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It is moral preening. I am sick of it.
Excellent.
That “I’m sick of what he does to our politics and national discourse” pap signals quite a blind spot for the complete descent into madness the entire other side of the aisle have forced upon themselves. To pretend that isn’t more serious and more dangerous than a Tweeting Executive greatly magnifies the anti-intellectualism upon which the entire NT movement is built.
Political autoeroticism.
I had my misgivings about Trump, and voted for him purely as an anti-Hillary vote. The worry was that Trump would be dangerously unpredictable and get us into all kinds of trouble and maybe some new wars. That never happened. The tweeting is annoying and embarrassing but ultimately harmless. It even pisses off the right people occasionally. Otherwise, he’s been pretty much a standard right of center President with some nice accomplishments on his record, like the judges.
I think all the hand-wringing by the Never Trumpers is just a smokescreen to hide the real truth, which is that their real problem with Trump is one of class and aesthetics; they just don’t want to be associated with such a vulgar man.
I suspect if the Dems had not gone bat-crap crazy Mr. Trump would have been very willing to play along with them…spending bigly and going along with some of their demands…and would have been seen as a centrist President on your scale…and NTs would hate him because reasons. (Anything to draw attention to themselves.)
Your last paragraph says it all for me. I can understand the Democrats hate of President Trump – he’s a Republican and therefore evil. I had a hard time understanding “Republican” hatred of the President, until I came to the same conclusion that you did. It’s about class (in the socio-economic sense) and looks. Establishment Republicans would rather hang around the Clintons (world class grifters and leftists) because the Clintons are “one of us”.
It really is sickening.
Tim
Let’s hope it leads to autoasphyxiation.
I was listening to Kevin Williamson on a podcast today, think it was the Mad Dogs and Englishmen podcast. He was talking about how, if he didn’t vote for Trump but Trump nonetheless won, he’d get the benefits of Trump without being made dirty.
The word that comes to mind is “effete.” It isn’t a good look.
You are certainly right, @J Climacus, that McLaughlin’s piece is seriously long. So it’s tough to pick out just a few high (or low, if you want) points to focus on.
Still, leaving out the long long analysis of short-term versus long-term winning and losing (going back to Ford-Carter-Reagan) was “unfortunate.”
McLaughlin’s analysis of what the 2024 election cycle would look like, for both POTUS and the Senate, after a Trump win or a Trump loss this week was the real center of gravity of the piece.
Just one more instance where a NeverTrumper opinion writer could have avoided making a complete public ahrse of himself by simply saying nothing.
Hey Dan, I’m sure all the aborted babies will understand why you couldn’t lift a finger.
Oh boy, I can’t wait until Dan tells us all about the 2036 election cycle for POTUS and the Senate.
The Evan McMullen voting block had another “hold my beer moment.”
I can think of a few other words…..
With respect to the length… whatever happened to editors? That thing could have been cut in half easily.
I thought that was pretty rotten too. And sadly, he’s not alone. I expect Jonah and Rob and many others are the same way even if they don’t say so clearly.
Really, that was my situation in Texas four years ago — grew up in NYC, Trump’s been around all my adult life, and I’d been annoyed by him since 1979, when he showed all the talk about being deeply into preservation of historic city buildings (after the Grand Hyatt project in ’77) was BS when he bought the Bonwit-Teller department store on Fifth Avenue and ripped it down (before a court order could take effect) in order to build Trump Tower. Add to that over the ensuing years his flittering from supporting Republicans to backing Democrats, depending on where he thought the swing voters were going, and I didn’t vote for either candidate in 2016. But living in Texas, that was really a zero-consequence vote, because, despite the national media talking up Hillary, there was no way she was winning Texas.
This year I voted for Trump, because what I feared — that he would follow the swing voters after a bad midterm election and move to the left to appease them — never happened. He’s governed far more to the right than I thought he would, while if you’re Kevin Williamson living in the greater Dallas area, you’re in the same boat I was in 2016. You can decline to vote for either candidate, knowing that it’s really a zero-consequence vote, because, despite the national media talking up Biden, there was no way he’s winning Texas. If Kevin was hanging out in Arizona or back working in Philly, that type of ‘a pox on all your houses‘ positioning could have far more negative consequences.
It would still be good if Trump won the popular vote too, just to deprive the Dims of that talking point. And even Kevin’s vote can help there.
It’s more important to keep your mouth shut and let everyone think you’re an idiot than to open it and prove it?
I was listening to a Trumpstumper this morning while I walked the dog. One of what, ten speeches he gave yesterday? Rambling, riffing, conversational, amusing. I thought: he’s having fun. I thought: I have never liked this guy, but that’s not the right metric. I’ve never clicked with this guy. Even back in the 80s. He comes from a different place. The playboy mogul braggadocio, the Howard Stern suck-up sessions, it all left me cold.
I agreed with him a lot of stuff, but you’ll eventually agree with someone who talks as much as he does.
Here’s the thing, and I’ve said it before: none of the things I feared came to pass. Everything I feared about the left has come to pass. I was hard-core NT in 2016 – I regarded this as wise move for the future of the movement, but it also masqueraded a self-flattering position that just happened to coincide with one’s desire to be thought of as a man of virtue.
This year’s vote is refreshingly free of posturing and agonizing. Which, I suppose, is a sign I have lost my moral compass and joined a tribe so I can shake my spear with all my new friends. Nah.
One more thing: I imagine Trump and Biden visiting our family gas station. Trump would be interested in the operation, because I think he’s always interested in how people manage to make money. It’s a frequency some people feel. He’d note how he reduced regulation on our operation and brought gas prices down, way down, it’s a beautiful thing. Biden would have had advance men make sure the owners were Democrats, then he’d talk about transitioning away from the gas pumps to EV changing stations, and how he’d sign legislation to make it so.
TBH Trump is still something of a Sphinx to me. But the practical effect of his tenancy in office is what matters.
Wouldn’t surprise me if that was why it was edited.
Heh.
No. I fixed the word “won.” When I’m tired, after a long day, I have a tendency to substitute homonyms — and, of course, a spell checker won’t catch that. I’d written “nonetheless one.”
But I get your point.
That right there
I come from peasant stock, and early in the 2016 election I recognized what I was seeing: nothing but snobbery. I started as anti anti-Trump. And guess what? A funny thing happens when you’re forced to defend someone. I became pro-Trump, which I was enthusiastically by the 2016 election. I’ve never had a second of regret
I recently mentioned several brainiacs on Twitter who constantly claim that Trump is an Existential threat. I constantly ask what the threat is Someone (here on Rico?) finally explained that he’s an existential threat to their own self worth. How could this tacky, classless guy from the wrong schools, the wrong industry (TV!! The horror) with the wrong accent be so successful a president? The very things they value the most end up not being important.
As for me? I think Trump has proven that most of the committed NTs never believed a word of what they’ve been shoveling for all these years.
My best friend is the closest thing to a living saint I’ve ever met. I could go on and on with examples to prove it. Even I clean up my act when I’m around her. She would walk over hot coals, barefoot to vote for Trump based solely upon his pro life actions. But she’s got a lot of other reasons as well.
For those NTs that are so tired? A lot of us are tired also. Tired of them blowing smoke and doing little else
I thought the McLaughlin piece was a fairly balanced review of the two candidates. From which the only logical conclusion was that Trump was (far) the lesser of the two evils. His choice not to chose was a bit of a shock. Yeah, moral preening, but also non sequitur.
And boy was the piece & its author excoriated in the comments.
Oh my, I see that Dan upset a whole bunch of people. However, what I got out of his article was that with Biden we have bad policies and with Trump we have a bad man. That really boiled things down for me.
For better or worse, my focus is not on economic policy or environmental policy or fiscal policy. If you get any of these wrong, it can be fixed in future administrations. (How often has the top marginal rate gone up and down like a yo-yo between 36.0% and 39.6%?)
What is fundamental to me is the Constitution and the Rule of Law. Aside from my morning prayers and surrendering my will and my life to God, that is the North Star that I salute each and every day. Character is the most important quality for me for a President. Intellectual honesty. Sobriety and rectitude. A commitment to something greater than one’s self. Heck, Ike was almost driven to distraction that he lied ONE TIME in his Presidency; Trump spits out a lie or exaggeration every other paragraph, if not every other sentence. Autocracy is the greatest evil our country faces. Trump is a bad man who would destroy the constitutional framework of this country if he can get away with it. He has already neutered the Republican Congress with the sole exception of Mitt Romney.
I am going to hate some of Biden’s policies. I fear the Sanders/Warren/AOC progressives. But Biden, while misguided in his policies, is fundamentally a good and decent person, and Trump is fundamentally a bad, unfit and Un-American person.
I didn’t so much vote for Joe Biden. I voted against Donald Trump. I prize my vote against Trump on par of when I voted for the Greatest President of the Twentieth Century, Ronald Wilson Reagan; both votes are the two sides of the same coin.
This (as the kids say). For someone so obviously vain and thin-skinned, he manages to laugh at himself a lot. For someone so personally vicious he seems genuinely warm and generous even (especially?) when he doesn’t have to be. Petty and large-spirited. Self-delusional yet so plugged into the zeitgeist he’s personally powering it. A stumbling speaker but a master orator. The attention span of a gnat with decades long plans that work (if not all of them).
But not only is he detested by the right people, he gets (some of) the right things done.
I’ll let Ricochet’s editor-in-chief handle this one….
As I wrote recently, the real hard core truth is they are pro-abortion and actually hate the social conservatives, even if they front as religious conservatives.
This was the position of the young woman working as a Wallstreet stockbroker in 1984. She told a major national newsweekly after the election that she was so happy the polls showed Reagan winning in a landslide. That let her vote for Mondale while knowing she would enjoy the continued material benefits from a Reagan win.
Cynical. Amoral at best.