As Julie Kelly established in these pages last week, when stripped of its Oz-like bluster, Conservative, Inc. is just Bill Kristol behind a curtain pulling levers. The cynical purpose is to create a mirage that scares people into providing tribute to the great and powerful punditocracy.
The “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” protests that followed Kelly’s report that Kristol cribbed off the Steele dossier in July 2016 to conjure Putin’s disembodied head surrounded by fire and smoke were certainly telling, eh?
This week, for the 71st time in Trump’s presidency, the sneering smart people in Washington who are threatened by a popular movement that overruled their veto and put him in office, declared once again that it is “finally over.”
As in the campy serial cliffhanger of yore, they have the hero strapped to a conveyor belt moving slowly toward a buzzsaw. He will not be able to escape his own lawyer’s guilty plea for paying the porn star, they think.
One wonders what comes next in their fantasy. Maybe 62 million Trump voters subscribing to The Weekly Standard to read 4,000-word essays about Montenegro’s crucial but underappreciated role in NATO?
Jeb!
A Basic Morality
In March, I covered this Stormy business in The Observer and at Business Insider, before I found a home at American Greatness. I won’t rehash the primary points except to restate the conclusion: Nobody cares.
Donald Trump never claimed to be a paragon of morality. His supporters understood that early in the courtship. People who are not highly paid political consultants cannot afford to abandon relationships over the venal failures of those with whom they associate.
They would lose their best salesman, their favorite mechanic, and the guy who cuts their grass.
Americans believe, as I pointed out in March and as David Horowitz reiterated here last week, that a basic morality undergirds Trump’s politics. He may be unfaithful in other relationships, but in dealings with his supporters he has been heroically true.
He sticks to his promises under attacks that men with greater reputations for virtue have fled.
None of that stopped Conservative, Inc. from taking to Twitter on Tuesday after Cohen’s plea to issue overwrought Ward Cleaver scolds. Bret Stephens glowered over his bifocals to tweet:
I’ve been skeptical about the wisdom and merit of impeachment. Cohen’s guilty plea changes that. The president is clearly guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors. He should resign his office or be impeached and removed from office. https://t.co/N23Z6vlfZa
— Bret Stephens (@BretStephensNYT) August 21, 2018
Stephens followed that tweet with a fire-and-brimstone column on Wednesday, inserting himself as a guardian of election propriety who is highly offended, blah, blah, blah.
The unspoken hope is that maybe now the Beav will stop all this Trump nonsense and get back to his chores. Trump supporters, though, are not children. Nor are they stupid. They know that the Stormy Daniels brouhaha is at most administrative campaign finance arcana dressed in a G-string with big breasts.
If there was regulatory ambiguity over whether Obama received an in-kind payment, he would be given the option retroactively to cut a check from his campaign, no questions asked.
His campaign was fined by the Federal Election Commission for more serious violations, and nobody tried to cast the administrative proceedings as criminal.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it, NeverTrump impeachment pimps.
The Only People Who Matter
Let’s face it, every network newscast, every fake poll, every George Clooney rant, is an unreported contribution to the Democratic Party, a front organization for in-kind contributions from media, academia, and pop culture that trick people into supporting it.
To cast this less-than-a-parking-ticket incident as criminal is worthy of the eye rolls it is receiving in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia—throw in Wisconsin; i.e., the only people who really matter at the moment in electoral politics.
The Stormy stuff reveals only how much the NeverTrumpers and their friends in the media do not understand the Trump phenomenon. They always treated his supporters as cartoon caricatures: camo-wearing rubes who love God, guns, and who would vote to ban dancing at the prom given half a chance.
The camo-wearing and loving God and guns part is pretty accurate. But the outliers who want to ban dancing really do not make up all that much of the Trump coalition.
One of them happens to be attorney general, sure, who dithers at the Justice Department trying to stop dope-smoking commie hippies on behalf of the troops in Vietnam.
The rest of our prickly sticklers are as content as church elders at a bake sale and will tolerate the president’s peccadillos if he keeps delivering Gorsuches and Kavanaughs.
What Will They Think of Next?
As night follows day, the 71st grounds for impeachment will pass in the narrative arc of the Trump presidency just as the 70 before it did, when high crime number 72 appears sometime next week.
It could be anything. Think, oh I don’t know, the president’s scorecard at Trump National being compared to unmasked satellite footage showing his failure to take a two-stroke penalty for his obviously out-of-bounds ball on the 15th hole.
John Brennan could break the story on CNN, assuring Wolf Blitzer that he doesn’t need a damn security clearance to get CIA satellite footage of the president’s golf game. Blitzer could agree wholeheartedly, noting FISA’s failure directly to address the issue.
Bret Stephens then could immediately tweet that Robert Mueller should investigate whether there was a $2 Nassau on the round, which would make it an in-kind campaign contribution.
That’s as good a guess as any as to what #TheResistance will try next.
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