In a sign that the right — some of its professional inhabitants, anyway — has soured on Trump, conservative blogger and National Review Online contributor Jim Geraghty molests, manhandles, and damn near sodomizes the nation's chief executive.
He opens with this punch in the gut: "The editors of National Review are exhausted with presidential tweets, from asking whether Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell or Chinese leader Chairman Xi is the bigger enemy, to 'hereby ordering' private companies to look for alternatives to operations in China. (If Fed chairman Powell is indeed an enemy of the United States, then whatever fool appointed him to that position should resign in disgrace.)"
He later condenses his post's theme, writing simply that "A lot of people … are getting tired of [Trump's] daily drama" — i.e., conservative people whom Geraghty cites.
For instance as panelists, Ben Domenech (publisher of The Federalist) and Chris Stirewalt (Fox News' digital politics editor) were in agreement with Fox's anchor Bret Baier in defending the network's polling, which has been gruesome for Trump, and in denying that the network had "changed," as the president recently whined.
"Fox has not changed," said Baier, remarking on the (vague) distinction between the news and opinion sides. And "we do polls. Our latest poll had the Democratic candidates head to head, several of them ahead of President Trump, and this poll tracks exactly … the RealClearPolitics average of polls — even a little the other way."
The conservative Washington Examiner's Byron York, notes Geraghty, tweeted on 21 Aug.: "The president should really stop talking about loyalty and disloyalty and who he thinks is loyal and who he thinks is disloyal" — meaning, of course, Jews who vote Democratic.
The day before York's tweet, even Mollie Hemingway, a Fox News contributor and, wrote Politico in 2017, "a reliably pro-Trump commentator," tweeted somewhat critically of Trump: "Good argument against Trump is that he ever hired people like Scaramucci or Omarosa." (In her more usual Trumpmanic way, Mollie went on: "NeverTrump[ers] and the corporate anti-Trump media" are emotional, not rational, and both stand in "limitless opposition" to what others know to be the president's limitless inanity and ineptitude.)
And Rod Dreher, a blogger for the American Conservative (which, admittedly, has never been keen on Trump), wrote a week ago that "I reacted much more strongly to President Trump’s idiotic insult to our NATO ally Denmark yesterday than I normally do to whatever embarrassing thing Trump has done. There aren’t negative superlatives strong enough to capture the childishness and stupidity of [this] American president."
But there, the "lots of conservatives" ended — and here, I don't mean to imply that Geraghty could perchance name and quote every Trump-disgruntled rightist. Yet even if he could, one must remember that these are professional conservatives, most of whom actually give some thought to the horrors of Trump; and that professionalism segregates them from the politically amateurish mass of Trump's 80 percent of rank-and-file Republicans who just don't give a cognitive damn about the presidential atrocity that is Trump.
You know, I think Trump actually could shoot somebody on Fifth or Pennsylvania Avenue and still get nearly 40 percent of the vote in 2020. He may have a few thoughtful conservatives as critics, but is base is just unyieldingly boneheaded.