Stromata Blog

Moments Pass

Today I must prepare for a flight early tomorrow morning, and the Panicdemic has left me badly out of practice at traveling. Hence, this Wednesday is dedicated to brevity and miscellany.

Senator J. D. Vance kicks off his 2028 Presidential campaign with an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that, with different details but identical principles, could have been written a century ago by Senator Gerald Nye. [Note to pedants: Yes, I know that Gerald Nye wasn’t yet a Senator in 1923. Please leave room for artistic license.] One sentence particularly caught my eye: “Mr. Bush allowed a just war in Afghanistan to turn into a nation-building quagmire and then started an unjust war in Iraq [emphasis added].” Senator Vance was a high school student in 2003, so he may not know that Saddam Hussein was a murderous tyrant, violated the terms of the cease fire that allowed him to remain in power after his failed invasion of Kuwait, repeatedly attacked U.S. aircraft enforcing the cease fire terms, and furnished money, training and weapons to terrorists. One can argue, with perfect hindsight (which includes the knowledge that President Obama would abandon Iraq, leaving a vacuum for Iran to fill), that overthrowing Saddam’s lethal dystopia accomplished less in the long run than had been hoped. To conclude that it was “unjust”, one must be either ignorant or morally obtuse.

The senator summarizes his creed as, “the U.S. national interest must be pursued ruthlessly but also carefully, with strong words but great restraint”, the opposite of Theodore Roosevelt’s “Speak softly and carry a big stick”. And pursuing our interests “ruthlessly . . . with strong words but great restraint” sounds just like Anthony Blinken. Now that I think about it, which party’s primary will Vance compete in come 2028?

Rep. George Santos has announced his resignation from the Congressional committees to which had had been assigned. He is, needless to say, busy with other ventures: a contract to produce the next three Marvel movies (scripts to be written by ChatGPT), the lead role in Don Giovanni at the Metropolitan Opera, privately funded weapons shipments to the Ukrainian army, and staffing his 2028 Presidential bid. There’s a limit to how much even a polypoetes of his stature can do.

As for the 2024 Presidential shambles, “Here Comes the 2023 Presidential-Candidate Stampede”. Nikki Haley’s chapeau will be tossed into the ring later this month. Judging by who persistently pushes messages into my e-inbox, she will be followed soon by Mike Pompeo, Kristi Noem, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, perhaps Ben Carson and Tim Scott, maybe even Lindsey Graham. There are undoubtedly others who don’t have my email address in their electronic rolodexes (or is it rolodices?). Meanwhile, Ron DeSantis, who everyone agrees is a first-tier candidate, waits for the optimal moment to jump in. The crowd on the third and fourth tiers hope that he will be the next Fred Thompson or Scott Walker, the front runner until he becomes a runner (as Tacitus said, omnium consensu capax imperii nisi imperasset).

In The Spectator, Cockburn, the periodical’s oddly anonymized D.C. gossip columnist (no relation, I presume, to the commie Cockburns), unveils another potential candidate: Boris Johnson. BoJo was born an American citizen during his parents’ residence in New York City. It’s true, as Cockburn notes, that he renounced his citizenship several years ago after losing a tussle with the IRS, but maybe he can resume it and regain “natural born citizen” status. While I doubt that, I don’t doubt that no other candidate would add so much je ne sais quoi to the contest.

Like everybody else whose life involves a lot of reading and writing, I’ve toyed with the idea of giving ChatGPT a spin but haven’t gotten a round tuit. John Hinderaker at PowerLine has now saved me the trouble. After quoting what the app said in response to “Who is John Hinderaker”, “What were some of President Trump’s accomplishments?”, “Which is cheaper, electricity generated with natural gas, or with solar panels?”, “Write an essay in the style of John Hinderaker” and “Write an essay in the style of Steven Hayward”, he summarizes his impressions:

All of this is highly preliminary, and artificial intelligence is a serious subject. But my experiments with ChatGPT confirm my assumptions about its limited utility. It turns out responses that are not as clever as, for example, the Tom Friedman Random Column Generator. But they don’t seem to be overwhelmingly biased, either. If you are a college student and seriously think that generic essays like these will get you a good grade, I can only hope you are going to a lousy school. As, to be fair, most college students are.

Incidentally, with all the brouhaha about ChatGPT, let me recommend Isaac Asimov’s classic story “Galley Slave”.

Two Sides of The Donald, Pithily Summed Up

Bill Otis (a friend at second hand), writing at Ringside at the Roundup:

What Trump was onto specifically is that American elites are suffused with rot. If they don’t hate the country exactly, they look down on it. If they don’t buy routine race-huckstering, they decline any serious action to defeat it. If they don’t don’t wear the mantle of Wokeness, they’re too cowardly to resist it. And if they see the danger in ubiquitous lowered standards, they’re too weak to stand up for high ones.

Jeffrey Blehar, writing at NRO:

It is the compulsive nature of Trump’s behavior that makes it so exhausting. My primary takeaway from the FBI raid was that Trump is a man who grasps reflexively, claims what he believes or wishes were his and holds onto it long past the limits of common sense or any greater sense of loyalty to civic norms, the rule of law, or the party he seeks to lead. That is the real tragedy, because whatever substantive achievements Trump may have had as president, he has proven over time only to be as good as his guardrails. His guardrails are largely gone now.

I’m no movie buff, but day by day the 45th President looks more and more like Norma Desmond or, on a more elevated level, like Sophocles’s Ajax.

Red Shift, Blue Shift

In the post immediately below, I expressed puzzlement at the Republican Party’s underperformance in this year’s House elections. The conventional wisdom has long been that Democrats are concentrated in urban centers, where they rack up Soviet-like majorities. Republicans, on the other hand, are spread out. They win seats by smaller margins but win more of them. That wasn’t the case in 2022: GOP candidates got more votes in toto, but the resulting minuscule majority of Congresscritters was in many ways the product of good luck, such as the New York Court of Appeals’ unanticipated rejection of a Democratic gerrymander (turning a likely five seat loss into a three seat gain), rather than good demographics.

Michael Barone, whose knowledge of the American electorate is unsurpassed, suggests that the demographics are shifting beneath the parties’ feet. He contrasts 2022 with 2012, when Republicans won 234 seats in the House while narrowly losing the overall popular vote. This year, a popular vote lead of about four percentage points yielded somewhere between 220 and 222 seats, just over the majority threshold of 218.

The most important reason for the Republicans’ reduced harvest of House seats has been a reduction in clustering. Previously, heavily Democratic voters – Blacks, Hispanics and gentry liberals – have been clustered geographically in central cities, sympathetic suburbs and university towns, while Republican voters have been spread more evenly around the rest of the country.

The effect of clustering can be seen in the number of House districts carried by different presidents. Both Bush and Obama were reelected with 51% of the popular vote. That enabled Bush in 2004 to carry 255 of the 435 House districts. But Obama in 2012 carried only 209. Biden, with 51% in 2020, raised that number to 226. . . .

You can see the evidence [of reduced clustering] from which party won seats with supermajorities. In 2012, 71 Democrats and only 32 Republicans were elected to the House with 70% or more of the vote. Twenty-eight Democrats got 80% or more, whereas only three Republicans did.

This year, by my preliminary count, the 70-plus percent districts moved closer to parity – 58 Democrats and 39 Republicans. Only 18 Democrats and five Republicans won with 80% or more.

Why has Democratic clustering diminished? For reasons that aren’t hard to fathom. People who can are leaving the misgoverned central cities, and those who remain are less likely to see any reason to vote, when their choices are criminal-friendly Democrats or demonized Republicans.

Central city turnout was way down, as compared to the last off-year election in 2018 – down 19% in New York City but up 0.3% in the suburbs and upstate; down 13% in Philadelphia, but up 8% elsewhere in Pennsylvania; down 15% in Detroit’s Wayne County, but up 6% elsewhere in Michigan; down 12% in Milwaukee County, but up 1% elsewhere in Wisconsin; down 24% in Chicago’s Cook County, down only 8% in Chicago’s collar counties and downstate.

Where do people who leave failed cities like Chicago and Detroit go? Moving to another central city is hardly likely to be attractive. What’s the point of trading Chicago for Philadelphia? The realistic alternatives are either purplish suburbs around the big cities or red areas like Florida, Texas and Tennessee. Mr. Barone notes that blacks have been moving in large numbers to the Atlanta suburbs, a big reason why the Democratic Party is more viable in Georgia than anywhere else in the Deep South.

What the voting data suggest is unsurprising: Conservatives emigrate to areas where conservatism is already strong. Liberals have few well-governed liberal bastions to choose from, so they go to politically marginal jurisdictions, where most of them retain their voting habits and help Democrats win swing districts.

While it appears that the era during which the GOP could leverage small overall vote advantages into large House majorities is over, Mr. Barone sees a bright silver lining:

Thus, the Republicans’ 51% of the total House vote produced a disappointing number of House seats.

However, it also signaled a residual Republican strength. Republican House candidates had a hard time dislodging Democrats in marginal districts. But relatively few were weighted down by highly publicized endorsements of Donald Trump’s backward-looking insistence that the 2020 presidential election was stolen; the few identified with that view ran significantly behind the many who didn’t.

Instead, Republican House candidates ran ahead of their party’s Senate candidates in such states as Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada. They also ran strongly in tandem with landslide winners Ron DeSantis and Marco Rubio in Florida.

Republican House candidates won 58% of the popular vote in the South and 53% in the Midwest, two regions that together account for 298 of the 538 electoral votes. Duplicating that support is one way an unproblematic Republican nominee could top 270 electoral votes in 2024.

A Republican President with a closely divided Congress wouldn’t be Paradise, but there are plenty of less attractive scenarios.

Keep Despair Alive!

Matt Labash, whose journalistic career was set back by his refusal to jump onto the Trump Train, has, one might think, every reason to rejoice when conservatives repudiate Donald Trump. (The latest is Virginia’s lieutenant governor, Winsome Sears, who two years ago chaired Black Americans to Re-elect President Trump.) But Mr. Labash is not at all a happy man, and it doesn’t sound like he wants to be.

What you’re probably already reading elsewhere is a lot of dopey analysis (no hyperlinks, sorry – I don’t wish to single anyone out for foolish wishful thinking after our long national nightmare) that holds that Ron DeSantis is about to wrest control of the party from Donald J. Trump, on account of the predicted Red Wave being more like a modest red eddy. As if Trump will suffer for this setback. After he already hasn’t suffered for losing two popular votes, the electoral college (in 2020), and helping lose the House and the Senate when they were on his presidential watch. Not to mention encouraging his own Capitol to be sacked, and his vice president hanged. So good luck with that theory. I don’t share it.

It’s true, of course, that pixel pushers’ opinions don’t necessarily reflect or influence the ballots of flesh-and-blood voters. We don’t yet have any post-election polls pitting Trump against DeSantis (or Pence or Abbott or Youngkin or Haley or Noem or anyone else on the GOP’s extraordinarily strong bench). It’s conceivable that Mr. Labash is correct when he writes, “DeSantis, if he is to win, ultimately has to break off adherents to a personality cult, when the cultist-in-chief is still alive and kicking, and is already pillorying Ron DeSantis to his sheeple.”

On the other hand, the “personality cult” originated in The Donald’s self-portrayal as an almost mythical “winner”, a title that his victory (over the most hapless Democratic candidate since John W. Davis) seemingly confirmed. The subsequent losses that Mr. Labash cites could be overlooked or excused or explained away. Nobody except progressive advocates of plebiscitary government pays much attention to popular vote totals in Presidential elections. Midterm Republican losses in 2018 followed a well-established historical pattern. It was possible to believe that defeat in 2020 was the product of a “steal”. The Democrats’ Senate victories in Georgia in December 2020 were supposedly Brian Kemp’s fault. And so on. Although the excuses and explanations were decreasingly convincing, no single failure was enough to start a preference cascade; Trump endorsements could still propel candidates with dubious political skills to victory in Republican primaries. But the load on the camel’s back was getting heavier and heavier.

Three factors, I believe, turned the “Red Trickle” into an anti-Trump torrent. First, the expectation of a Red Tide, even a Red Tsunami, was universal. Second, its non-appearance conspicuously resulted from the defeats of candidates who owed their places on the ballot to Trump (and, to be fair, to not-so-covert Democratic campaigning for “Mega-MAGA” candidates in the primaries). Third, Trump instantly reacted like a loser. Contrary to widespread Internet opinion, Trump voters are human beings rather than zombies. They have struggled against adversity or have witnessed the struggles of family members and friends. They have to deal with people who won’t take responsibility for mistakes, bully anyone who crosses them, brag of their own prowess, expect others to do their bidding and, in general, believe that the world owes them unearned loyalty. Not many of them hold a high opinion of people like that.

The latest Trump tantrum came this afternoon: a syntactically confusing and eccentrically capitalized e-mail to supporters. As John Hinderaker comments, “This would be an embarrassment coming from a twelve-year-old. Time to get Trump off the stage before he does further damage to our party and our country.”

Joe Biden Gets the CNN “Fact Check” Treatment

There could be no clearer foreshadowing of the coming campaign to ease Joe Biden out of office than the strange new disrespect shown by CNN’s “fact checker”. For the first time ever, the President’s statements are being evaluated as if he were a Republican.

“Fact check: Biden’s midterms message includes false and misleading claims” embraces nine items. Some are the sort that any semi-honest fact checker would have to rate as false: Gasoline prices weren’t over five dollars a gallon when Biden took office. He didn’t get Congress to pass his student loan giveaway “by a vote or two” or by any other margin. The tax cuts enacted in 2017 didn’t benefit “only the top one percent of the American public”. The Biden spending splurge hasn’t reduced the federal debt.

The interesting fact checks are those of the kind ordinarily reserved only for the GOP, namely, those that attach “false” labels to allegedly false conclusions based on undeniably true statements and to trivial factual muddles. For example, it is true that the 2023 increase in Social Security payments will be the largest in many years. (The fact-checked statement says ten; the actual number is forty-two. The President was unwontedly modest.) That Biden presents the increase as an accomplishment of his Administration is a dubious interpretation, but the conclusions to be drawn from facts are outside the fact checker’s bailiwick.

On the trivial side is Biden’s claim that he has traveled “17,000 miles” with Communist dictator Xi Jinping. That’s an obvious muddle – untrue but insignificant.

Combining both facets of bad fact checking is the response to “Unemployment is down from 6.5 to 3.5%, the lowest in 50 years.” CNN sniffs that 3.5 percent unemployment is only tied for the lowest in half a century, then points out that the other months with that low a figure were during the Trump Administration, before the panicdemic struck. Once again, the error is trivial, and the “fact check” – assigning significance to it because “Biden uses these campaign speeches to favorably compare his own record to Trump’s record” – is argumentation rather than blue penciling.

Lest there be any misunderstanding, I think that CNN outargues Biden at every point. But a month ago, it wouldn’t have argued with him at all. Soon, I imagine, it will begin highlighting the spoors of his diminishing mental capacity. And then the guy whom Art Buchwald called “the Great Mentioner” will begin speculating about primary challenges, voluntary retirement, the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, perhaps even Impeachment. The Left’s Overton Window is opening. Joe soon will feel the breeze.

Update (November 7, 2022): CNN isn’t alone. This morning, the Washington Post’s fact checker awards President Biden “a Bottomless Pinocchio”, which sounds like a description of a Meta avatar. (If you don’t want to pay for access, you can read a summary here.)

I begin to wonder whether Slow Joe will make it all the way to 2023.

The Biden Problem

If you’re looking for another depreciation of Joe Biden’s capacity to fill the duties of his office or prediction that shadowy Democratic power elites will find a way to ease him out, somehow circumventing his dubiously capable next-in-line, this isn’t it. I’m thinking instead of the “Biden Problem” in a generic sense, viz., when a political faction finds itself bound to a leader who harms its cause more than he helps it and can’t easily be superseded.

Joe Biden became the Democratic Presidential nominee, because all of the other aspirants were inexperienced, unlikable, extremist, unknown or all four. Biden appeared to have none of those defects. He had served 36 years in the Senate and eight as Vice President. He was known for his bonhomie. He had a reputation as a moderate, a former quasi-Dixiecrat who had mellowed as the Jim Crow era receded into the past. He was well known to the electorate, at least in the sense that everyone had heard his name, even if very few had much sense of who he was.

The country learned little more about him during the campaign, which he spent largely out of sight. He then defeated, by a narrow margin and with immense help from media and billionaires, an incumbent President who had worked tirelessly to alienate large swathes of voters who agreed for the most part with the policies he espoused but not with his espousing them.

Thus we reached the present predicament, which, let’s remember, is a predicament for Americans of any and all political persuasions, not just for Democrats. Moreover, it’s a predicament that no plausible action within the framework of the Constitution can resolve. (Action outside the Constitution would bring on worse problems.) The President won’t be impeached. So long as he retains a reasonable proportion of his present faculties, the Twenty-Fifth Amendment is an unworkable removal mechanism (more difficult than impeachment, unless the incumbent is literally incapable of speaking up for himself). He shows no signs of wanting to lay aside the burdens of office voluntarily.

Moreover, should the forces of nature remove him, matters wouldn’t be improved much, if at all. His designated successors are Kamala Harris and, after her, Nancy Pelosi, figures who inspire confidence in their own households and very few other places.

Such is the current instantiation of the “Biden Problem”. Let’s note its elements, abstracted from particularities. First is the election of a President for reasons that have little to do with his fitness for the office. Joe Biden was lucky in his opposition; his own qualities didn’t really matter. Second is manifest incapacity for the office. That doesn’t mean that a President who is non compos mentis, just one who isn’t up to the demands of the world’s most demanding position. Third is the absence of visible exit from the situation created by the first two elements.

For most of our history, Biden Problems stemming from age weren’t a great danger. Only five of the 45 Presidents were as old as 65 when they took office (two of them at a time when Presidents had far less to do than today); 32 were under age 60. Joe Biden is a full eight years older than the next oldest, his immediate predecessor Donald Trump.

Only two men entered the Presidency with potentially serious physical impairments: Franklin D. Roosevelt, a polio victim, and John F. Kennedy, dependent on prescription drugs to alleviate a painful chronic disease. In each case, the country avoided a Biden Problem. While FDR and JFK died in office, death was from other causes. So far as one can tell, their debilities had little effect on how they carried out their duties.

Now let’s look ahead. I apologize if that view is discomforting.

According to polls (with all due allowance for their unreliability at this distance from Election Day), Donald Trump is the favorite to win the Republican nomination, assuming that he seeks it, in 2024. A brand new McLaughlin & Associates poll says that 70 percent of Republican voters want him to run, and 81 percent would support him if he did (62 percent “strongly”). Pitted against a laundry list of conceivable GOP opponents, running from Ron DeSantis to Candace Owens and Liz Cheney(!), The Donald is the choice of 53 percent; DeSantis is second at 13.

The same poll puts Trump solidly ahead of Biden in a hypothetical general election, 51 to 40 percent. (He would beat Hillary Clinton by the same margin.)

There is, then, more than a remote prospect that Donald Trump will become the second President to serve nonconsecutive terms. If he does, the possibility (not certainty, to be sure) of a Biden Problem looms.

• Should Trump be elected, two factors are likely to be keys to his success: (i) support from Republicans because of the enemies he has made and (ii) continued Biden bumbling that taints him and, more generally, the Democratic Party. Just as with Biden in 2020, Trump in 2024 will be the beneficiary of his opponent’s negatives rather than his own positives.
• Upon taking the oath for a second term, Donald Trump will be 78 years old. Does that ring a bell? After four years of aggravated ineptitude, he will face daunting challenges at home and abroad, for worse than Joe Biden had to cope with. That doesn’t mean that the office will overwhelm him as it has poor Mr. Biden, but the risk is undeniable. Gambling the nation on the health and acuity of an elderly man of volatile temperament isn’t much different from putting your life savings on red or black at the roulette wheel and letting it spin.
• If the gamble doesn’t pay off, it’s hard to see how America can recover. It won’t be a matter of easing a capable Vice President into office. By then, given the prospects of rampant inflation, unchecked crime and international turmoil, the transition may well be too late.

“First, do no harm.” In this age of euthanasia, physicians may have forgotten that maxim, but it remains wise.

Thanksgiving Vacation

For Thanksgiving weekend, my wife and I drove to Los Angeles to attend Loscon, a regional SF convention to which we’ve become attached. On Thanksgiving Day itself, we visited Disneyland’s new “Avengers Campus” (ma femme is an enthusiast for Marvel movies), and I was reminded of Yogi Berra’s famous apothegm: “Nobody goes there; it’s too crowded.”

My attention has therefore been rather distracted for the past several days, but a few items leaked through.

• The weekend’s big topic, I gather, was the Nu Xi Omicron coronavirus variant, which inspired the stock market to fall out of fear that the panicdemic will intensify, even though the first reports suggest that it probably has less serious effects than previous variants. That is consistent with the commonsensical observation that viruses maximize their reproductive potential by becoming more infectious but less lethal. A virus doesn’t hate humanity. It just tries to survive long enough to spawn offspring, which it can’t do efficiently if it kills its host. There is strong reason to believe that the viruses behind past pandemics remain with us today as causes of the annoying but mostly harmless “common cold”.
• Egregious Xi-aspirant Jack Dorsey has resigned his positions with Twitter. I’m not such an optimist as to think that the platform will improve under his successor, who just last week gave an enlightening interview to Technology Review. What I infer is that Parag Agrawal sees Twitter as a conversational referee whose benign objective to ensure that discussion takes place solely within bounds determined by “credible sources”. Credibility will be determined, naturally, by the wise bureaucrats of Twitter Central.
• Dr. Fauxi leaped over the shark last Sunday. Did Aristotle or Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein ever proclaim, “I represent science”? Even Hyman Rickover had to be eased out eventually. Dr. Fauxi is no Rickover.
• By far the most ominous news report of the weekend was the Wall Street Journal’s “Taliban Covert Operatives Seized Kabul, Other Afghan Cities From Within”, an account of how the Haqqani Network established Fifth Columns throughout Afghanistan’s major metropolitan areas, activated them when Joe Biden announced that America was going to scuttle, and took control of the country with hardly a shot fired. That subversion could proceed undetected and unhindered for so many years is a blacker blot on the U.S. military and intelligence services than the botched withdrawal. If we don’t learn from this massive failure, it will inevitably recur.
• The Daily Telegraph hears “Whispers in Washington [that] suggest Joe Biden's camp has a plan to find a more popular replacement ahead of the 2024 White House battle”. The “plan” is supposedly to shuffle Cackling Kamala off to the Supreme Court when Justice Breyer retires. The whispers are, however, mere tintinnabulation. Should a Court vacancy occur before the 2022 elections, vacating the Vice Presidency would leave the Senate tied 50-50 with no tie breaker, which would spell the end of the Biden agenda. The chance that any Republican Senator will vote to confirm a replacement is about equal to the chance that Donald Trump will endorse Liz Cheney’s reelection bid. After 2022, unless the Democrats gain an actual Senate majority (a fading though not impossible prospect), Kamala will be unconfirmable as a Supreme Court nominee. Her qualifications for the bench aren’t just nil; they’re negative.
• A couple of noteworthy articles: In City Journal, Charles Fain Lehman explores “The Genealogy of Woke Capital”. National Review’s Kevin Williamson asks, “Enjoying Autarky?” and reminds readers of the vices of restrictive trade policies:

Some of you who went shopping on Black Friday may have noticed substantially higher prices, or found that certain products you were looking for were not to be had at any price. Some of you experienced the same thing when shopping for your Thanksgiving dinner. You have heard about “supply-chain disruptions,” which have made it difficult to get the world’s splendid produce to the United States with the ease and plenty to which we have become accustomed. Another way to think of that situation is that COVID-19 managed to do quickly what our anti-trade protectionists have tried to do slowly: deprive American consumers of inexpensive imports.

Finally, let me note that a small tax on unsolicited e-mails sent between the day before Thanksgiving and the following Tuesday would easily raise enough revenue to replace the income tax.

Is the Trump Train Headed Off the Rails?

Donald J. Trump is a study in multiple political personality disorder. One DJT is a slightly unconventional conservative Republican with a degree of charisma that far exceeds what his mostly humdrum agenda could be expected to generate. His orthodox conservative side – deregulation, tax cuts, originalist Supreme Court Justices, scorn for “wokeness” – and his deviations – skepticism about free trade, a pacifist foreign policy, strict immigration enforcement, indifference to excessive federal spending – all fall within the “Overton window” of American politics. The enthusiasm of his most ardent fans (an appropriate term for them) seems almost independent of his policy prescriptions. So far as I can see, it carries over from his pre-political career, when he was a full-time celebrity who ran some businesses on the side.

DJT-1 became visible only after he became President. Many conservatives who vehemently opposed his nomination in 2016 advocated his re-election four years later. While the inveterate core of Never Trumpers call them opportunists and sellouts, most have, I think, merely come to see a different Trump personality.

DJT-2 is a braggart and bully who has no real interest in public policy, knows little about it, doesn’t care to learn more, places his highest priority on personal victories, and quickly sours on advisors who pester him with substantive advice.

When Trump emerged as a plausible Presidential candidate in early 2016, National Review took aim at DJT-2. Its February 15, 2016, issue blared “Against Trump” on the cover. Inside was a symposium of 22 conservatives representing a wide range of right-of-center opinion. The editors added their own appraisal. The bottom line:

Trump is a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones.

Most Never Trumpers still see only DJT-2. Nothing that Trump did in office altered their perception, except that some came to hold their negative opinion yet more firmly, a few – Bill Kristol, Max Boot and Jen Rubin, to take conspicuous instances – to the point of abandoning conservatism altogether.

DJT-1 and DJT-2 are Trump personalities whose existence seems to me clearly supportable by objective evidence. The other two are more subjective. In fact, I’d call them delusions, but those who see them believe them.

DJT-3 is a “fighter” against the “elites” who, whether ostensibly Republican or Democrat, are joined in a united enterprise of running the country for their own benefit. The elite hostility that he attracts is taken as proof that they fear him, which is all the more reason to give him unconditional support.

I know people for whom DJT-3 is the “real Donald Trump”. I confess to not being able to see what they see. The widespread assumption, particularly among those for whom DJT-2 is the real thing, is that this group comprises the majority of the people who voted for Donald Trump last November. It certainly includes a lot of them.

Finally, DJT-4 aims at becoming a dictator and inspired an insurrection last January 6th with that end in mind. Those who see this Trump see another Mussolini and the January riot as the equivalent of the March on Rome. That strikes me as fantastical, but we can leave that argument for another day.

Whether Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee in 2024 depends on which of the competing DJT’s looks most real to the most voters. Last Wednesday, Trump himself gave the country something new to look at. He released this brief statement:

If we don’t solve the Presidential Election Fraud of 2020 (which we have thoroughly and conclusively documented), Republicans will not be voting in ’22 and ’24. It is the single most important thing for Republicans to do.

Parsed sympathetically with one’s eyes closed, that could just be a prediction, uttered with no intent to persuade anybody to stay home on election day. Even on that view, it’s startling. A massive boycott of the polls by Republican voters would guarantee a progressive Congressional majority able to enact whatever program appeals to “woke” fanatics in 2023. Just finishing whatever parts of this year’s Biden agenda fall by the wayside would be bad enough. DJT-1 would surely have made a very different statement, one urging his supporters to leave 2020 to the historians and work to Make America Great Again in 2022.

Coming from DJT-3, the statement is only slightly less inconceivable. Declining to vote isn’t a very effective way to “fight”. It amounts to surrender to the “elites”. It certainly isn’t a threat that will terrify the people who, in DJT-3’s view, control the United States.

Maybe it’s evidence for the reality of DJT-4, a sign that Trump has given up on democratic politics and will next urge a MAGA putsch. That’s quite a leap of logic. Whether it’s accurate doesn’t matter a great deal. January 6th showed that Trump “insurrectionists” are few in number and irresolute of purpose.

That brings us to DJT-2. The not-too-covert threat to sink the GOP unless his personal desire for vindication is satisfied is exactly what that Trump would do. It’s also consistent with his conduct during the Georgia Senatorial elections, where his denunciations of the state Republican Party are universally cited as a major cause of the loss of two Senate seats, handing control, tenuous though it is, to the Democrats.

Does DJT-2 have any base anywhere? Voters who admire DJT-3 may not have drawn a sharp distinction in the past between him and DJT-2, because much of the former’s “fighting” consists of the insult-laden, juvenile rhetoric of the latter. Now he is asking them, for practical purposes, to subordinate the overthrow of “elite” dominance to his personal King Charles’s Head. Will a great many of them fall in line with doing nothing in response to Joe Biden’s record, already disastrous and on a downward trajectory? Is that how fighters behave? So far, the ground isn’t swelling with positive vibrations.

John Hinderaker, who thinks that “Donald Trump was a very good president, our best since Ronald Reagan in my opinion” (yeah, not the highest of bars), titled his post on the Trump statement “Bad Donald” and summarized thus:

So Trump’s solution is to say that “Republicans will not be voting in ’22 or ’24.” This is a profoundly stupid threat. In fact, the Democrats’ response would be, as we used to say on the playground, Is that a threat or a promise? From the Democrats’ perspective, the answer is obvious.

Trump’s worst fault is his tendency to put his own interests – or worse, his own ego – over the interests of his party and his country. I don’t know how many Republicans he could induce to stay home next year, or in 2024, if he isn’t satisfied with progress on election integrity. But the dumbest possible response to the existence of voter fraud – something that has been with us since the beginning of our democracy – is to refrain from voting yourself. If Trump were to persuade even a small number of Republicans to abstain from voting next year, or in 2024, it could well swing close elections to the Democrats. Trump should be enough of a patriot to consider that the worst of all possible outcomes.

Sure, he should be, but don’t bet on it.

The Twitter Blitz That Isn’t

Let’s start with two counterfactual premises: that Donald J. Trump were as acceptable to Twitter’s juvenile Stasi as an Iranian mullah or Afghan terrorist and that Mr. Trump had more strategic sense than Braxton Bragg. Holman Jenkins describes what the ex-President might be tweeting under those circumstances. I have taken the liberty of putting it into a more twit-like form:

@realdonaldtrump My vaccines are the global gold standard.
@realdonaldtrump I warned you about the China lab leak possibility.
@realdonaldtrump I warned you about “defund the police,” runaway urban crime, and the Democrats with their woke racism, which they call critical race theory.
@realdonaldtrump I warned you about illegal immigration, with hundreds of thousands risking their lives and their children’s lives to get here illegally.
@realdonaldtrump I offered a big beautiful wall with a big beautiful gate. We got instead Sleepy Joe’s border chaos.
@realdonaldtrump Next he may throw away the post-Covid jobs boom I gave him.
@realdonaldtrump And which president has been eating out of Putin’s hand. . . .
@realdonaldtrump canceling weapons for Ukraine. . . .
@realdonaldtrump surrendering on the Nord Stream pipeline. . . .
@realdonaldtrump begging for relief from the ransomware reign of terror?
@realdonaldtrump Could anybody have done a worse job of getting us out of Afghanistan?
@realdonaldtrump It’s been a travesty, with America looking weak rather than strong by smartly putting America First.

If this blog hadn’t been on hiatus during the 2016 Presidential campaign, commenters would probably have been denouncing me as a “a cuck RINO traitor who probably wanted Hillary to win”, although, as Jim Treacher, coiner of that phrase put it, he and I were really cuck RINO traitors who were tickled pink that Hillary lost.

At the root of my objections to The Donald were, first, his tenuous attachment to conservatism and, second, his outsize pride in his mastery of the Art of the Deal. It was eminently foreseeable – I would have bet my IRA on it – that, if elected, a President Trump would right away start bargaining with the Democrats to pass a Big, Beautiful Bill full of whatever yuge notions sounded good to him and them. He had already started down that road by promising to replace Obamacare with a system that the government would pay for 100 percent (suggesting that he believed, like so many Democrats, that federal revenue comes from pockets other than those of taxpayers and their debt-repaying descendants). 

Miraculously, that didn’t happen. For the Trump inaugural, a left-wing Day of Rage descended on Washington, D.C. (WUSA9, CBS, Washington Post, CNN), and Democratic Congressional leaders, governors and state attorneys general made it clear that they weren’t going to do deals with the latest GOP incarnation of Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo. (The rehabilitation of George W. Bush began the same day. It didn’t take long for “Bushitler” to transmogrify into the kind of wise, moderate Republican with whom Democrats of course would cooperate.)

So Trump policies turned out perforce to be not a whole lot different from those of any generic Republican President, albeit presented more bombastically and with less finesse. There was even the occasional happy surprise. Republican Presidents had been talking for decades about moving the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel-Aviv to Jerusalem. Donald Trump went ahead and did it.

But character is, alas, a strong clue to destiny. The post-2020 Donald Trump, with his King Charles’s Head of an election fraud grievance and his seeming indifference to whether any Republican but himself wins elections, is striving to become as inept a politician as Hillary Clinton. He’ll never quite make it. He lacks her natural talent for self-destruction. Still, like an animal born without pain receptors, he stumbles into fires and burns himself to the quick. If he possessed ordinary common sense, he’d be trumpeting (sorry) messages like Holman Jenkins’s imaginary Twitter feed and on his way to being the next Grover Cleveland. More likely, though, he’ll wind up as the 21st Century Harold Stassen.