It's nearly time for the media's tedious "The Year in Review" features, in which we're cruelly reminded of every event we just spent months trying to forget. The year has been distressing enough, especially for those of us who otherwise thrive on presidential politics.
In that category, the most distressful development has been the sagging, pathetic, downright execrable re-debut of Donald Trump. At the year's beginning, sensible Democrats had high hopes that he would sweep his party's nomination, thus dooming Republicans' White House aspirations. But it's all falling apart.
If I were hired to design a Trump campaign with the primordial objective of sabotaging it, I could do no better than he has already done.
I would first advise that he spend the year talking ... and talking ... almost exclusively about the election he lost — a guaranteed yawner within two months. I would then suggest that he locate and endorse other real losers all around the country, just to upset the easily winnable midterms. I would stress the sublime importance of delivering the most lackluster presidential campaign announcement in the last hundred years.
And then I'd tell Trump that he simply must invite a couple of exuberant antisemites to dinner! This advice, one would think, would be the final solution for the perfect destruction of a presidential campaign, which the candidate would promptly recognize and thus sternly decline.
Not so, however, for our man Trump — the very model of pluck, vision, and a political death wish. And with it, Democratic hopes of the undeniably worst imaginable, Republican presidential nominee.
A last touch? I'd counsel Trump's spokeswoman, Liz Harrington, to go on a national broadcast to insist that "Trump is not going to shy away from meeting with Kanye West" — a psychotic, black Adolf Eichmann — and to further insist that any criticism of his supping with white supremacist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes is "absolutely ridiculous."
What can be salvaged from Trump's latest buffoonery? His party's response. The NY Times' Jonathan Weisman writes that "not all Republican leaders have spoken out," which is a curious way of observing that scarcely any Republican leaders have spoken out. Weisman cites Sens. Bill Cassidy and Susan Collins as having named Trump in their criticisms; The Washington Post's Karen Tumulty found two others — Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson and Mike Pence.
Perhaps there were others, but by and large Republican commentary on Trump's white-hooded dinner party somehow neglected to name the host, the Grand Wizard of all things racist — because, of course, Republican pols rely on their racist base to keep them in office. Hence mum's the word when it comes to the party's champion racist. Democrats should be thankful that the opposition persists in its enabling acts.
Trump and his fellow white supremacists may believe there were "very fine people on both sides" in Charlottesville, Va., but one thing no one can say honestly about American politics is that both parties embrace them.
One other uplifting aspect of the GOP's Trumpian self-sabotage will be the speakership of The Honorable Kevin McCarthy, as it were. Among his first official acts will be the reinstatement to House committees of the Also Honorable Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar, both of whom came out of the antisemitic closet long ago. Indeed, they even hobnob with the likes of Mr. Fuentes. God bless Kevin McCarthy, who can always be counted on to do the really dumbest unthinkable thing.
This morning I read an op-ed by Patti Davis, née Reagan, in which she offered an unspeakable recommendation. "What if there was a collective pledge among responsible news organizations to take Donald Trump off the front pages, to not talk about him every single day? He would huff and puff and try to blow the house down, but no one would be paying attention."
Precisely. His absence is also precisely the best thing that could happen to the Republican Party, the worst party in American history. Every conscientious citizen should want Donald Trump as front-page news once every day and twice on Sunday. He's the GOP's swaggering time bomb, a poison pill, an odious blackguard of pez-dispensing voter disaffection. And I love the guy for it.
Against all odds, I shall keep rooting for our man Trump.