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At the end of an especially busy week in pundit-world, Jonah sits down with us all to ruminate on some of the more noteworthy topics that may have flown by too quickly to actually wrap one’s brain around them. On the docket: The final debate, some useful counter-programming on the Biden email hullabaloo, getting (erm…) a “grip” on Jeffrey Toobin, and much more. Plus, Jonah has some more evergreen thoughts on the gradual defining down of conservatism, and what the G-File has meant to him after all these years.
Show Notes:
–Get tickets to The Dispatch’s post-election event – What’s Next: Election 2020 and Beyond
–The Dispatch’s final debate wrap-up
–Star Trek: “Patterns of Force”
–The Editors podcast talking about the Biden email scandal
–The members-only (so to speak) Midweek Epistle
–Lucy.co, use promo code DINGO to get 20% off of all products
–ExpressVPN.com/Remnant for 3 months free with a 1-year plan
Subscribe to The Remnant with Jonah Goldberg in Apple Podcasts (and leave a 5-star review, please!), or by RSS feed. For all our podcasts in one place, subscribe to the Ricochet Audio Network Superfeed in Apple Podcasts or by RSS feed.
What do you know? I’m yawning again.
I thought it was interesting that when Jonah said 2016 isn’t 2020 because some people who voted for Trump last time wouldn’t vote for him again — since they thought four years ago he might be a Democrat because he donated to Democrats in the past — that there was no thought that there might have been others in 2016 who didn’t vote for Trump because they thought he might be a Democrat who now are going to mark the ballot for him because he’s turned out to be better on conservative issues then they thought.
So the shift in voting may work both ways, though I’m sure if you’re in the DC area, the move away from Trump by a few of the few people who did vote for him is more probable than elsewhere in the country. We’ll see on Nov. 3 but it comes across as a bit of a Pauline Kael-lite “Nobody I know is moving towards Trump” hypotheses, that Trump’s four years have only pulled voters away from supporting him again.
Yeah that idea seems pretty ridiculous to me too. Who would vote for Trump in 2016 because they thought he MIGHT BE a Democrat, rather than Hillary? It seems like anyone who didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 because they thought he was crude etc, doesn’t change from now. But I don’t see anyone who did vote for him, being less satisfied now with his actual record, rather than changing their minds because NOW they “discover” that he’s not a decorum candidate in either direction.
The whole thing seems to be based around either suburban moms seeking comity who for some reason voted for Trump in 2016, but are so appalled by his style that they just want the calming numbness of Joe Biden in the White House in 2020, or seniors who have been both freaked out and be placed in isolation due to COVID, who want to elect Joe to punish Trump for not bigfooting state governments and locking down the whole country in February.
I don’t know if either is going to end up being true, but those are the talking points for the high Biden poll numbers, though I can say with relative certainty that either 33.3 percent or 66.6 percent of the host of The Richocet Podcast who didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 are likely to do so in 2020 (which I don’t think would move Jonah much, since he co-hosts the other podcast with the 33.3 percent of the show that isn’t voting for Trump this year, and he sounded irked at his former co-workers from NR for thinking the Hunter Biden laptop is a big deal).
As – at best – a decorum conservative, nothing Biden or Hunter or any other Dems might do, affects Jonah’s position against Trump. Trump doesn’t extend his pinky while doing things that objectively help everyone, including Dem voters even if they don’t know it, and that’s all Jonah cares about.
If one is interested in “decorum” in a candidate, is there a Democrat in the nation that can clear that bar? And why does Jonah think there might be?
Jonah is like most others in that camp, it doesn’t appear that he cares how awful the other side is. His only point is decrying how awful he thinks Trump is. It doesn’t seem to matter if Biden wins, because all that matters is that Biden’s awfulness can’t be labeled Republican.