Republicans Know He's Unfit But They Don't Care
David French is another one of the NY Times’ conservative editorialists these days. Before that he was just some homophobic sociopath from Alabama who managed to get a good education and find a job as a National Review mainstay. He was an early NeverTrumper but an AlwaysConservative. He lives in Tennessee and The Times’ editors must feel he has something to offer to their readers. Yesterday it was that in his hellish part of America, the white folks are split between the delusional pre-MAGA Republicans “who still think they belong to a party of limited government and individual liberty” and the actual Republicans, basically fascists “Trump’s core supporters [who] are convinced that the American establishment is irretrievably corrupt, that America is in its last days and that only the most dramatic action can save the Republic. They think the Trump of Stop the Steal and Jan. 6 is the real Trump, and they can’t wait to see him unleashed... [O]ne set of voters is voting for Trump with great joy and enthusiasm because they absolutely, positively take him seriously. Another set of voters is voting for him in part because they don’t take him seriously at all.”
For the old line Republicans, noted French, “to believe that Trump will govern responsibly, they have to believe that his campaign is a lie. Because if you actually listen to Trump, he’s not promising peace and prosperity. He’s promising conflict, chaos and economic policies that make no sense if inflation is a prime concern. Are you thinking of voting for Trump because prices are too high? His proposed policies would almost certainly make inflation worse. A Wall Street Journal survey of 50 leading economists found that 68 percent believed inflation would be higher under Trump than Kamala Harris. Only 12 percent thought Harris’s policies would exacerbate inflation more. Trump’s extraordinary dedication to tariffs (earlier this week he said, ‘To me the most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariff’) is a chief reason for economists’ concerns. The cost of tariffs— taxes imposed on foreign goods imported to the United States— tends to be passed on to the consumer. Indeed, that’s part of the entire point of the exercise, to make foreign-made goods more expensive for consumers so that they’ll buy domestic products.”
It’s scary, albeit not to MAGAts, that Trump’s father bought him a slot at the Wharton School of Business but that Trump doesn’t have the vaguest idea of even basic economics beyond an innate predatory knack for shearing the sheep.
The problem of potential Trump chaos is magnified by his probable personnel policies. Republicans look back at Trump’s first term and appreciate his early cabinet and judicial appointments. MAGA views those people as mistakes. They wouldn’t let Trump be Trump.
So instead of Mike Pompeo at the CIA, you’re likely to have Kash Patel, a man my newsroom colleague Elizabeth Williamson accurately described as “valued more for subservience than expertise, and eager to pursue a vengeful president’s whims.” Politico is reporting that the Trump team is preparing blacklists of banned staffers— only the most loyal members of MAGA will find a home in the next Trump administration.
And if you, like me, largely liked Trump’s judicial picks, don’t expect a sequel. Trump is frustrated that his judicial appointees blocked his effort to steal the 2020 election, and now his loyalists are pushing what The Journal described as a “combative slate of new judges.”
Expect fewer nominees like the intellectually independent Amy Coney Barrett and more like Judge Aileen Cannon, the South Florida federal judge who dismissed Trump’s criminal documents case on specious grounds.
If you take Trump’s words seriously (and we should take every presidential candidate’s words seriously), his proposed policies mean more inflation, worse debt, greater international instability, incompetent or corrupt appointees, disruptive mass deportations and the deployment of military force against domestic opponents. That is not a formula for peace, prosperity or stability. It’s a formula for precisely the economic and international chaos that Republicans say they want to avoid.
This is where Jan. 6 enters the picture. Even if Republicans want to move on— even if they believe the liberal response was overblown— Trump’s actions demonstrate that Trump’s malice isn’t confined to mean tweets. He wants to break free of the men and women who restrained him in 2020, from his former attorney general, Bill Barr, to his former vice president, Mike Pence, and to the Supreme Court justices who rejected his frivolous legal arguments to overturn the election.
Trump’s conduct reminds us that the best moments of his first term are an artifact of establishment Republican influence, influence he now rejects.
I don’t mean to say that a potential Trump presidency won’t have some policies that traditional conservatives would approve of. It’s quite likely that he will reverse the Biden administration’s policies on Title IX and trans rights in schools and sports, for example, but it’s doubtful Biden’s policies will ever be fully implemented anyway.
On Monday, my colleague Michelle Goldberg wrote an interesting, extended analysis of the American political realignment, noting the logic of Harris’s outreach to disaffected Republicans. There’s no doubt that Harris has been quite liberal, but look again at the issues I just discussed— which candidate is taking the more conservative approach to debt? To confronting Russian aggression? To free trade?
For traditional Republicans to feel at home in Trump’s GOP, they have to make a leap of faith. They have to assume that Trump is lying to his base. They have to assume that he’s running on a fake platform. But knowing what we know now, their faith is misplaced. Trump’s tweets are his policies, and there is no one left in the Republican Party to stand in his way.
Charlie Sykes discussed Trump’s endgame yesterday or, as he put it, Trump’s bizarre endgame a “cognitively declining, incoherent, fascisty closing argument [that] already belongs to the Ages.” Trump he noted— as have others— has “turned up the crazy.”bFor one thing, “Official campaign signs bearing a slogan championed by neo-nazis, issuing increasingly violent threats against his perceived enemies, targeting Black and hispanic immigrants with increasingly racist attacks have become the hallmarks of Trump’s close to the 2024 race… [He] went online after midnight Tuesday to brag about acing cognitive exams he never released [or even took] and his cholesterol, then misleadingly called Vice President Kamala Harris’s allergies a ‘dangerous situation.’ By midday he was meandering through an interview in which he would not directly say whether he would allow a peaceful transfer of power after the election and later complained about Fox News having a Harris aide on air… With three weeks left until Election Day, Trump is running an unorthodox, freewheeling campaign, directing threats and insults at a wide mix of people and institutions.”
Why is this happening? Are we simply watching the real-time decomposition of an aging narcissist? Or is this four-dimensional chess to keep the spotlight on Trump and suck up the political oxygen?
We can’t possibly say.
But one thing seems increasingly clear: Voters will have no excuse. If they elect Trump, they will know what they are getting.
Even the NY Times has been trending towards emphasizing the incipient senility, although they still tend towards tiptoeing around it. “[S]ome Trump advisers and allies,” wrote Michael Bender, “worry that Trump’s impetuousness and scattershot style on the campaign trail needlessly risk victory in battleground states where the margin for error is increasingly narrow. At a time when his opponent… has stepped up her attacks on him as ‘unstable,’ Trump has struggled to publicly hone his message by veering off script and ramping up personal attacks on Harris that allies have urged him to rein in… Internal Harris campaign research showed that one of the most effective ways to persuade voters to support the vice president was by portraying Trump as unstable and Harris as a steady leader who would strengthen America’s security, according to two Harris officials who insisted on anonymity to describe private data. In the past two weeks, the Harris campaign has flooded the airwaves in battleground states with a pair of television ads to underscore these themes. One spot features warnings from Trump’s former top defense officials to paint him as “too big of a risk.” Another features endorsements for Harris from a bipartisan group of national security officials. ‘Even former Trump administration officials agree there’s only one candidate fit to lead our nation — and that’s Kamala Harris,’ the narrator says. The Harris campaign criticized Trump’s appearance at the Economic Club of Chicago, saying he displayed ‘unstable behavior’ and was ‘angry and unfocused as he rambled on and on.’”
In Prescott Valley, Ariz., on Sunday, Trump’s scripted remarks hewed tightly to the anti-immigration message that has become central to his campaign. He stayed on track for the first half-hour of the event before taking a more scenic route to the finish.
After about 25 minutes, he told the crowd he wanted to tell “one quick story” about a friend with a car plant in Mexico.
But he never finished his tale. Instead, he lost the thread one minute later as he complained that if he mispronounced one word he would be accused of being “cognitively impaired.” Then, he botched the phrase by saying President Biden was the one who was “cognitively repaired” and referred to the election as three and a half months away, not three and a half weeks.
About 20 minutes later, Trump seemed ready to wrap up his speech. He promised the crowd would see him again soon and said he was thinking about residents on the East Coast suffering after the recent storms.
“So in closing,” Trump continued, “I just want to say Kamala Harris is a radical left Marxist rated even worse than Bernie Sanders or Pocahontas.”
He proceeded to speak for 17 more minutes.
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