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Trump Focus Is Establishment Focus — PowerLine, the Left, and the “Right”
Trump. Trump, Trump, Trump. There’s a word with a lot behind it. Apparently it has a lot ahead of it too. The use of the word (not even as a name) is increasingly just a brush that the left uses to spread their tar. Calling somebody a Trumpist is like calling them a racist, a fascist, a speciesist, a whatever-ist.
It’s not as though racism, fascism, etc., do not exist. We’re drowning in these things now, courtesy of the racist, fascist left. And these are real evils, which the left does not wish to confront honestly — they would suffer in any realistic assessment of motives and programs. Yet the left has been calling everybody they don’t like racist, fascist, whatever-ist for decades now, with increasing vehemence. Perhaps as their own racism and fascism intensify, they must compensate by accusing ever more stridently, in order to squelch the ceaseless, buzzing cognitive dissonance for their readers — and themselves.
So “Trump” is increasingly just a cudgel to swing. Why confront the issues when you can simply call names? And why confront issues that are important to Trumpists — why on earth would we confront issues important to racists? Focusing on Trump is how to spike a conversation that might not go your way.
Trudeau knows it. Why do you think he tars the truckers as racists, misogynists, fascists, neo-nazis? Because he cannot win if it looks like he’s arguing with truckers about freedom. Instead, he wants it to look like he’s defending civilization itself from the worst barbarian horde to menace our story’d edifice.
Months ago I wrote a post and asked the membership here to vote on the proposition: “The party was split long before Trump, and will remain split if it survives, well past Trump. The split has very little to do with Trump.” The results were (are) 56-2 for the proposition. Taken as a group, overwhelmingly we admit that Trump is not actually the issue. So why is he still the focus?
There are good reasons and bad. Good reasons include the fact that he might indeed run again, or he might just flap about and influence the proceedings, and there’s the as-yet unresolved stolen election, as well as the mutiny of the executive branch, dovetailing with the deep state coup. So there’s a lot to this Trump stuff right?
Except that the whole point of most of this Trump stuff is that the problems indeed pre-date (and predate, even) the Trump administration. Those things which brought Trump down are the exact things that precipitated him from a cloud of right-base fury at the Establishment.
And just a note on terminology: the Establishment is that which is not grassroots. The GOPe is that on the Republican side of things which is more cathedral than bazaar, more coast than flyover, and more paid-to-speak than desperate-to-be-heard. No, supporting the points of view reliably found in the Establishment does not make you “the Establishment”, but whether you admit it or not, it does put you in that camp. The Establishment has its shills, and its mere fans. Perhaps you can’t see it from in there, but from the outside, it’s clear as day.
So here’s post up at PowerLine in which Paul Mirengoff offers his support to the laughably unsupported potty-gate claims, and Steve Hayward takes him to task, complete with a Buckley-esque offer to punch him in the nose. I, like fellow Ricochettian @drewinwisconsin, hopped off the PowerLine fanwagon when they, like Hugh Hewitt (ask Glenn in Dallas!) went all in for Romney. I couldn’t cite chapter and verse — I just know that in general, reading them was no longer worthwhile. The upshot of nearly every podcast or article seemed to turn me off, based almost solely on the purity of Romney-boosting. For all I know, maybe Hinderaker or somebody was stalwartly open about it until after the nomination, but I don’t recall anymore. I remember what I thought about the whole thing at the time. At any rate, off I went.
So why is Paul Mirengoff jumping all over yet another unsourced scatological “intel” leak about Trump? Well, perhaps it has to do with a reluctance to engage with actual documents, findings, filings, in the Mueller/Durham/Godot series of non-events which nonetheless eject valuable nuggets from time to time — and which bear out what Trump has said since before taking office. And which, let us not forget, bear out what the angry rabble have been saying since before Trump descended from Heaven on a solid gold escalator. Or something like that.
How far will the Establishment types go to avoid confronting real issues which just might make Trump less risible to them? Or prove him right about something — anything? Or prove that they have at least some climbing down to do in public? Or prove to their own satisfaction that indeed the election was stolen?
Horrors! Better off just to swing that Trump word around. It’s not just the left who have a cognitive dissonance problem when it comes to Trump. So the word Trump must be maintained as a radioactive expletive, scatological, corrupt, uncouth. The Tea Party is still here. We were here before Trump, and will be here after. As a popular Trump meme has it, he (supposedly) says “They’re not really after me. They’re after you. I’m just in the way.” The GOP war on the base has not gone away — neither has the base. I wrote about the GOP wanting to win without the base years before Trump ran. Right or wrong, it wasn’t about Trump. We care about Trump because we voted for him — he literally represented us — not because he matters himself.
The DC Establishment uniparty finds it useful, or funny, or “devastating” to make us into the T-Party, as if we followed Trump around examining the contents of His Royal Chamberpot. Sorry, that’s not us. But somebody sure is.
Published in General
Wow, this stuff has blown up while I was editing this. I’m reading a bunch of good stuff in posts, group posts, and comments here, and I even see one of us over at PowerLine. Howdy, Bryan!
When you defeat Hillary Clinton, it is indeed a mandate to go in a new direction. The Republicans could have eaten this up. Instead they showed their true tastes and didn’t pass an 0bamacare bill that they’d passed before when there was no chance of the president signing it.
Trump may run for office again, and presumably will have had four years to pick staff and form a clean-up plan, but he really now represents all those people who have voted for decades for Republicans who didn’t do anything when given the power to do something real and lasting. (Like balancing the budget.)
They are now calling most Americans terrorists and white supremacists, but Trump is still the symbol for what the deep state and its Left, and its Press hate. I get that. What I don’t get are the saboteurs in the Republican party that fight against the change that Trump tried to bring.
Sorry BDB, I very much like PowerLine!! Mirengoff should go; but, alas, I believe that he was part of it when it began.
Revelatory, innit?
I’m not hatin’ on PowerLine. Just explaining why I don’t follow them much anymore. I’m still grateful when people link to good stuff over there. I’m still sad that the Northern Alliance is gone.
I downloaded and saved a LOT of their podcasts.
Some of us are wondering if it’s out of fear of being cancelled or doxxed for something in their past. . . Like John Roberts.
Flushing documents down the toilet? Is that something anyone does? Aren’t there other more effective ways to get rid of documents? Is the subtext here that Trump is so stupid, this is a stupid thing that he would do?
I don’t want to caricature myself into shibboleths about how “they hate change” etc. Many a canard comes in two polarities: George W. Bush approval in his “handling of the war” is guaranteed to elicit identical responses from those who thought “too much” and those who thought “not enough”, leaving only the Goldilocks slice in the middle to supposedly represent Bush supporters. And so it is with this. We want change and the kooky left wants change, but we want different changes — both of which represent discomfort to the Establishment. Depends how big the change is.
Yet even the angriest Trumpian is not howling for literal burn-it-down riots and street justice. What we want, in true Spice Girls style — what we really really want, is smaller government, with all that that entails: less intrusive, less oppressive, cheaper, more responsive, and just maybe sustainable beyond the next generation’s otherwise inevitable bankruptcy. All of this is anathema to the Establishment right just as it is to the left, not because it is mere “change”, but because it dries up the swamp they swim in for fun and profit.
Yet many on the Establishment right are more threatened by the right than the left, because in the left’s Socialist utopia, there’s still ple-e-enty of funding for a captive opposition at all the finest cocktail parties. Can’t pretend to be a Republic without any token Republicans around.
This is separate from the obvious “half-ally in the foxhole” problem, about how proximity demands alignment. I like Jimmy Dore because he’s on the left but speaks sense sometimes. If he called himself conservative, he would be just another Bill Kristol. And this is why it’s so lucrative for a lot of turds on our side to be “Mavericks” or whatever the term of the month is for selling out to the left. David Brooks and Jen Rubin are paid exclusively because they get to wear the label “conservative” while tacking to the left of Krugman and Obama.
Flicker, these people arent stupid and neither are we — they are on the other side on a lot of issues that matter.
No, it’s just the gratuitous scatological reference.
Yes and…
… I would say the stupid part comes in as an enabling factor — they think Trump is stupid enough to do this, so it makes perfect sense to them that this story checks out, with no need to actually you know check it out. And even if he sat there and shredded his reading on the pot, the big germ-o-phobe might not have wanted to carry anything out of the washroom. I mean, wouldn’t there be a burn bag next to the toidy if he reads in there? This is the premier executive staff in the world, right?
What makes no sense to us, but all kinds of sense to the rabid establishment, is that he somehow used the potty as a way to circumvent something which he, uh, couldn’t do otherwise? It makes no sense. I have a shredder right next to my desk. I bet he does too.
But if he used the shredder, someone might see.
There are so many jokes here. But I think that the toilet reference isn’t supposed to say that Trump thinks that’s more certain than just crumpling it up and throwing it in the trash, it’s the grossness of it and the image that it conjures.
You know, they could say he keeps a portable butane burner in the Resolute desk and burns the bits of paper, but, no, its got to be the toilet.
And maybe, y’know, he doesn’t use regular toilet paper either…
No, it’s something that happens in movies, not in real life. Which means it’s probably completely fictional.
Word on the street is he uses flash paper.
It puts you in the outer party.
Hooooowwwdy!
Doubleplus funny.
What’s Powerline?
Blog.
Powerline
I still read Powerline everyday, and Hinderacker is my go to Powerliner.
I read all of them depending on the piece ….. and Paul Mirengoff is entitled to be wrong and proven to be so at the risk of his own credibility …. so I let him write …. and the subsequent events will either prove him prescient or completely talking out of his ahrse.
You talk out of your ahrse often enough and pretty soon you’re
Jonah Goldbergout of the business.Just because they all walk the plank in the end, that doesn’t mean it’s worth feeding and transporting them for the intervening years.
Obviously, based on my daily consumption of the Powerline guys writing, I do not believe the preponderance of their work …. or Mirengoff’s writing specifically ….. is all wrong, bad, whatever pejorative you choose to characterize the writing on the Powerline Blog.
In fact I would say the preponderance of the Powerline guys writing is useful and productive in moving the conservative movement forward.
….. And I admit I didn’t realize Mitt Romney was a colossal douche until after Trump became President.
Oh, if only they did walk the plank.
They just go to get big money from the left.
Maybe that comes from spending too much time on Powerline and not enough with other places? :-)
Confirmation more than revelation. Right after Contract With America up to 2012 was the revelation time. Oh all those fakers could hide behind “pragmatism” and “independence”. In reality it was mostly just cover for not being conservative.
I’ll repeat for context that I am not pooping on PowerLine. I just explained why I jumped off of that wagon in their Romney-boosting days. As I said some comments ago, I still appreciate links to their good stuff, which is undoubtedly more than what I see. Overall, I’m PowerLine-positive! I just don’t follow them anymore, and Romney was where I took that particular red-pill. Perhaps it’s unfair of me, and I should run right back there. Well, sometimes I do. But there are only so many hours in a day, and I’m already chronically not caught up with the blogs or podcasts I am subscribed to.
#NorthernAllianceForever!