Commentary: The Establishment Still Doesn’t Get Trump

Trump Speaking

A few weeks ago, a “Morning Joe” panel concluded that if Donald Trump were to become the Republican nominee (spoiler alert: he will), Republicans will lose in the fall. This is by no means a unique sentiment – former House Speaker Paul Ryan expressing this idea here, journalist Bernard Goldberg wondering if Trump is trying to lose here, and so forth.

As I read these analyses, I wonder if I’ve somehow been transported back to 2016, when such takes were de rigueur. Here in 2024, we know that Donald Trump won in 2016 and came close to winning in 2020. He carried Republican senators across the finish line in both years, and the GOP gained House seats in 2020, much to the surprise of most election analysts. And, at a comparable time in the campaign cycle when he trailed Hillary Clinton by 4.5 points in the RCP Average and Joe Biden by 5.6 points, Trump actually leads Biden by 1.9 points in national polling.

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Andy Biggs Commentary: Congress Can’t Continue the Budget Insanity

In the current atmosphere of acrimony surrounding the failure of Congress to produce a balanced budget, or even an unbalanced budget, it is important to review the facts. The facts are important because the Uniparty, the Swamp, the Establishment, and many media propagandists are engaged in a parade of fearmongering.

Because House Republicans did not timely produce a budget as required by law, “they,” the leaders of the Uniparty, began championing their preferred budget mechanism, the “Continuing Resolution (CR).” We know it is their preferred option because they use it every year.

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Commentary: Uniparty’s Plan to ‘Save Our Democracy’ Unfolds

The fish are plentiful today. There’s Hunter Biden and his various lies: about the sources of his prodigious income, his payment (that is, non-payment) of taxes, drugs, guns, child support, laptops and prostitutes. There’s Joe Biden and his lies, the sources of his prodigious income, and—the latest—his use of pseudonymous email accounts when writing to Hunter and Hunter’s business partners to discuss the weather—or was it the whether and how to siphon 20 million of the crispest into virtually untraceable bank accounts?

There’s the seemingly endless series of indictments directed at Donald Trump. The latest new there, if I am up to date, is that he told people to watch election returns on One America News Network. Clearly part of a RICO conspiracy. Someone whose math is sharper than mine calculated that President Trump is potentially on the hook for 450 years in the slammer for . . . well, his torts are mostly in the eye of the beholder.

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Commentary: The Establishment Uses ‘Hate and Fear’ to Manipulate Voters

Hate and fear might as well be the GOP’s motto. And while there was a time when a liberal like me saying that would be accurately labeled hyperbolic, that time has passed. Show me what, aside from hate and fear, the modern Republican Party is all about.
Columnist Rex Huppke, writing for USA Today, July 16, 2023

Huppke’s comment is something we hear all the time. The campaign to dehumanize MAGA Republicans as hatemongers and fearmongers is a staple of the liberal media, is the playbook for Democrat politicians all the way up to President Biden, and is supported by almost the entire academic community. This dehumanization campaign isn’t restricted to Democrats. Establishment Republicans either equivocate, or explicitly join Democrats in demonizing MAGA Republicans.

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Glenn Jacobs Commentary: With the Uniparty’s Indictment of Donald Trump, the Die is Cast

When Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon with his army — an act Roman law strictly prohibited — he is reported to have said, “Alea iacta est,” Latin for “the die is cast.” Caesar, one of history’s most brilliant military and political minds, understood there was no turning back, even though the outcome was uncertain and quite possibly catastrophic.

History will question whether, during his occasional moments of lucidity, Joe Biden or his hubristic Justice Department experienced any such epiphany before crossing an American Rubicon, the indictment of a former President and Biden’s chief political rival, Donald Trump.

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Commentary: It’s Trump vs. The Establishment All Over Again

Since the “red wave” fizzled out, a consensus has quickly emerged in the media that Donald Trump is no longer a viable political force. The newly anointed prince of the Right, according to the tastemakers, is Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Trump’s more palatable, less chaotic protégé. But DeSantis and Trump offer two very different things. DeSantis is a conventional politician with Trump-like qualities, who can, at least according to his fan base, build a popular majority that is beyond Trump’s reach. Trump is a radical outsider to a rigged, illegitimate political system with which he has been at war for seven years, and which his supporters see as an existential threat to their way of life.

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Commentary: Trump Took a Sledgehammer to the Establishment. America Needs Him to Do It Again in 2024

Tucker Carlson, who seems to have his finger on the pulse of the America First movement, signs off his nightly Fox News show as “the sworn enemy of lying, pomposity, smugness and group think.”

The “lying” and “pomposity” surely represent the tactics of a Democrat/media complex who will stop at nothing — including using the power of the state to persecute their political enemies. President Joe Biden’s reprehensible speech in Philadelphia all but confirmed it.

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Commentary: The Establishment’s Effort to ‘Destroy Trump’ Belies a Terrible Truth

For some time now, Michael Anton has been saying that the Establishment – Democrats tout court, of course, but also large swaths of the testosterone-challenged GOP – are dead set against allowing Donald Trump to run for president again. It’s been obvious from its beginnings that the January 6 committee – an illegally constituted kangaroo court – was interested in one thing and one thing only: eliminating Trump and his followers from the metabolism of American political life. The fact that its public face is Liz Cheney, a soon-to-be cashiered anti-Trump RINO, underscores Anton’s point, or part of it. 

It’s not just the Democrats who cannot countenance Trump. It is the entire certified political class, what Anton calls the bureaucratic “uniparty” that runs the government and maintains the Overton Window that determines what is and what is not acceptable in the political life of the country. Donald Trump is not in the picture frame. 

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Commentary: Establishment Republicans Snatch Defeat from Jaws of Victory Yet Again with the ‘Infrastructure’ Boondoggle

Adam Kinzinger

Having been in the D.C. area for over 20 years now, I’ve come to live by the maxim, “Always bank on the GOP snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.” I was proved right again this last week when 13 Republicans in the House helped pass the $1.2 trillion “Gateway to the Green New Deal” otherwise masquerading as an infrastructure bill. 

As I wrote back in August, only 23 percent of this bill is really for infrastructure. The other 77 percent is for things like the $213 billion “allocated for retrofitting two million homes and buildings to make them more “sustainable,” whatever that means. Or the $20 billion for racial equity and environmental justice. Or the mileage tax, as in yes, they want to explore taxing you for every mile you drive in your car.

In the wake of an absolutely stunning clean sweep for Republicans in Virginia from governor to House of Delegates—in a state Republicans hadn’t won statewide in a dozen years and where they’ve lost the last four presidentials—Republicans in D.C. just couldn’t find the nerve to simply say “No.” They couldn’t “Just say no,” kids. It is one of the most beautiful and underused words in the English language, but Republicans appear simply incapable of using it. 

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Mollie Hemingway Commentary: Taking on the Establishment

Before the 2018 midterm elections, Trump’s political advisors were thinking about the president’s re-election bid and noticed a curious commonality among incumbent presidents who didn’t get re-elected: they all faced challengers from within their own party.

Five U.S. presidents since 1900 have lost their bids for a second term. William Taft lost to Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover lost to Franklin Roosevelt, Gerald Ford lost to Jimmy Carter, Jimmy Carter lost to Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush lost to Bill Clinton. While each election is determined by unique factors, all five of these failed incumbents dealt with internal party fights or serious primary challenges.

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Commentary: Now That Democrats Have Successfully Pulled Off Their ‘Decapitation’ Strategy, Will Americans Reward or Punish Them?

In their latest entry in their litany of hypocrisy, the Democrats are trying assiduously to suppress the very opposition strategy they engaged in during the Trump Administration.

It is ironic, and in many instances unnecessary. By and large, Republicans and populists would never engage in many of these political tactics. Nevertheless, the Democrats are trying preemptively to extinguish a Republican-populist version of their “resistance” by using the execrable and rightly condemned Capitol riot as a pretext to equate legitimate “opposition” with treasonous “sedition.”

The Democrats’ “resistance” was no organic, spontaneous uprising. It was a well-orchestrated political operation. Knowing what they did to undermine the Trump Administration, the Democrats know what they must do to stop it from happening to them. In other words, there is a history lesson the Democrats are trying to rewrite.

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Commentary: Play the Game or Be Played Like a Chump

By now, you may have forgotten the story from all the way back in August when various bugmen and D.C. lizard people convened to run a series of “war games” on the upcoming presidential election. Dubbed the Transition Integrity Project, the group of Democratic Party operatives, Bushite neocons, and lawfare swamp creatures warned of a tumultuous Election Night at the end of which neither candidate would concede, followed by a months-long political and legal battle, going all the way to Inauguration Day, that would stress our republic to its breaking point.

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Commentary: The Empire Struck Back, but MAGA Will Strike Harder

I’ve written many times that I thought Donald Trump would win the 2020 election. The question always was whether he would win it beyond the margin of fraud and litigation.

Did he? It’s touch and go. Television networks and even some foreign heads of state tell us Joe Biden won the election. The electors have yet to be appointed and meet to vote. Still, the forces arrayed against Trump are formidable. It’s not just, as Joe Biden bragged, that the Democrats had put together “the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics.” That does appear to have been the case.

But if Donald Trump loses, it won’t only be because of that “extensive and inclusive” organization. Perhaps more important is the ambient jelly in which that organization has operated. I mean the eructations of the swamp, or to give it a more cinematic name, “The Empire.”

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Commentary: The Pale Pastel Republicans for Socialism

The man was a walking political disaster.

He was “a minority of a minority” who “has been taking some extreme positions.” His positions were “so extreme that they would alter our country’s very economic and social structure and our place in the world to such a degree as to make our country’s place at home and abroad, as we know it, a thing of the past.” He was horrifyingly “foolhardy,” and a Republican Party in his hands was headed for a certain “crushing defeat … that could signal the beginning of the end of our party as an effective force in American political life.” The man was putting the GOP in “an impossible situation” because he was a “sure-loser in November” who held “extreme and too simple views.”

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Commentary: The Citizen Army Amassing in California to Recall Gavin Newsom and Challenge Democrat Supremacy

Even in deep-blue California, it is possible to achieve the impossible. The technology to facilitate mass uprisings is mature and ubiquitous and will function with or without the complicity of the social media and search monopolies. The political realignment we are witnessing in California is not partisan, it is not conservative or liberal, Right or Left, or Republican or Democrat. It is comprised of old and young, rich and poor, black and white, and everyone else. This is a mass uprising.

California’s pandemic shutdown isn’t just pushing the economy to the brink, it’s taken away whatever remained of the trust that Californians had in their elected officials.

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Commentary: An Open Letter to the D.C. ‘Right’

I’m addressing this to several of you whom I know in Washington, D.C. Not all of you, but some of you.

I’ve known you for decades. You’re think-tankers, government officials, political journalists, and pundits. Some of you have been all these things.

For a long while, I thought you were the good guys. You talked about individual liberty. Some of you identified as conservatives, others as libertarians, still others as classical liberals. None of you are outright leftists.

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Commentary: The Great, Steaming Heart of ‘The Swamp’ Beats in the U.S. Senate

by Rachel Bovard   Donald Trump was elected in 2016 on a platform that, broadly, called for draining “the swamp.” The definition of swamp, for the most part, was left to the listener, but generally, it was assumed to represent the established interests that dictated federal policy toward the ends…

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Commentary: The Trump Doctrine

Trump at UN

by George Rasley   While the establishment media and self-appointed pundits focused on the U.N. audience reaction to President Trump’s truthful boast that “In less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country…” they missed the most important part of…

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Commentary: The Suicidal Sanctimony of Phony Conservatives

Christine Blasey Ford made scurrilous accusations against Brett Kavanaugh for actions she claims occurred nearly 35 years ago when they were both minors. Both Judge Kavanaugh and Mark Judge, who Ford also claims was present have vehemently and categorically denied her claims. The people who know Kavanaugh, as well as…

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Commentary: A Nod Is as Good as a Wink to a Blind Horse as GOP Establishment Throws the Midterms to Democrats

US Senate

by Bill Wilson   The old saying that “a nod is as good as a wink in a blind horse” came rushing to mind as I read an article at TheHill.com by Morgan Gstalter about an RNC internal poll.  It seems the Republican National Committee (RNC) spent money to find out that…

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Commentary: Clowns to the Left of Us, Jokers to the Right, and Media All Around

by Jeffery Rendall   Living in the news bubble that is Washington DC it’s easy for swamp dwellers to lose perspective on their own actions and how they’re being viewed by others. Last week’s media circus surrounding the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh must’ve given outsiders…

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Commentary: The New York Times Belatedly Discovers The Deep State

by George Rasley, CHQ Editor   The New York Times recently published what it touted as a bombshell anonymous op-ed by a “senior” Trump administration official that trashed President Trump for being among other things “amoral” and showing “little affinity for ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and free…

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Commentary: Jim Jordan Must Be Winning The Race For Speaker

Jim Jordan

by George Rasley   Let us help you understand what’s going on with the phony scandal being ginned up against Rep. Jim Jordan, the consensus conservative choice to succeed RINO Paul Ryan as Speaker of the House. NBC News published an article on Tuesday, quoting Mike DiSabato and Dunyasha Yetts,…

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Commentary: Who Better Understands the Concerns and Frustrations of Conservatives, George Will or Donald Trump?

George Will, Donald Trump

by Jeffery Rendall   It should come as no surprise to observers of American politics that nearly two years after Donald Trump was formally nominated as the Republican Party’s presidential candidate – and a year and a half after he assumed the office – his “conservative” #NeverTrump adversaries are still…

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