“You guys know he lost, right?”
So asks Kevin Williamson in National Review, who expresses his befuddlement at the Republican Party swearing Jonestown-level loyalty to a man who led them to a catastrophic defeat - not catastrophic enough, in my opinion, but still pretty bad - in the last election. Wasn’t the whole point of backing Trump was because he supposedly won at everything he ever tried?
…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.
Walter Mondale, who passed away not long ago, didn’t have Democrats scrambling to lick his boots in 1985. Bob Dole’s run as a Republican power player pretty much ended after his unsuccessful challenge to Clinton in 1996.
And, of course, we’ve seen what the GOP now thinks about its previous two Presidential election losers, John McCain and Mitt Romney.
But Trump’s iron grip on the party appears stronger than ever, and yet another assumption we made these past few years has been proven wrong. I figured the GOP would have tossed him overboard after losing the White House and the Senate (the latter by losing both Senate seats in freaking Georgia).
I underestimated just how powerful and intoxicating the feeling of victimhood can be.
When we talk about the weaponization of victimhood and trauma, we usually think about woke college kids, and not without reason. (The latest example: students at a university right here in Atlantic Canada pressuring the school to suspend and pledge to re-educate an Lebanese-born professor for expressing doubleplusungood opinions on her website.)
But it’s very much a phenomenon on the right, as well. Trump might be wrong about almost everything else, but he was deviously smart to identify growing dissatisfaction among the white working class in rural America and tell them that all of their problems were someone else’s fault. And the “stolen” election of 2020 is just the latest example of how the elites are screwing them over.
The thing is, many parts of America that went for Trump really have had a rough go of it these past few decades. I support free trade and drug legalization, but I cannot deny that the former has caused some real pain in some sectors of the economy, and the scourge of opioid addiction has made me reconsider some of my assumptions about the latter. If you’re in some rural county without well-paying jobs, what would you have to lose by voting for the guy who promises to shake things up?
The flip side, of course, is that a responsible politician - as opposed to a loudmouthed populist - sometimes has to tell even his own base hard truths they won’t want to hear. The world has changed and the good old days just aren’t coming back.
It might not be fair, but life ain’t fair. That’s what conservative Republicans used to think, isn’t it?
Follow the loser
I guess the moral of the story is to never underestimate the power of a personality cult or the stupidity of the grassroots GOP. If McCarthy, Stefanik, and the rest of the MAGA kool-aid drinkers want to go full Thelma and Louise in Trump's clown car that's perfectly ok with me. Is it not enough that they've relegated themselves to the party of rural whites and neo-segregationists they want to double-down on conspiracies and Trump's Big Lie?