There’s an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal which is such a misstatement about the conservative political tradition that no wonder a charlatan like Donald Trump is still the presumptive head of the GOP. Because if anyone with the slightest degree of knowledge about American politics buy this bullshit, then we might as well go back to understanding how the world works by studying Greek myths.
The op-ed is a fanciful discussion between two individuals who previously voted for Trump – one a ‘thoughtful’ conservative, the other a member of the MAGA crowd. Obviously, it’s what the more reasonable character says, because the whole point of the ‘responsible’ alt-right media like the WSJ is to promote an alternative to Trump.
But the narrative which the anti-Trump former Trump voter promotes is nothing but a bunch of stupid cliches which aren’t all that different from what the MAGA-type has to say.
Here’s the opening salvo from Mister GOP Respectable, who claims that he put up with Trump in 2016 because “we got a political leadership that was willing to take on the entrenched interests that have steered this country in the wrong direction for decades.”
Exactly what are these ‘entrenched interests’ that responsible GOP voters need to fight against in 2024? Here’s the list: “the progressive revolution [which] swept through our institutions, substituting open borders for controlled immigration, global economic opportunity for national interests, a green and woke orthodoxy for traditional values and faith.”
In other words, it’s not just the crazies on the MAGA team who want to lead a civil war or at least a cultural war against the Deep State. The looming encroachments of WOKE and green energy have also become a major concern for everyone on the GOP side of the slate.
Never mind the utter stupidity of this narrative, what else can you find to talk about when unemployment is under 4%, our troops are mostly at home safe and sound, and since nobody really understands the Israel-Hamas thing anyway, better just to leave it alone.
What’s most interesting about this make-believe world being carried on a WSJ page is the total absence of the one issue from the spiels of both of these dumb heads which will probably decide who will be sitting behind the real Resolute desk in 2025.
I’m talking about abortion, but before I get into that issue in more detail, when it comes to understanding anything about how the two sides will create, broadcast, and promote their election scripts, we need to keep something in mind about how the election will be determined no matter who wins.
If we learned anything from the last several elections, it’s that most of the 50 states and D.C. whose electoral votes really count, there are only 4 or 5 states which could swing either way – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin – and which together delivered 73 electoral votes to Biden, although he only got 50% of the votes in two of those five states and altogether his 12,038,911 votes in those 5 states represented less than 15% of all the votes he received.
For Trump, those same five states gave him 11,761,250, which was less than 16% of all the votes he received. 23,800,161 So, the entire 2020 election produced 158,429,631 votes and produced a winner based on a grand difference of 277,661 votes, or – ready – one tenth of one percent of all the votes cast that year.
Know what? If I were Trump, I’d also be out there kvetching about an ‘election fraud.’
You think that Joe and the Democrats can’t find enough GOP-leaning women to keep that precious margin intact in those five swing states? It turns out that women who claim to vote GOP happen to be just as pro-life as the men who vote GOP, the pro-life percentage for GOP female voters is around 60%.
Guess what? That still leaves 40% of female GOP voters who went to the polls in 2020 before the Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
Anyone other than me want to take the short odds that this could be the determining factor in how the 2024 votes turn out in those swing states?
My two Jacksons are already on the table.
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