George F. Will: Republican self-degradation continues. Democratic self-sabotage helped.
Republicans’ decline is obvious. Let’s look at how Democrats helped reinstall Trump.
Donald Trump supporters cheer as results are announced at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida, on Tuesday. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Conducting a thorough autopsy on the cadaver of Kamala Harris’s campaign will require the scalpel of voting data not yet sharpened. Two things, however, are obvious. Democrats should have remembered the ancient axiom “be careful what you wish for.” And they should have remembered the warninga ttributedto their hero Franklin D. Roosevelt (regarding Gen. Douglas MacArthur): “Never underestimate a man who overestimates himself.”
Progressives, which most Democrats more or less are, are defined by their confidence that clever people (they have themselves in mind) can manipulate society and fine-tune its complex processes. So, many months before President Joe Biden’s disqualifying decline, which many leading Democrats had fiercely denied until it became undeniable, Democrats worked to see that Republicans selected the nominee who would be best for Biden: Donald Trump.
Republican opposition to Trump’s nomination became untenable after the August 2022 FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago (pertaining to classified documents), then his indictment in the hush money case. This was concocted by an elected, flamboyantly anti-Trump Democratic prosecutor in Manhattan, who, in a marvel akin to the multiplication of the fishes and loaves, transformed a bookkeeping misdemeanor into 34 federal felonies. Democrats, who call Trump an “existential” threat to everything, endeavored to secure him another presidential nomination.
Enough has been said about the Republican Party’s eight years of self-degradation. More needs to be said about the Democratic Party’s self-sabotage, via identity politics (race, gender), that made Harris vice president. And then, via Democratic Party high-handedness, foisted her on the nation as the party’s nominee. She did not pass through the toughening furnace of competition that reveals mettle, or its absence.
Her campaign, although short, was too long for her talents. They do not include the skill of making her synthetic centrism — her repudiation of her entire public profile prior to July — seem authentic.
A wit once asked, can the phrase “insipid beyond words” be applied to words? Harris segued from vapidity (“joy!”) to hysteria (“fascism!”), from Beethoven (“Ode to Joy,” without the music) to Wagner (“Götterdämmerung,” staged for swing states). She mocked Trump for being such a feeble president that he could not even build his border wall. Simultaneously, she intimated that in a second term the triumph of his Hitlerian will would steamroller America’s democratic institutions. Perhaps voters detected a contradiction.
And perhaps some of them thought: Before claiming to sniff Nazism on the other party (and its supporters), Harris’s party should deal with the stench of its antisemitic faction that is pro-Hamas and therefore pro-genocide.
Harris, who called Trump “weird” (an unusual, for her, understatement), leads a party hospitable to advanced thinkers who believe that men can menstruate. Speaking of weird, the Biden-Harris administration’s secretary of Health and Human Services could not be cajoled, during Senate testimony, to refer to “mothers” as other than “birthing people.” And perhaps Harris’s difficulties with male voters had something to do with her party having too many members who think that in their favored phrase, “toxic masculinity,” the adjective is actually redundant. Trump has hardly monopolized the supply of weirdness.
In October, the Obamas descended from Olympus to remind us of the meaning of “insufferable.” And to demonstrate why progressives persuade only themselves. The Obamas scolded approximately half the electorate for disappointing the Obamas, who are weary to the point of irritability by the chore of teaching their deplorable inferiors this: If you will please just vote as we Obamas consider hygienic, you will disguise your moral backwardness that requires us to stoop to instructing you.
A minimally articulate Democratic nominee would have contrasted nicely with Trump’s rhetorical style of digressions piled upon previous digressions. Instead, Harris got lost in her syntactical labyrinths. And she spent too much time belaboring two subjects: Trump’s boorishness and abortion.
The former is familiar to everyone and appealing to many. The latter issue was heated to a red glow by the Supreme Court’s June 2022 overturning of the constitutional right to abortion. But by 2024, it had cooled somewhat as various states, including some red ones, passed pro-choice laws and/or state constitutional amendments, and sentient people recognized that it is politically impossible for Congress to pass a national abortion ban.
It has been said that the future is a mirror without glass in it. But Trump’s scatterbrained approach to almost everything makes it likely that he will fail to do much of what he has vowed to do. Then, in 2028, Americans get to do this again. That is the good and bad news.
