Rage of the NeverTrumpers

“…The apparent suicide plunge of U.S. Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) appears to be the psychopathic backlash of NeverTrumpers who are starting to realize Donald Trump’s defeat in November and the allegations he was attempting to overturn the election by provoking an “insurrection” at the Capitol on January 6 do not bring back the Republican Party of the Bushes and McCain and Romney, as those families seem to imagine. This is only the first shoe dropping. It will soon be followed by the realization of the role the NeverTrumpers have played in shackling the country and the Western world to the unfolding disaster of the Biden presidency…

…A very large number of Americans are disconcerted to see 80 percent of the gas stations in Washington, D.C. closed for lack of fuel, and the Russian thugs responsible for the closure dutifully paid their ransom money by the hacked pipeline’s owners. They are disconcerted by a 944 percent increase in April, year over year, in illegal entries across the southern border. They cannot fail to notice a 75 percent shortfall from projections of new jobs for April. Nor can they be assured by a rate of inflation, if properly calculated, of approximately 12 percent. This is the emerging level of performance by the new administration that will cause recollections of President Trump to become fonder rather than more censorious…

…Trump urged his followers, aggrieved as he and they were at what they all thought, with some reason, to be a tainted election result, to demonstrate “patriotically and peacefully.” He did not counsel and gave no support nor knew anything about the hooliganism that occurred. It would have gone nowhere if House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) or Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser had paid any attention to the requests the chief of the Capitol Police made in the preceding days for reinforcements. It would be gratifying if the same self-elevated custodians of American political virtue had managed any comment at all on the “peaceful protests” of last summer, which killed at least 50 people, wounded more than 2,000 police, and caused billions of dollars in damage. Where was the rule of law then as the police were being defunded by the Democrats?

As emotionalism subsides, the grim facts of the Biden Administration’s incompetence and mendacity grow more onerous, degrading, and cringe-worthy, and the soufflé of Trump-hate settles, the absurdity and futility of the anti-Trump Republicans will become unimpeachably clear…

…Cheney and her followers are not numerous or credible enough to tear anything but a marginal corner off the Republican Party as it moves in the direction Trump pointed it: pitching directly to blacks, Hispanics, and working and middle-class Americans. It is a winning formula on a rising trajectory, and it is not accessible to the McRomBush (and Cheney) Republicans as they disappear into the mists of the party’s less successful past.

There is an argument to be made for trying to persuade Trump to confer his benediction on another candidate who would thus be much indebted to him, and to do the necessary to make that candidate a unitary Republican figure. In this, Cheney inadvertently shows the way: the Trump policy with a less disruptive personality but with whom Trump is congenial.

Long before serious consideration needs to be given to the next presidential nominee, however, Trump will flex his muscles in the midterm elections next year. He will demonstrate that he is the only person in the country for whom 50,000 Americans will stand outdoors in raw weather to wait for the chance to see and listen to him. Unless he does something to damage his franchise, none of the other plausible Republican nominees will announce until Trump says that he will not run. If he does not say that, he will probably be renominated and reelected.

That is what drives the NeverTrumpers to these insane acts and utterances: in policy terms, he was very good and it is clear that his opponents wounded but did not kill him. In their mindless hate, they inflicted this terrible regime on the country. Their rage now is designed to assuage their guilt. It will not succeed, even in that…”