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Democrats Pick the Wrong Fight
If I were a Democrat in a district that Trump won, this would be my “uh-oh” moment.
Published in General
If #NeverTrumpers were smart (not intelligent – there are lots of sophomores among them) they would not be #NeverTrumpers. To be Never anything bespeaks an intellectual rigidity that overwhelms even genius levels of intelligence.
I think they’re fine with Democrats in control. If Republicans are in control they have to, you know, make good on their empty promises to the electorate. That’s tough, and 2016 showed us that they had no idea what to do with the power voters gave them.
They’d prefer to be the party out of power, then they can fund-raise on it. Sweet sweet cash for doing nothing. What a life, eh?
Clearly they are not. They not only not smart, they are on the level of moron when it comes to politics.
They are living in a cosseted fantasy world as evidenced by the past strategic failures, which they might be forgiven for lacking counterfactuals, but holding onto these same pathetic strategies now after having been proven spectacularly wrong takes a special kind of idiot.
And I’ll tell ya — you think Democrats are having trouble with the “woke” on the left?
“Woke” conservatives are causing as much trouble for GOP, Inc.
I mean, Democrats are the same. They were given the House (with the help of traitorous Republicans) and the impeachment circus is all they’ve got. If you take impeachment off the table, what do the Democrats have as a selling point for 2020? What have they done? What can they point to in order to draw votes?
Republicans growing a spine is one thing, keeping it is another. Let’s pray that they do.
There’s a certain amount of hubris on their part, in thinking somehow they can help the Democrats take down Trump, and that in Step 2, they will be welcomed back by the rest of the GOP and resume their rightful place as the ideological trend setters of the party.
More likely, they’d be in even a worse place than the hardest of the hard-core #NeverTrumpers like David Frum and Jen Rubin are — they were among those in 2008 who were swooning for Obama and in 2009 said the GOP’s only hope to survive was to move left. They’ve been fighting the Republican base since the rise of the Tea Party.
I can’t help but think this is a colossal mistake by Democrats. People on the right who may not be especially fond of Trump and not animated to vote out their moderate Democrat congressional rep are now given a big reason to get active. Trump supporters will be even more active. But will this energize Democrat voters any more than they already are? I can’t see it.
It’s also a very small hill to fight on. Clearly it is ambiguous at best. We know they would impeach him for jaywalking if they could, and this just makes it more obvious.
They can only pretend this is some big deal.
I’m going to be volunteering for the opponent of my Democratic congressman, who just won in 2016 from an establishment Republican. So he’s definitely vulnerable.
The difference, at the moment, is the House Dems see their impeachment efforts as a means to an end, which is to win the 2020 election. Then they’ve got major control, especially if they can win the Senate. The #NeverTrumpers are like South Park’s underpants gnomes, in that once you get past Phase 1, in taking down Trump, there’s no logical Phase 2 and beyond, where they get back the political clout they crave, even if they seem to believe everyone on the right is going to come to their senses and start listening to them again if Trump’s no longer president.
It’s been three years and we have not had a breakthrough with the #NeverTrumpers . I see several possible outcomes for our foreseeable future:
The best one is that the present essentially criminal Democrat and ‘deep state’ behavior fails to achieve its purpose and Donald Trump is reelected in 2020. The #NeverTrumpers come around to the extent that the 2024 Republican nominee is one who gets why we have Trump and what the Party needs to do to restore our sovereign constitutional and free republic, and is elected to pursue that path.
I’m not up to detailing the others because of what the unpleasantness of them does to my state of mind. I know y’all can imagine them as well as I.
First, Pence would not have a chance to make the case for anything. He would be on defense. Tarred with any negative of Trump and called all sorts of “ist” words for being a social conservative.
Next, you have to bet on Pence bringing lots of new voters into the fold, more than Trump or Bush could, because you are losing a significant number of people who voted for Trump but would not show up at the polls after Republicans agreed to remove him.
Three words for 2024: President Kanye West.
They’ve been elevated and emboldened by venture capital, MSNBC, CNN, etc. In what sane world can the Bulwark and the Dispatch and Jen Rubin and Tom Nichols and Rick Wilson and Max Boot all not only exist but thrive
I’m a little more sanguine about 2020. The media is going to bury anything that might stop a Democrat wave. NeverTrump is going to tut-tut that people merely voing against Democrats are unsophisticated and too tribal. Democrats are putting pressure on alternative media to censor right wing points under the guise of “fact checking” or “stopping hate speech”
We don’t really know if they’re thriving. (How many copies of Wilson’s anti-Trump slam book actually sold?)
I’ll say this for The Bulwark: they seem to have spent more on site-design than The Dispatch.
I kind of think the impeachment inquiry will be voted on again. That vote will be to deem Trump impeached sending it over to judiciary, but they’ll never actually start a real impeachment. It’ll die in the Judiciary over the holiday season. But they’ll try to use the intelligence committee vote as an impeachment vote during the campaign.
Andy McCarthy puts it rather better than me as to what will emerge from Schiffty. Though I still think the impeachment will die over Christmas because the R’s won’t convict anyway. So they’ll just deem him impeached without ever going through the process.
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/trump-impeachment-inquiry-next-chapter-andrew-mccarthy
The American people and the Pelosi/Schiff Star Chamber. @AndrewCMcCarthy @NRO @ThadMcCotter @WJR https://audioboom.com/posts/7412017-the-american-people-and-the-pelosi-schiff-star-chamber-andrewcmccarthy-nro-thadmccotter-wjr?utm_campaign=detailpage&utm_content=retweet&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter via @batchelorshow
There have been a few of them who have converted. Just not the biggest names.
I can think of at least three Ricochetti that have purchased it.
Also, Jonah isn’t a NeverTrump, he’s more of a BartlebyTrump.
Trump’s his own best publicity man, in that the media can’t help but quote him (and get outraged) when he tweets — see the kerfuffle over his retweeting of the Daily Wire’s Photoshopped medal award to Conan this week as the latest example. He may not offer up good publicity for himself all the time, but he’s such a media presence that he can’t be filtered effectively, in that the public can see the original source material and decide for themselves if how the media is presenting it is accurate and fair or not.
For any 2024 candidate, that’s going to be more of a struggle, since they’re not going to go in with the same pre-political high profile Trump has (or Reagan had, with his acting career). They’re going to have to keep the media from defining them, as they defined Romney in 2012, but at the same time, they have to show that they’re their own person (i.e. — someone running as ‘Mini-Me’ Trump might get some backers in the primary, if people are looking for the most combative candidate in the field, but whether or not swing voters would want a Trump clone after 4-8 years of the real thing is another story).
The Dispatch’s front page seems like the equivalent of the little sliding opening on a door to a 1920s speakeasy (maybe they’ll let you in for free if you type “Swordfish” in the subscription box).
But they aren’t. After hearing from a couple that they’d be “laughing in our faces” after Trump leads the GOP into an electoral disaster, I realized that they are egotistical, self-righteous, snot-licking punks. They’d rather see the GOP die than not get their way, so they aren’t thinking about 2024 as much as thinking about gloating if Trump loses.
“I’ve been saying for a while now if the #NeverTrumpers were smart, they’d already be pointed towards 2024, and finding a candidate who they can be comfortable with but who could also have a chance at winning over the majority of Trump’s supporters”
How Delusional.
All Never Trumpers who have even said nice things about the Democrats Impeachment efforts have signed their political death warrants. They are Dead Men and Women Walking Politically. No right thinking Republican would ever again put up with anyone so gratuitously full of themselves, selfish and self deluded to endorse any of the incredibly illegal Democrat Impeachment efforts as so many Never Trumpers gleefully have. This Impeachment effort is an illegal coup. Anyone in Congress who votes for this ridiculously illegal farce is a traitor and should face prison time. This is an unconstitutional effort to overthrow a duly elected government and anyone involved with it needs to be slapped down good and hard.
I think there are gradients of Trump opposition, from those who don’t like his persona or some of his worst impulses, but will hold their noses and vote for him anyway, to those who are hoping wacky-but-lovable Uncle Joe gets the nomination, because they think they can live with four years of Biden, to the hardest of hard-core types who actually have the egos and self-delusion to think they can support anyone from Biden to Bernie.
They really seem to think by making the case, say, that the only True Conservative vote in 2020 will be for Liz Warren, they can eliminate Trump and their titanic intellectual and argumentative skills will, in 2021, allow them to waltz back in as the arbiters of Republican policy for the mass of the part, with only a few malcontent #AlwaysTrumper holdouts, who can be mocked and ridiculed.
This is exactly right.
What do you think they’ll be saying when the President wins reelection in a landslide? Like the Democrats, they seem to have maneuvered themselves into a political cul-de-sac from which the only exit is to support impeachment. And when that doesn’t happen, or proves to be so unpopular the full raging fury of the electorate turns against them, . . . what will they do then?
(Also worth noting, what happens when their left-wing sugar daddies stop funding their anti-Trump newsletters after the 2020 election?)
Apologies to the post author for derailing a good comment section. I couldn’t resist.
How many are we talking about? Is there a different outcome in store for #NeverTrump pundits versus plain old #NeverTrump voters like our @garyrobbins?
I don’t remember hearing Gary say he’d be laughing when Trump loses.
He may or may not laugh but he will end up in the same gulag as the rest of us. He’ll be a stool pigeon in there too.
I think most of us are talking about prominent Never Trumpers, not people like Gary.