It’s the people, stupid

Created
Wed, 02/08/2023 - 02:00
Updated
Wed, 02/08/2023 - 02:00
The LA Times’ Jonah Goldberg discusses the idea that Republicans are hooked on victimization, believing that they are under siege by powerful forces that are destroying their way of life: Among his core supporters, about 37% of the party according to a breakdown of the poll by the New York Times’ Nate Cohn, literally nobody thinks he committed any crimes and 94% think the party needs to rally around him against these presumably bogus charges. […]  If the Republican establishment forces were as powerful as Trump and his voters think, they’d be able to do something about it. If the Deep State were half as formidable as they think, Trump would never have been president in the first place. But large segments of the GOP suffer from the delusion that they are victims of the ruling classes and that the woke left is running everything — or will — if Trump doesn’t stop them. Even in states with Republican governors and legislative supermajorities, like Tennessee, a certain paranoia that the left could take over at any moment dominates politics. As one GOP state legislator recently said on a leaked conference call, “The left wants Tennessee so bad because if they get us, the Southeast falls and it’s ‘game over’ for the republic.” Of course, if these left-wing overlords were as fearsome as all that, the GOP would not be in total control of the Volunteer State in the first place. Similarly, if the “RINO” establishment were in charge, Trump wouldn’t be…