No, White Women Didn't Vote for Trump

[Celerity]

48. Jonathan Chait? LOL, the hack who said that liberals should want a Trump nomination and Trump might

even be good for the country. Probably the worst single article ever written on Trump. If credibility were expressed as a temperature, Chait's wouldn't melt an ice cube.

Hard pass on whatever smug, sanctimonious pontificating (his go-to style) he has to say on this or any other subject.



Why Liberals Should Support a Trump Republican Nomination

By Jonathan Chait

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/02/why-liberals-should-support-a-trump-nomination.html

There are three reasons, in descending order of obviousness, for a liberal to earnestly and patriotically support a Trump Republican nomination. The first, of course, is that he would almost certainly lose. Trump’s ability to stay atop the polls for months, even as critics predicted his demise, has given him an aura of voodoo magic that frightens some Democrats. But whatever wizardry Trump has used to defy the laws of political gravity has worked only within his party. Among the electorate as a whole, he is massively — indeed, historically — unpopular, with unfavorable ratings now hovering around 60 percent and a public persona almost perfectly designed to repel the Obama coalition: racial minorities, single women, and college-educated whites. It would take a landscape-altering event like a recession for him to win; even that might not be enough.

Second, a Trump nomination might upend his party. The GOP is a machine that harnesses ethno-nationalistic fear — of communists, criminals, matrimonial gays, terrorists, snooty cultural elites — to win elections and then, once in office, caters to its wealthy donor base. (This is why even a social firebrand like Ted Cruz would privately assure the billionaire investor Paul Singer that he wasn’t particularly concerned about gay-marriage laws.) As its voting base has lost college-­educated voters and gained blue-collar whites, the fissure between the means by which Republicans attain power and the ends they pursue once they have it has widened.

Trump’s candidacy represents, among other things, a revolt by the Republican proletariat against its master class. That is why National Review devoted a cover editorial and 22 columns to denouncing Trump as a heretic to the conservative movement. A Trump nomination might not actually cleave the GOP in two, but it could wreak havoc. If, like me, you think the Republican Party in its current incarnation needs to be burned to the ground and rebuilt anew, Trump is the only one holding a match.

The third reason to prefer a Trump nomination: If he does win, a Trump presidency would probably wind up doing less harm to the country than a Marco Rubio or a Cruz presidency. It might even, possibly, do some good.

snip


The worst takes of the 2010s

https://theoutline.com/post/8406/worst-takes-of-the-2010s-bret-stephens-david-brooks-megan-mcardle?zd=1&zi=hlwc7nn4

Chait’s immensely confident take on why the Democrats should support a Trump nomination is a humiliating crystallization of the wrongheaded thinking that propelled him to the White House: he asserts that Trump would easily lose (wrong), that he might force the Republicans to rebuild their party (wrong), that his presidency would do less harm than a conventional Republican (wrong) and might even do some good (WRONG!!!), that Trump’s presidency might end up like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s California governorship (wrong, and based on nothing besides “they were both celebrities”).

If I was this wrong, at this level of publication, I would probably re-examine all my fundamental assumptions about how people think. Three years later, Chait is still smugly wagging his finger about how things can’t be better, reminding us that nobody who makes this much money to fuck up that badly with zero self-awareness or reflection should be taken seriously about anything.