh, “I want to bring
everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.” According
to Radosh, this included the Republican party and the traditional conservative
media. This mentality has bled down to some Republican thought-leaders, who
maintain that a Congress run by Paul Ryan is no better than one run by Nancy
Pelosi — so if Ryan and Republican representatives supporting Trump increases
Trump’s shot of winning by 5 percent but decreases Republicans’ shot of maintaining
Congress by 40 percent, that’s a fine tradeoff.
That’s historically ignorant. Republicans in Congress
haven’t done enough to stonewall President Obama. But when Democrats ran
Congress, they passed Obamacare along simple party lines, blew out the budget,
rammed through a massive stimulus package, and approved two wildly leftist
Supreme Court justices. Republicans haven’t been a picnic, but they’ve done a
hell of a lot better than that.
But none of that matters to Trump. For him, it is and
always has always been Trump über alles;
dissent is treason. That’s going to be a problem when Trump beats Republicans
into submission just long enough for them to hand over total power to Hillary
Clinton and the Democrats.
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