Politics

How many times do pundits with conventional sensibilities have to be surprised before they twig to their own blindness? They were surprised by Brexit. They were surprised by Donald Trump. And now, while they’re distracted by Donald Trump’s latest tweets, they’re setting themselves up to be surprised by another nationalist miracle — the wholesale replacement of the decrepit conservative movement by a new national conservatism. The press missed the story of this week’s National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C., an event organized by Yoram Hazony and his newly created Edmund Burke Foundation. The media hive mind had decided that Trump’s tweets were the axis around which political news must revolve for about 72 hours.

Peter Thiel. Tucker Carlson. John Bolton. What’s most striking about the trio headlining the National Conservatism Conference is that none of the three has ever been elected to anything.Bolton may be national security adviser, but judging by his recent exile to Outer Mongolia and his stymied efforts to force regime change in Iran, his influence is ebbing. He may be rejoining the civilian corps soon enough.So why is a major new conference so honoring these folks? The question could be inverted. Why aren’t we hearing from over 200 Republican members of Congress? Sen. Josh Hawley, a freshman, will close Tuesday night at the NCC, but his address seems to have been a late addition.

Fred Fleitz doesn’t like me. When I last saw national security adviser John Bolton’s former chief of staff, in January, he told me my journalism was ‘crap,’ that I was ‘crap,’ and that he ‘didn’t have anything to say’ to me. Fair enough. This was the second time I’d tangled with Fleitz, a career conservative, civil servant and intelligence officer. Our first interaction came before he became Bolton’s chief of staff in 2018. Fleitz had publicly condemned my profile of his ally and mentor, Frank Gaffney. Gaffney, controversial in his own right, has since been entirely decent to me. But Fleitz is both Gaffney and Bolton’s pitbull, and seems to have no time for less than obsequious journalists.

Over eight million Americans received an unsolicited marketing email on Tuesday. But unlike the random vacation offers and buy-one-get-one-free enticements that regularly flood the nation’s inboxes, this email arrived to announce the presidential campaign of a pious billionaire. Tom Steyer had very cleverly cultivated the email list for several years on false pretenses, putting himself front-and-center of a PR initiative to impeach Donald Trump well before most in the Democratic party were willing to entertain that notion. By October 2017, Steyer had already launched his ‘Need to Impeach’ organization, which exhorted the public to sign up for his email updates or else risk collapse of the American constitutional order.

Imagine that you’re Donald Trump for a day. You wake up, you ablute, you make the usual follicular adjustments, you shoot off a few tweets in the throne room, and then you mooch down to the West Wing. Here, you face a choice. Do you dive into the fate-of-nations stuff and open the files marked ‘Rocket Man’ and ‘Iranistan’, like John Bolton has asked? Or do you spend the day compiling a guest list for a White House event on anti-conservative bias in Big Tech, at which the talking points will be as tired and old as the curly cheese sandwiches? The answer depends on which Trump-for-a-day you prefer to be.

Now here is a dubious image: Wednesday January 20, 2021. A low grey sky and persistent drizzle over Washington, as 'billionaire activist' and President-elect Tom Steyer takes the hallowed oaths of office on the steps of the Capitol building. Who, besides Steyer himself and the squad of creeping, over-remunerated sycophants who advise him, really pictures that happening? Every schmuck in America with enough money to buy the actual moon seems to have considered running for president lately. Consider Mark 'Augustus' Zuckerberg’s weird 50-state listening tour back in 2017.

The Mueller report should have been a knockout blow to anti-Trump forces who invested their hopes in the special counsel. With Robert Mueller’s finding that the Trump campaign did not conspire with Russia to steal the 2016 election and that there was no clear path to indicting the president for obstruction, the enterprise should have shuddered to a stop. Instead, those who were at first dumbfounded by the special counsel’s report have since found reasons to be buoyed by it – by its grudging tone, its sly assertions resembling proof, and its insistence that not being found guilty should not be confused with innocence.

To make a great success of a speech you need timing, what the ancient Greeks called kairos, you need an electric connection with your audience, and you need a bit of luck. President Trump, in his damp squib of a Fourth of July speech, had none of those things.  Kairos-wise, the Fourth of July was a near-miss: the sort of occasion that asks for and often gets rousing oratory. But in this case the resonance of the date was undermined by the suspicion that rather than honoring the national holiday the president was seeking to hijack it. As Elizabeth Warren commented tartly, 'If he's going to do a campaign event, then it should be paid for by his campaign contributions. It should not be paid for by the American taxpayer.

Sometimes in politics you win without actually winning. Barry Goldwater and George McGovern, two candidates who lost in blow-out landslides to Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon, are the obvious examples. Johnson won in 1964, but it was Goldwater’s campaign that indicated where American politics was heading in the next 20 years. McGovern lost in 1972, but the 'acid, amnesty, and abortion' ideology that held him back at the time became, in only slightly diluted form, the regnant social orientation of the Democratic party from his day to our own.More recently, Ron Paul lost his two campaigns for the Republican presidential nomination — in 2008 and 2012 — but won anyway.

The candidate whom Americans should be the most ironically happy is running for the Democratic presidential nomination is surely Eric Swalwell, the goofball California congressman. Of all the contenders, Swalwell best embodies the brand of performative liberal politics that has been in vogue since the election of Donald Trump. It’s at essence the sensibility of MSNBC, which focuses incessantly on Trump’s vulgar personal traits and the never-ending Russia/Mueller saga at the expense of every other issue. So too does Swalwell, which is why he has become one of MSNBC’s most frequent and cherished guests.

The Washington, DC city council is having none of it. 'Tanks, but no tanks', it tweeted at Donald Trump. Trump may shy from actual warfare but he has arranged a military extravaganza masquerading as a July 4 ceremony. While there may be no 'brand new Sherman tanks,' as Trump promised — they were retired after the Korean War — the Pentagon is furiously trying to figure out if it can safely transport the 60-ton M1 Abrams tank over Memorial Bridge without collapsing it. A thunderstorm might also cause any tanks to sink into the ground of the National Mall. It would be awkward symbolism for the man who promised to drain the swamp.

Will President Trump switch up his ticket in 2020? The Wall Street Journal editorial page, bastion of the establishment right, certainly hopes so. A little over a week ago, it called for former ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley to replace the dutiful Mike Pence as vice president. But there’s well-placed chatter in Washington that suggests the president will take a different route. Trump does indeed feel he needs VP change, but it is not Nikki Haley he is considering. It is Fox News host Tucker Carlson.The Trump 2020 campaign needs panache, not more cash. If Trump wants to make a switch – as both his predecessors, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, flirted with doing – why would he lean further into the establishment?