As you probably know, George Will likes Trump as much any man would like a double orchiectomy. For this reason he very much likes Nikki Haley, although in a first-rate understatement he concedes her hopes are near hopeless: her candidacy "might ultimately be unavailing." Still, Will's grateful that she's pushing against the monstrous plague that is Trump.
He also resents the coifed contagion's efforts to make Haley seem a terminated irrelevance; that is, his swaggering, generalissimo-like pronunciamentos that virtually all Republicans are already behind him. And his Iowa and New Hampshire wins proved it. Reality differed, notes Will. Among Iowa's registered Republicans, Trump won 8% of them. In N.H. he won only a handful of points above a majority.
Trump boasts of such trivial victories because his shtick is that he's always a winner and never a loser. This also differs from known reality, if, that is, one thinks about it, which his followers don't but Will did.
He's lost the popular vote on his two shots at it, he lost the White House, the Senate and the House. And how's this for a classic line? "In numerous court challenges to the 2020 election results, he has compiled 20 fewer wins than the famously futile 1899 Cleveland Spiders baseball team, which went 20-134."
Now it's on to South Carolina, perhaps Ms. Haley's last stand. Her angels are already closing their wallets, and losing S.C. to Trump by 40 points, as one recent poll suggested, would send them fleeing.
That aside, what can South Carolinians expect from another Trump White House? asks Will. "Higher taxes at home," for one. Trump is eager to impose a 10% tariff on all imports, and "it is simply beyond his poor powers of comprehension to understand that tariffs ... are taxes paid by American consumers and producers."
Hardest hit would be the lower-income group — a group likely to vote for incomprehension. What's more, with its sea ports S.C. is a robust importing and exporting state — retaliatory tariffs will come — thus Trump's tax would cost its residents jobs.
Foreign affairs aren't affairs that Americans seem to care about much, something the lower readership of my foreign-events posts can confirm. At any rate, Will addresses Ukraine as an issue that South Carolinians should care about in relation to Trump.
He "obsesses about the cost of U.S. assistance (a rounding error on the federal budget)" while being "oblivious of the fact that almost 90 percent of U.S. dollars devoted to arming Ukraine are spent in the United States." Naturally his cost obsession is as counterfeit as his other obsessions, given that he "blithely presided over an $8.4 trillion increase in the national debt."
I have spotlighted Will's column on S.C. for its dovetailing with my post of yesterday, "Who benefits from this?" This, being Trump and Trumpism. South Carolinians would not be alone in receiving nothing but self-harm in exchange for helping a solipsistic sociopath regain the White House. They'd never admit it, but if they ever sobered up, they'd regret it.