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Dear Friends,
Dan McLaughlin at National Review recently observed that it would take political incompetence of world-historical proportions to lose to Joe Biden in 2024. And it would also take political incompetence of world-historical proportions to lose to Donald Trump in 2024. Alas, one of these two campaigns are bound to accomplish the feat! But don’t worry, those same campaign managers and consultants will, in fact, be hired again the next time around.
The video clips of President Biden looking like an escapee from a long-term care facility keep emerging daily. He looks so lost that, late though it is, I am sticking with my prediction that Joe Biden does not end up on the ballot in November. You cannot win an election by scolding the entire country, telling them that their own eyes and ears are deceiving them. And that appears to be the Democrat plan: all those videos are “deepfakes”! Sheesh. I’m reminded of Jon Stewart’s inaugural reboot of The Daily Show, which did a montage of TV pundits saying over and over, “I’ve been with President Biden; I’ve never seen such energy! Sharp as a tack! I don’t know how anybody keeps up with that guy!” To which Stewart says, “Um, did anyone film THAT!?”
So the incumbent has historically low approval ratings, and his opponent is basically making it … a tossup. It is pathetic. But the Republican Party has resoundingly decided that it doesn’t want to be a party that wins landslide victories; it wants to do elections with a 50-ton orange anvil tied around their necks. I know this is difficult for people in MAGA world to believe, but their candidate is not popular and never will be. It’s a 50/50 proposition whether he can eek out a narrow victory against the least popular incumbent in American history.
And who knows what he is running on, other than the demagoguery of populist victimhood? There isn’t really a policy platform, other than shutting down the border and imposing massive taxes—I’m sorry, tariffs—on everyday Americans. I recently saw a post by a Republican state representative that proudly said, “I stand with the Republican platform!” She forgot that there is no platform; the Party hasn’t had one since 2016. The Republicans stand for whatever wacky idea spills out of Donald Trump’s mouth.
This week Donald Trump suggested that we could and should replace the entire revenue stream of the Federal government with tariffs. Republican National Committee spokeswoman Anna Kelly defended this, saying “The notion that tariffs are a tax on U.S. consumers is a lie pushed by outsourcers and the Chinese Communist Party.” I don’t know if it is behind a paywall, but Kevin Williamson very easily dispatched (heh) this idiocy. He begins:
If Donald Trump has a superpower, it is being so brazen and insistent in his stupidity and dishonesty that his lackeys, sycophants, and credulous marks have no choice but to adopt his stupidity and dishonesty as their own. This has happened to Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, to the whole of Fox News, and to countless little old church ladies who want to explain to me how January 6 was a false-flag operation. As heuristics go, that’s a time-saving line in the sand: Either people actually believe it when they repeat Trump’s baloney, in which case they are too stupid for further conversation to be of any value, or they don’t believe it, in which case they are dishonest—and there’s never any point talking to a dishonest person.
Meet today’s contestant in “Stupid Or Dishonest?”—Republic National Committee spokeswoman Anna Kelly, who claimed: “The notion that tariffs are a tax on U.S. consumers is a lie pushed by outsourcers and the Chinese Communist Party.” As a specimen of Trumpist baloney, that is just about perfect: It is a lie, it is easily disproved, and it contains a preemptive strike accusing the people who are going to point out that it is a stupid, easily disproved lie of operating in bad faith.
I recommend reading the whole thing. You’ll get up to speed on what tariffs are and who pays them. Short answer: you do.
Charlie Kirk’s outfit, TurningPointUSA, is platforming a fellow by the name of Evan Kilgore:
That would be the guy who wrote this Tweet:
No enemies to right, remember. None at all.
And Candace Owens is at it again:
The only evidence I see that our country didn’t get greater in the postwar era is that some people think Candace Owens is some sort of intellectual.
Since we’re on the topics of racism and nationalism, Gray Sutanto nicely explains how “Bavinck Warned That Without Christianity, Racism and Nationalism Thrive.”
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