Win It Back, the Club for Growth's super PAC, has spent a couple million dollars in South Carolina and twice that in Iowa on television ads aiming to weaken Trump's primary support. The results have been Nietzschean; what hasn't killed him has only made him stronger.
The PAC blasted at Republican voters a veritable fusillade of podium-pounding sermonettes against the frontrunner, whom the Club regards as insufficiently conservative. The ads attacked Trump on his "handling of the pandemic, promotion of vaccines, praise of Dr. Fauci, insane government spending, failure to build the wall, recent attacks on pro-life legislation, refusal to fight woke issues, openness to gun control, and many" other issues.
"All attempts to undermine his conservative credentials ... were ineffective," wrote the PAC yesterday in a memo to donors. No matter how "objectionable" most Republicans might find Trump's position on any key topic, "they find a way to rationalize and dismiss it." An ad criticizing Trump on his pandemic-handling, which the PAC considered its best creative effort, actually improved "Trump’s ballot support by four points," wrote the exasperated folks at Win It Back.
One subject on which the conservative group has aired nothing: Jan. 6. The PAC produced an ad showing "Trump as an instigator of political violence or as a threat to democracy," but the tested focus group was favorable to it. Like the happily received pandemic ad, Win It Back "found that the ... [J6] ad helped Mr. Trump with the Republican voters."
The PAC's finding aligned with the sentiment of a recent David Frum tweet: "Republican primary voters don't care about policy. What they want is a proven record of violent sedition, sexual assault, and financial fraud." In an online comment, I responded that Frum's tweet "is polemical but perfectly accurate. For years now I — and many others — have referred to Trump's base as neofascist, as Trump is, because he [successfully] peddles 'violent sedition' to the rabble, just as Hitler did."
This assessment, I added, is "not hyperbole" and "it's not hysterical. It's reality." Going Frum one better in the polemics department, I also added that "I once wondered what it would have been like to live in Germany, 1923-1933. I no longer have to wonder." Granted, that assessment does contain some hyperbole and more than a little hysteria. But is it justified as a reasonable polemic?
In 2021 we witnessed an American "putsch" roughly equal in number — about 2,000 seditionists — to Hitler's 1923 misadventure. Jan. 6 was a day once unthinkable, even unimaginable, in its violence. God's chosen, exceptional people just don't do that sort of thing. Since then, physical violence has come at a minimum; the nation has suffered no Brownshirts ghoulishly stalking the streets like the savage tribes they once were.
But with that potential atop the empirical violence of Jan. 6, I offer this bookkeeping of barbarity from The Bulwark's Mona Charen: "In the first year of Trump’ tenure, threats against members of Congress quadrupled from fewer than 900 to 3,930. Threats continued to rise throughout the Trump presidency, more than doubling by 2020. After January 6th, the Capitol Police estimated that there were more than 10,000 threats of violence or death against members."
These are the threats against members of Congress only. Absent is the numerical terror being leveled at state and federal prosecutors, judges, the FBI, political commentators, straight-news journalists, media organs, election workers — virtually anyone actively or merely perceivedly opposed to the great and powerful don, small-d intentional. Tens of thousands more threats, for sure.
I'm skeptical that they'll materialize into rampant physical violence before November 2024. The mob seems calmly persuaded that the Orange Blight has the election wrapped up. Should "it" lose the election, however — and there's a good chance he will — all skeptical bets are off. Given Trump's inevitable and even louder squalls of rigged election! and voter fraud! the odds are at least as good that we'll see Brownshirted, J6-like violence throughout the republic.
Living with just that anticipatory thought makes life seem like Germanic life, circa 1930. After years of Trump and Trumpism I already feel much as German author Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen did, in Diary of a Man in Despair, 1936:
"I suffocate in the knowledge that I am a prisoner of a horde of vicious apes, and I rack my brains over the perpetual riddle of how this same people which so jealously watched over its rights a few years ago can have sunk into this stupor, in which it not only allows itself to be dominated by the street-corner idlers of yesterday, but actually, height of shame, is incapable any longer of perceiving its shame for the shame that it is."
Emphasis original. Reality, ours.