Today, Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review (the flagship conservative magazine founded by William F. Buckley Jr.), published an article claiming that Donald Trump could win the 2024 election “on character.”
No, really. But bear with me; the headline wasn’t quite accurate.
Trump could beat Kamala Harris, Lowry wrote, not by running on his character but by attacking hers. According to Lowry, you see, one of Trump’s “talents as a communicator is sheer repetition, which, when he’s on to something that works, attains a certain power.”
That’s not a talent though. It may work, but that doesn’t make it a talent. There’s no skill to it. More the opposite – sheer repetition is what you do when you have nothing else, and Trump always has nothing else.
Thus, he argued, Trump could hammer Harris into the ground if he called her “weak” enough times—50 times a day ought to do it, according to Lowry—and especially if he gave her a funny nickname, like the ones he managed to stick on “Crooked Hillary” Clinton and “Little Marco” Rubio.
That might be true, but if it is it’s because people are stupid or greedy or both, not because Trump’s 3 tricks endlessly repeated equal talent.
Lowry and others in that group never became full-fledged MAGA warriors. Many of them hated Trump, as Tucker Carlson, now a born-again Trump booster, admitted in 2021; they just hated Democrats more. But they also hated being reminded of the spirit-crushing bargain they’d made with a tacky outer-borough real-estate developer they wouldn’t have spoken with a year earlier. As Charlie Sykes wrote in 2017, they adopted a new fetish: “Loathing those who loathe the president. Rabid anti-anti-Trumpism.”
Which is tricky, because reasons not to loathe Trump are shatteringly difficult to find. He’s not one of the lovable bad guy types – he’s too boring for that, too dumb, too trashy, too clumsy (those damn hands!), too dim, too painful to listen to.
Stepping outside of years of partisan tribal affiliations comes with professional and social costs (and for politicians, electoral consequences). But principles are sometimes burdensome things; that’s part of what makes them principles. The behavior of the anti-anti-Trumpers continues to be an inexcusable betrayal of the values they once claimed to hold. Many of them spoke, even passionately, against Trump—and then they shuffled into line. And for what? One more federal judge? A few billion more dollars in the account of a donor?
Winning. Winning for the sake of winning. That’s my guess.
Comments
12 responses to “One of Trump’s talents as a what now?”
By the writer’s criterion, someone on the lane where I live has a very talented dog. It barks all day, every day! It can repeat the exact same barks all night, every night!
I’m not sure that it’s much more intelligent than Trump, though.
What this author considers talent is really just the amplification inherent in being a major party’s chosen candidate. That was enough to get him a presidency, which amplified it again.
I would have thought that was obvious – a multi-generational win on abortion, and the capacity to deliver similar changes in the years to come.
“Crooked Hillary” and “Little Marco” are not funny. Neither is “Comrade Kamala” (or Kambala, or whatever other puerile mispronunciation he comes up with). “Ron DeSanctimonious” was kind of funny, but aside from that I can’t think of a truly funny nickname he’s come up with.
Any betting on who it was who came up with “Ron DeSanctimonious”? I think there’s no chance it was Trump.
Yeah, I was going to say….
What is it with “Kambala”, anyway? Reference to NAMBLA? Reference to Kabbalah? Simple juvenile mispronunciation? Two of the three? Something else?
I think it’s just “Hur, hur, she’s got a funny-sounding furren name.”
If I was going to mispronounce Harris’ first name for laughs, I would go with ‘Kumbaya’.
I think it’s everything that Sackbut and WaM said, plus implying liberal based on what Jim Baerg said. The more ways he can be Trump, the happier he is.
I had heard at least one commentator do comparisons and it seems that he started pronouncing “Kamala” properly over time for some reason or other.
Or like Donald The Fucking Moron Trump?