By Charles C. W. Cooke
Monday,
January 22, 2024
In recent
days, I have been reaching for a concise way of describing the difference
between Donald Trump as a candidate or power broker within the Republican
primary system and Donald Trump as a candidate or power broker within the
United States at large. Yesterday, while I was looking at computers for a side
project in which I am involved, it came to me: Donald Trump is “optimized” for
the GOP primaries, but he is fatally underpowered when operating anywhere else.
To run the same program on him — once, twice, three times, or more — will
invariably be to yield the same disappointing results.
Architecturally,
Trump’s problems are ruinous, intractable, and impossible to fix with a patch.
Until it changes its core hardware, the Republican Party will stay where it has
been for years: unable to prevent Trump from remaining as its deranged standard-bearer,
and unable to win key elections while Trump occupies that role. In effect,
there are now two spheres within our politics. In one of them, Trump thrives;
in the other, he flails. Within a highly politicized environment — let’s call
it “the bubble” — Trump’s shtick is catnip to both his friends and his foes,
because, unlike anyone else within the firmament, he provides a central pole
around which everyone else is able to triangulate. Thus does Trump serve as an
incentive machine for people in the politics business: He drives
his fans wild and his enemies wilder, and, in so doing, he creates
opportunities for entrepreneurship that simply do not attach to more sober or
earnest candidates. Over the last decade, the majority of America’s
conservative institutions have realized that there’s a great deal of money to
be made in demanding fealty to Trump, and the majority of non-conservative
outlets have seen the potential inherent in taking exactly the opposite course.
Ostensibly, these two groups have nothing in common. In reality, though, both
of them rely upon the preservation and promotion of the same man. Sure, it’s
bad for the country. But it’s damn good for CBS.
Inside
the bubble, Trump is a magician who can bend reality to his will. If Trump says
that he won the last election, then he won the last election. If Trump says
that Ron DeSantis was a lockdown enthusiast, Ron DeSantis was a lockdown
enthusiast. If Trump is an apostate, that’s politics; if anyone else is an
apostate, it speaks damningly of their reliability. Inside the bubble, the
truth doesn’t matter: What is Trumpist is conservative, and what is
conservative is Trumpist. RINOs are people who criticize Trump; Republicans are
people who praise him. There, Trump is the arbiter of truth, the oracle of the
Right, the very definition of correctitude — and nobody else is allowed a say
in the matter. The marching orders go out, and the infantry falls quickly into
line. Nobody can compete with that.
But
on the outside? On the outside, nobody much cares about all that. Most
Americans are not politics-addled weirdos, and, as such, they are not
susceptible to claims that they know deep down are patently untrue. They do not
believe that Trump won the last election; they do not believe that he is the
sole person in America who is incapable of doing wrong; they do not conceive of
politics as a holy war between MAGA and its enemies; and they are not much
interested in being cajoled into silence by some of the flimsiest arguments
that have ever graced the national stage. Shocking as it might seem to the
bubble people, their lexicon remains alien to a majority of the citizenry.
“Pro-Trump, anti-Trump, anti-anti-Trump” — these are cynical, myopic,
monomaniacal terms, favored by zealots and charlatans, and they have little
purchase with anyone else.
Which,
given that America’s most important politics is practiced outside the bubble,
presents a considerable problem for the GOP. As was clearly illustrated in
2018, 2020, and 2022, there exists a striking gap between what Republican
primary voters think will be appealing to Americans and what is actually
appealing to Americans. And yet, unable to learn its lesson, and unwilling to
accept the harsh truths that it has been told, the Republican Party keeps
pointing to the results of its own deliberations as if they had any bearing on
the real world. It must be one of the greatest ironies in American political
history that a movement that considers itself “populist” has fallen so
dramatically into Pauline Kaelism. At root, MAGA’s argument is preposterously
solipsistic: Everyone they know loves Trump, ergo everyone
they don’t know must be presumed to feel the same. But the
thing is: Everyone they don’t know doesn’t feel the same. Most people in this
country live well outside of the absurd cocoon that the Right has constructed
for itself, and they make their decisions not in an unhinged frenzy, but
dispassionately and on balance. And, on balance, they dislike Trump more than
they dislike his opposition. Once again, Republicans have optimized for
precisely the wrong fight. Garbage in, garbage out.
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