Republicanism

Having been saddled by everyone involved with the largest portion of blame for Tuesday's election disappointment, Donald Trump's descent into the pit of despair takes exactly the form you could expect: a series of Mean Girls rants about everyone more popular than he is in the Republican Party. There has been much talk over the years about how there's a Good Trump and a Bad Trump, but the truth about our 45th president is that, just like the Marvel Cinematic Universe's version of the Hulk, he's always angry — he just controls it better when times are good. Now that times are bad — or as bad as they can be when you have millions more Republicans voting than Democrats and you just dislodged Nancy Pelosi from power — he is reverting to his true form. It ain't pretty.

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. As Donald Trump strides toward his fourth year in the White House, his enemies have yet to answer the most basic questions of 2016. Why is Trump president? Why not a nice Republican like Mitt Romney or Jeb Bush? Two maps tell the tale. The first is the obvious one, the map of states whose electoral votes Trump won, a map that includes states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that no other Republican presidential aspirant had won since the 1980s. But the second map is even more important — it shows not why Trump won but why the Republican party was doomed to lose without Trump and Trumpism. It’s the map of George W.

Here’s a riddle for you, and if you solve it, the Democrats will nominate you for president: how does one candidate carry both Cambridge, Mass. and Luzerne County, Penn.? Sure, the former’s a cake-walk. Hillary Clinton could stand in the middle of Harvard Square and shoot somebody, and she wouldn’t lose any voters from the People’s Republic of Taxachusetts. But the latter, which Obama won in 2012, went to Trump in a whopping 25-point swing. This was the big story in 2016: the defection of blue-collar voters to the Republican party. Now, as the 2020 election draws nigh, Democratic office-holders in ‘Purple America’ are feeling the heat. Speaking to Politico at the National Governors Association’s winter meeting, Gov.