The Limits of WrongnessBy Jonah Goldberg
The merry pranksters at the Washington Free Beacon put together this super-cut of Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski gloating over and over again about how they were right about the Trump phenomenon when so many others were wrong. It’s fairly nauseating to watch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOPJKEKYLt4Scarborough insists on air and off that he’s not in the tank for Donald Trump. Rather, he says that he and Mika are “in the tank for . . . truth!” He claims the reason so many think he’s pro-Trump boils down to professional jealousy. I should say that after conducting a vigorous personal inventory of my motives, jealousy of Scarborough’s foresight really doesn’t play much of a role in my own annoyance with his obvious Trump-boosterism. Nor have I talked with any Trump critic who’s said, “You know, the thing that really burns my ass about Scarborough’s Trump man-crush is, he called this so early.” (This also assumes that Scarborough’s “predictions” were based on dispassionate analysis rather than an investment in Trump boosterism that simply paid off.)
But this gloat-a-thon does raise a larger point. Trump’s candidacy has ignited a riot of question-begging and non sequiturs across the land. Every day I hear from scores of people who insist that because I was wrong about Trump’s chances to win the nomination, I must be wrong not only about his chances in the general election, but also about his qualifications to be president at all. I should say, it is entirely fair to doubt my prognostication skills on how Trump will perform in the general given how wrong I was in the primaries. Of course, failure to predict black swans — or in this case, Creamsicle-orange ones — is not necessarily as damning as some think. It was utterly reasonable to predict that Trump wouldn’t do this well, just as it’s entirely reasonable to say, “There will be no zombie apocalypse.” But, if the dead do rise from their graves, such assurances will look pretty stupid. And while the zombie-preppers in our midst will surely have the last laugh, I’m not sure I have to concede they’re all geniuses, even when a reanimated Abe Vigoda is munching on my larynx.
I honestly believe that Trump would crash in the general election like so much blue ice from an Aeroflot jetliner. I don’t think he can flip any of the states in the Democratic “blue wall,” and I think there’s a strong likelihood he’d fail to hold on to some of the states in the Republican “red wall.” Talk to political handicappers in Arizona and Utah, for instance, and they will tell you he’s very likely to lose there and take other Republican candidates down with him. For example, Trump boosters point to his blow-out win in New York as evidence he can flip the state. I agree with Ross Douthat: This is delusional. Bush got more votes than Trump in the New York primary in 2000 — when that primary didn’t even matter — and still lost the state in the general by 15 points. Both Sanders and Clinton got a lot more votes than Trump.
Trump loves to cite how he “won” with Hispanics in Nevada, leaving out that he was talking about a statistical handful of self-identified Republican Hispanics in a caucus. Among Hispanics generally, Trump polls only slightly better than ass cancer. His numbers are somewhat better with women, but still within sight of ass-cancer margins. Yes, Trump does well with white men, but he’d have to do roughly ten points better than Reagan in his 1984 landslide (the high water mark for white-male turnout) to even be competitive. His boosters point to Hillary’s undeniable vulnerabilities, while leaving out that Trump’s negatives are much worse. Still, I could be wrong about all of this. There’s no disputing Trump is a disrupter, that he overturns many of the rules that we mistakenly thought were binding. Good for him. So maybe he’ll keep defying expectations. Reasonable people can debate that point. Less reasonable is the claim that because I was wrong about Trump’s chances, I must therefore be wrong about Trump’s qualifications and character. If you predicted in 2006 that Obama would be the Democratic nominee, congrats! That, however, is not an argument for why he should have been the nominee or the president. It’s a confusion of “is” and “ought” and I see it everywhere. While my opposition to Trump is not primarily an argument about electability, I’ve been focusing on that angle lately because the establishment opportunists, quislings, sell-outs, pragmatists, and harlots are more persuadable on these grounds than arguments over principle. People open to principled arguments against Trump have already been persuaded. The John Boehner and K Street caucus on the other hand has made peace with Trump because they understand he’s a guy they can “cut deals” with. They hate Ted Cruz because they know or fear he isn’t. I’m not saying that everyone who supports Trump isn’t a conservative or isn’t principled. I am saying I think they’re wrong.
I’ll make one last point on all this. I think it’s fascinating how so many people are already pre-blaming a Trump loss on the #NeverTrumpers. My old friend John Nolte seems blinded with rage at all of us, tweeting, “If Trump loses to Hillary . . . I will forever blame #NeverTrump.” Herman Cain is on Fox every five minutes ranting and bullying Trump opponents as fools and de facto Hillary supporters. I am beset by Lilliputian trolls on Twitter insisting I am pro-Hillary (a strange case to make if you read my chapter on her in Liberal Fascism — or quite literally anything I’ve ever written about her). To the extent this stuff isn’t simply stupid, it amounts to coercion. Get on the bandwagon! Or else. Indeed, every day I get a half dozen threats along these lines:
Now, I get it. I don’t want Hillary to be president either. And in politics sometimes people feel like they have to crack the whip to get the stragglers back in the herd. Also, it’s clear to me that as Ian Tuttle wrote this week, a major motivation of Trumpsters isn’t winning, it’s vengeance. John Nolte says that the “GOP’s needed an enema for a long time.” In this case, I actually agree with John’s apt comparison of his dashboard saint to an anal douche. But let’s go back to the claim that Trump will win in the general election by flipping blue states in a populist tsunami. If that analysis is even remotely plausible, why should #NeverTrumpers matter? Indeed, if you take Trumpian rhetoric from his talk-radio and other cheerleaders seriously, the anti-Trump forces are a negligible bunch of eggheads, pinheads, and finger-sniffing shut-ins completely disconnected from the authentic and volcanically powerful volksgemeinschaft. If Trump has any chance of flipping New York, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, we shouldn’t matter at all. And yet, according to the increasingly shrill and whining bleats from his supporters, we will be to blame if he doesn’t win. Well which is it? Is this a revolutionary populist movement that will sweep aside ink knights like me or not? I think several things are going on here. I think some pro-Trump forces actually realize that their guy will lose no matter what. Rather than face the fact that blame for Trump’s likely inevitable loss will rest entirely with Trump and his followers, they want to preserve the claim that Trump was “stabbed in the back.” Tactically, this isn’t dumb. The consolation prize for the Trump movement is to complete the hostile takeover of the GOP the way conservatives did after Goldwater’s loss in 1964. Psychologically, it also makes sense. No one ever wants to look squarely into the abyss of their own failure. But empirically, this argument is inane. If or when Trump loses it will be because of Trump’s own myriad and manifest shortcomings. Blaming us for honestly pointing out that those shortcomings are as short as the digits of Trump’s puppy-fur gloves may be cathartic, but it won’t be honest or accurate.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/434776/donald-trump-nevertrump-election-loss
