Brokeback Party
They just can't quit him.
Hey fam: Tonight I’ll be joined by Mona Charen and Will Saletan on the livestream at 8 p.m. in the East. We’ll talk about horseshoe theory and the uniparty. Also Biden 2024. And we’ll be discussing this thing below 👇
Tim is driving today and it’s a good one. We’ll unpack it more tonight. —JVL
1. Brokeback Party
The Republican party has barely tried anything in their effort to move on and they are already out of ideas. After a few bad weeks in the polls for Tiny D, the party poohbahs are throwing in the towel and getting back aboard the Trump Train.
Whether it’s a pheremonal attraction to his rakish, devil-may-care persona, an addiction to the small donors and the retweets, an unquenchable desire to be invited to a disgusting dinner in a gaudy dining room, a cowardly fear of being shouted down at the airport by obese hillbillies, a boner for making the libs squirm—or a little from columns A, B, C, D, and E—the GOP grownups are signing up to Do It all over again. Like the besotted Jack Twist staring at their mountain man, these Republicans just don’t know how to quit Trump.
In just the past week, the former guy has received endorsements from both the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Steve Daines, and Lee Zeldin, the Republican nominee for governor in New York in 2022.
I think it’s important to step back and appreciate how insane these endorsements are, because these guys are not random backbench MAGA morons.
Zeldin was reportedly set to be a “top official” in the DeSantis campaign before he signed on with Trump. (Ouch!) This guy was puffed up as a future party leader by establishment favorite Tom Cotton on the Sunday shows and he was the secret candidate that “closet normal” Republicans were trying to recruit to take over the RNC from Ronna “Don’t-Call-Me-Romney” and the Trumpers after the midterm disappointment.
As for Daines, it is his job to manage the campaign committee that has as its entire purpose the election of GOP senators. The sole individual responsible for tanking that mission in 2022 was Donald Trump—whose endorsed candidates crashed and burned in every competitive race.
Not to mention that seven of Daines’s colleagues voted—just three years ago!—to convict Trump over his attempt to overthrow the government, a vote that carried with it the consequence of prohibiting him from being elected to federal office again in an unprecedented rebuke of a president by members of his own party. (Four of the seven GOP “guilty” votes are still in the Senate, and one of them, Mitt Romney, is up for re-election next year.)
In what world does it make sense for the guy who is ostensibly in charge of winning elections for the GOP to throw in with Trump after all that? There’s still ten months until the voting begins! And Daines decided to announce his endorsement on the disgraced, twice-impeached president’s nepo-baby’s podcast.
This is fucking madness!
In any sane world, endorsing Trump on Don Jr.’s Triggered pod would be grounds for replacing Daines with someone, anyone, who was awake in 2022. It should be a disqualifying act. Politico should be littered with pieces sourcing privately concerned Republicans on background about how they are worried the NRSC chair has lost his mind.
And yet news of the Daines endorsement was met with nary a peep from his colleagues, who are spending their time these days either hyperventilating over Bud Light or cowering in the corner in fear of a Trump bleat. Today, the big-foot Politico column about accepting a Trump nomination quotes a “shrewd” GOP strategist content to “go into the basement, ride out the tornado,” which raises the question, when exactly did you leave the basement, gimp? Yesterday, it was revealed that when the RNC looked at why they lost in 2022 they were too scared to even mention Trump’s name.
These are just the latest pieces of evidence that the number of politicians left in the party who haven’t been completely corrupted by Trump can be counted on one hand. And while the fingers of their affection might be tiny and pudgy, Ennis does have those dreamy blue eyes . . .
2. Et Tu, NRO
I’m not sure I have come across a better example of just how hard it is for people inside the GOP Industrial Complex to leave Trump than National Review’s Instagram feed.
Of all the outlets that might have the distance, the credibility, the seriousness to avoid traipsing into the social media engagement sewer for MAGA clicks, it would be the staid, DeSantis-loving grownups at NR. You might figure that the institution which ran both an “Against Trump” cover and a “Maybe Trump” editorial would be immune to the pressures that push other right-wing content creators to shill for Trump.
Alas, no.
I went down an Instagram rabbit hole the other day and the National Review feed had me clutching my pearls.
Here are multiple recent posts about Trump schlonging DeSantis in the polls.
And here’s a meme with a victorious Trump waving goodbye at the grave of BuzzFeed News (with a little tummy tickle for the Russia Hoax crowd).
And here’s a picture of a menacing Trump staring down Alvin Bragg. (Points for not including a baseball bat, I guess?)
And here’s a victorious “He’s Back” tabloid-style picture celebrating Mr. Trump’s triumphant return to Facebook.
For starters, one option here would be to just do nothing! There is no requirement for National Review to do based Trump memes! There’s lots of other content options for them besides puffing up the guy who incited a deadly riot at the Capitol in an attempt to end our democracy. (And just to give you a peek behind the curtain: Instagram doesn’t drive meaningful amounts of traffic for publications. So there’s not even a real business case for this stuff.)
Just like Steve Daines didn’t need to jump on the endorsement bandwagon in April 2023.
But they decided to do it anyway. Why?
Well, I’m guesting on JVL’s newsletter so I’ll ape his shtick.
This is what the voters, donors, Instagram followers, etc. want! And the National Review folks—who desperately want Ron DeSantis—find themselves doing Trump Pravda memes to get their approval.
On The Next Level this week I predicted that we are about to see the same thing from Fox following Tucker Carlson’s departure. I suspect that Rupert Murdoch’s DeSantis flirtation will fade the second the network gets any whiff that it’s losing market share to more MAGA/Tucker-friendly outlets.
This is the this dynamic we get from politicians, conservative media outlets, and even anti-anti-Trump magazines that guarantees Trump Is Forever.
They can try to blame the mainstream media or the Never Trumpers because it makes them feel better, but the reality is when every single figure that could possibly help nudge people off Trump folds like a cheap suit because they want their Gram engagement numbers to spike . . . well, then Trump is what they are going to get.
(P.S. If you want to follow an Instagram feed that will never look like a Trump Airlines in-flight magazine, we’ve been sprucing up ours.)
3. Hold The Champagne
One of my best memories from childhood was the summer after I moved to Denver. My new city’s NBA team had drafted Fab Five star Jalen Rose. I was finishing Mitch Albom’s splendid book on that Michigan squad. And my brother and I got to go down to training camp to see Jalen, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, and the rest of the team up close and in person.
It’s been a few decades since then and while there have been some highs as a Nuggets fan, I’ve also had to contend with what the blog boys call NuggLyfe: experiencing the inevitable disappointment that comes with following a star-crossed franchise.
This year might be their best chance to make the NBA Finals (something the team has never done). But here to temper my enthusiasm is the Gray Lady with this beautiful profile of the franchise:
There are sadder teams in American sports, some with longer championship droughts and in decaying cities that could use more luck than Denver. For most of their titleless years, the Nuggets were good, and they were fun. They just cannot get the ending right.
The next best chance for the Nuggets comes now, eight years after the Denver arrival of Jokic, the two-time reigning most valuable player. Behind the 6-foot-11 human Swiss Army knife, the Nuggets earned the No. 1 seed in the N.B.A.’s Western Conference for the first time.
Maybe this is the year. A city awaits.
For now, the ghosts of “almost” are everywhere.
They are in Lot C next to the football stadium. They are at the downtown performing arts center at 13th and Champa.
And they are in the current arena, near the confluence of the South Platte River and Cherry Creek, where 19th-century miners set off the Colorado gold rush that would shape a city and a state and, one day, give a basketball team its name: Nuggets.
Read the whole damn thing. And Geaux Nuggs.
 | A guest post by
|
So I feel like we can't talk about why the GOP is going all in on Trump without first establishing how much the traditional manner of information dissemination has been inverted among conservatives in a way that it hasn't been for liberals.
Traditionally, the way in which ideas were spread among the national body politic was top down; you had outlets or media organizations and think tanks who would talk about stuff and then essentially wait to see if the larger voting base responded to whatever they were saying. This was because the general voter, even among primary voters, was fairly low information and concerned about lots of different things, and while they might really focus on one or two issues, by and large the people who were all in on one thing were in a minority that wasn't large enough to sway the party. This is still how it mostly works in the democratic party; sure you have your Jacobin types, your bernie bros, your really online MSNBC commentators, but none of these people command any real majority among Democrats to sway much of anything.
This isn't how it works in the GOP. Conservatives, having spent basically two decades ginning up paranoia among their base, created a system where the majority of their primary voters are not just high information (mostly in misinformation, but high info refers only to how much they're seeking it out/internalizing it), but who set the agenda for the rest of the party. This didn't happen overnight. In 2008, that voter who asked McCain if he thought Obama was a secret muslim was one of these. Then the Tea Party happened, which was a direct rejection of the 'normal' Republican. And by 2016, Trump tapped into these people, and revealed that they weren't a minority in the GOP, that they were a majority. Or, at the very least, had a floor of about 40%, which is essentially a majority when we're talking factional politics.
What this means is that the people on the top aren't setting the agenda, they're following an agenda set by the people on the bottom. They're not leading, they're following. The people at NRO don't have any real power; the question of 'do people listen to them' comes down to 'do they say what their voters want to hear or not?'
Trump in this light is not an outlier, he's a natural progression of what was already happening. He was the first person to look around, see the people for who they were, and cater directly to the people who were demanding to be catered to. Perhaps it was because, as a grifter and businessman, he had a lizard like cunning for exploiting people who want to be exploited; like P.T. Barnum before him, he understood that suckers are suckers because they want to be suckered into things. People will happily give you money and attention if you make them feel good and validated. Or, if we want to go back to Caesar, this is the 'bread and circuses' concept of rulership fashioned for a modern audience.
But we also need to recognize that the tastes of the conservative electorate have irrevocably shifted, like they've suddenly been exposed to the car for the first time and no longer need a horse. They've discovered computers; they no longer need or want typewriters. Now that they know, consciously, that they have power, they demand that their power be reflected in the wider party. Which means that if you want a job in this party, you have to appeal to the voters as they are, not as you wished them to be. In focus groups, over and over, voters have expressed to not go back to pre-Trump. Meaning that anything that is going to defeat Trumpism has to be entirely post-Trump. Guys like DeSantis, who are pre-Trump creatures, are already working from a handicap. And anyone talking to pre-Trump people about how they're going to defeat Trump with pre-Trump values is wasting their time.
To put it another way, once civil rights became a plank of the Democratic party in the 1960s, George Wallace style racism was entirely out, and voters would not support candidates who expressed it. That's why they all left the party and became Republicans. In a similar vein, if you're a pre-Trump conservative, you're no longer desired by the Republican voters who make up the party.
So we're in this situation where the 'gop establishment' such as it is, pretends that a spade isn't a spade. That the party that hates elites and foreigners and anyone who isn't a Christian is going to vote for someone like Mehmet Oz, a muslim, or someone like Ron DeSantis, an Ivy League educated pre-Trump conservative. If you're a republican and go 'invading Mexico and having muslim bans and fighting disney is crazy' you might as well not be in the GOP, because that's what the GOP base demands.
People looking for a way to defeat Trump that comes from the top down are wasting their time; unless you change the GOP voters, you're not going to have anyone else. When 60% of GOP voters say they'd vote for Trump even if he was convicted of a felony, that tells you everything you need to know about how much power the people on top have.
So in this moment, they have a choice. They can go the Youngkin and DeSantis route, where they can pivot to whatever grievance the GOP base has at the moment, going all in on drag queens and bud light and hope that whatever they do won't destroy them in a general election. Or, they can retire and disappear, because they're about as welcome in the Democratic party as cholera is. Reality is, the amount of people actively desiring pre-Trump republicanism in 2023 couldn't fill up a mid-sized stadium, let alone win a general election.
Much like how Goldwater conservatism couldn't win the 1980s, Reagan conservatism cannot win in 2023. And the voters have shown that if their preferences aren't adhered to, they'll go where their preferences are adhered to. Meaning the question for places like Fox and NRO is 'do I choose to change who I am or do I choose self destruction?'
Most of them choose the former and pretend like nothing has changed. Many of them become anti-anti-whatever and hope that this is good enough to pass muster among consumers, while blaming 'the left' so that they don't have to accept that they're no longer wanted or valued in their own party.
When we say 'they can't quit Trump' what we should be meaning is 'the GOP voters do not want to quit Trump, and you are not going to replace Trump with what they had before, anymore than you could convince people using computers to return to pen and paper.' The world is now different, and you either accept that or you go extinct. The people on top know that they're not driving this ship, the people who vote are. And the second they deviate, they'll be replaced. That's just the state of play.
They must know they're going to get clobbered in the general election, right? Nominating a guy who refused to leave office after he lost an election and attempted a coup. Staying on board with his election lies. Free-for-all with guns. Abortion bans. Book banning. Blocking teaching of actual history. Attacks on the vulnerable. Utter, pure hatred of anyone who doesn't get on board with them. Going pure authoritarian when democracy doesn't yield the results they want. Voter suppression and abuse of power in state legislatures.
How exactly do they think this is going to play out??