Purges for Unity

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, May 09, 2021

 

You guys know he lost, right?

 

Representative Liz Cheney (R., Wyo.) is (probably) being pushed out of her leadership position, most likely in favor of Representative Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.), because Representative Cheney is insufficiently Trump-loving and Stefanik is superabundantly Trump-loving.

 

It’s that familiar Republican strategy: a purge for unity.

 

House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) and other like-minded Republicans complain that it will be difficult for Cheney to do her job effectively in the current political environment, meaning the infantile emotional climate in which some number of Republicans stamp their feet and hold their breath like Veruca Salt when Cheney accurately characterizes Donald Trump’s disgraceful post-election behavior as a parade of lies marching through an avalanche of horsesh**.

 

It seems that this inflexible position vis-à-vis the truth is divisive, and so Cheney, lamentably, must go.

 

More in sadness than in anger and all that.

 

McCarthy et al. talk about the political situation like they are talking about the weather, as though it were something that just happened to them rather than something that is the result of their own choices, decisions, and actions. It used to be that when Republicans talked about “learned helplessness,” they meant welfare dependents rather than the leaders of their own party. Because those choices have been dumb and destructive, that party is a smoking ruin right now, and you’d think that, if nothing else, cynically self-interested Republicans would try to do themselves a solid when it comes to the next election.

 

There’s just that one part I still can’t figure out.

 

Do you know what Liz Cheney did in her last election? She won — bigly. Her Democratic opponent didn’t break 30 percent. If Donald Trump had won 70 percent of the vote in his election, Sean Hannity would have spontaneously given birth to twin pandas live on Fox News. Trump did well in Wyoming, turning in about the same numbers as Mitt Romney in 2012. But Trump wasn’t running for the House seat in Wyoming — he was running for president, and got 46.9 percent of the national vote, which is why he currently works as a part-time blogger in Florida.

 

So, walk me through this.

 

Donald J. Trump — let’s tighten in and focus on this part — did not win. He lost. And he lost pretty handily — not in a landslide, but in a reasonably convincing pantsing. Joe Biden running against Donald Trump in 2020 outperformed Jack Kennedy running against Richard Nixon in 1960, Richard Nixon running against Hubert Humphrey in 1968, and — this one is going to sting — Donald Trump running against Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2016.

 

But, somehow, Trump has convinced McCarthy et al. that Republicans can’t win without him — even though he quite recently has demonstrated, as plainly as can be, that they cannot win with him.

 

Republican leaders are living in talk-radio reality.

 

In reality reality, things look a little different. When Trump was elected in 2016, Republicans already controlled the House of Representatives and the Senate. In 2021, they control the board of commissioners in Minnehaha County, S.D., and several very highly regarded hills of beans. Trump never got even to 50 percent approval, the first president in a generation to stay underwater for his entire term in office — and also the first since Herbert Hoover to see his party lose the White House and both houses of Congress in one term. Trump-aligned figures are hearing footsteps in Republican states, with Senator Ted Cruz, for example, having come within a few points of losing reelection to a callow nobody in a race in which he lost every city in Texas more populous than Lubbock.

 

One in six of the people who identified as Republicans on Election Day in 2020 no longer associate themselves with the Republican party — only 25 percent of American voters do. That’s the political price of January 6 and Trump’s post-election shenanigans. Any more unity, and Republicans will be holding their next convention in a corner booth at Denny’s.

 

Win a campaign for president? Trump currently can’t win a campaign for a Facebook page.

 

You can blame the media, the “fraudulent presidential election of 2020,” or the cabal of Luciferian pedophiles secretly pulling the strings in D.C. if you want. But Trump still ended up chalking one in the L column, not the W column. The goods were not delivered. He got a win his first time at the dance and then choked the second time around: He’s not Ronald Reagan — he’s Brett Favre.

 

Republicans are slow learners, but they are capable of learning. And, here, they might want to make an effort.

 

Joe Biden is a ghastly old Washington dinosaur whose IQ and preferred thermostat setting have been converging for decades, but he beat an incumbent president while hardly leaving his basement, where he was obliged to dodge questions about his feckless cokehead son’s shady Ukrainian business partners. He didn’t win because he had a team of geniuses working for him, and he didn’t win because of media bias; he won because Trump was bad at the job, and because Trump was a celebrity candidate whose novelty had worn off by 2020, leaving him with a rump of die-hard supporters who were not numerous enough to deliver the win for him in November and who are not numerous enough to make Republicans into a majority party today.

 

Representative Cheney is a conservative Republican of the kind who scares Portland lefties out of their Birkenstocks, and not just because of her fearsome surname. But, set that aside. I’ll even stipulate that I don’t care very much about the House Republican pecking-order (it is really too much to keep calling it “leadership”), because I can’t put much faith in any hierarchy that has Kevin McCarthy at the top of it. And Representative Elise Stefanik, the New Yorker for whom Republicans apparently are planning to dump Cheney, is just hunky-dory for the purposes at hand.

 

But I wonder: Why dump somebody who wins as an act of symbolic fealty to somebody who loses — and leaves the stink of loserdom all over his party and his supporters?

 

I used to think Republicans sold their souls in exchange for political power. I am starting to think they’re just doing it out of habit.

 

You guys know he lost, right?