The day after the 2020 election, I suggested that the results were bad news, as now we’d have 12 years of Trump instead of 8 years of Trump. I immediately realized that the closeness of the race meant that Trump would be back—more fascist than ever and seeking revenge against those who oppose him. Flash forward to 2024, and Trump is already the de facto president of the United States.
For the sake of argument, assume the president were Joe Biden. We know that Biden supports more aid for Ukraine, as do the overwhelming majority of representatives in Congress. But President Trump is opposed, so it won’t happen. Ditto for the border control bill. Indeed nothing substantive will happen without Trump’s OK.
Most of our political pundits are stuck in the 20th century, before America became a banana republic. They no longer know how to make sense of our politics, as they are not willing to accept the fact that we are no longer a serious nation. They keep waiting for some positive trends to show up. It won’t happen. There are now only two political parties—the Democrats and the Trump cult. And the Dems are too weak to put up a serious fight. (Trump recently said that all the non-MAGA Republicans should just leave the GOP–he doesn’t need them.)
Unfortunately, while the US richly deserves to pay a price for our dysfunction, our political implosion will initially impact the rest of the world—with the Ukrainian people being the first to suffer. Life is unfair.
PS. The National Review had a couple nice pieces on Trumpism. Here’s Andrew McCarthy:
It’s time to retire “RINO.”
That means “Republican in name only,” of course. It’s a stale epithet. Mildly clever in its origins, it referred mainly to elected Republicans in Washington who posed as conservatives for their home-state constituents (“severely conservative” as the squishy Mitt Romney described himself), but who, at best, mounted little meaningful resistance to the progressive ascendancy and Leviathan’s expansion.
RINO is inapposite with the Republican Party having become the Trump Party. Indeed, it’s the Republican Party that is now “Republican in name only.” No longer are we talking an entity that is substantively the Republican Party — meaning the politically and ideologically conservative major party in the United States. A party wedded to that orthodoxy no longer exists, so it is irrational to speak of RINOs who feign allegiance to the orthodoxy.
And Jim Geraghty:
Christian Schneider reminds us that this weekend, Ron DeSantis endorsed the man who’d previously shared a photo of him with the caption, “Here is Ron DeSantimonious grooming high school girls with alcohol as a teacher.”
Think about what it would take to endorse a man who said something like that about you.
And you people wonder why I’m so cynical about politics.