NeverTrump conservative talk show host Charlie Sykes said of crowning crackpot Roy Moore's Alabama Senate primary victory last night that "Republicans — and that means Trump, too — have unleashed something they can’t control." Added fellow NeverTrumper and GOP strategist Rick Wilson, "More and more Republicans may say I don’t want the hassle from the activists on the left and the Trump Republicans on the right" — and just flee the regnant pseudoconservative maelstrom, as Sen. Bob Corker did yesterday. And Mississippi state senator Chris McDaniel, a probable challenger to U.S. senator Roger Wicker, summarized the populist discontent with GOP incumbents: "[People are] are going to vote against those who play the D.C. games."
But control and contain his humiliating repudiation by Alabama extremists is of course precisely what the cowardly Trump is attempting. Yesterday he deleted his recent pro-Luther Strange tweets in an embarrassed frenzy of Stalinist airbrushing, and, reports the Daily Beast, he's "gearing up to lay blame" for his candidate's loss "squarely at the feet of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell." The president's out-of-character candor last week that he "might have made a mistake" in backing the impending washout was as fleeting as any of his inept stabs at using coherent syntax.
The upside to Republicans' Alabama Sturm und Drang is that the inevitable war between the equally unhinged forces of Trump and Steve Bannon is on. And Bannon has won the first major battle. From his expected victory over Trump-Strange, Breitbart's militant bossman is overconfidently forecasting, Sanders-like, that a populist "revolution" will ensue nationwide.
While Bannon's prediction will doubtless play out in Republican primary politics of 2018 and 2020, Bannon is ahistorically overlooking — as extremists are wont to do — that the American electorate at large is neither radical nor revolutionary and it sure as hell is not pathologically fanatical, as are Roy Moore and Steve Bannon. Monday night the latter said of McConnell & Co.'s establishment battalions, "They think [Moore-enthusiasts are] a pack of morons, they think you’re nothing but rubes." Moore's local success proved McConnell correct, but the religious fanatic's victory will never flourish across this diverse republic.
Trump's 2016 hideous triumph was the blackest of swans in American political history, and though it "unleashed something" he and his party can't now control, as Sykes observed, that "something" is only pseudoconservatives' last radical gasp before collapsing in suicidal heedlessness.
Just about all that remains is for Democrats to shrewdly exploit that heedlessness — which is as worrisome as Republicans' self-immolation is joyful.