DeSantis-stans are in a tizzy over his collapse. Jonathan Chait takes on their latest excuse — Democrats made the Republicans do it:
National Review’s Andrew McCarthy explicated this theory in more specific lunatic detail:
“The Democrats are trying to get Trump nominated because they know they would beat him decisively in November 2024. The indictments (and there will probably be two more — one from Biden DOJ special counsel Jack Smith, perhaps as early as today, and one from Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis (in the next two weeks or so), coupled with the civil cases teeing up for trial (New York attorney general Letitia James’s fraud case on October 3, and a second E. Jean Carroll sexual-assault/defamation case in mid January), are both firing up the Trump base and preventing other GOP candidates from getting any traction. That is the intention …
The Democrats’ plan has been, at this point (with 2024 voting a little over a year away), to give Republicans the impression that Trump can win. And it’s working. We’ve all seen with our own eyes how Trump has destroyed the GOP’s grip on Pennsylvania over six years, and yet people are somehow going up in a balloon about his chances to beat Biden in the state because a poll shows him in a statistical dead heat there. That is what Democrats and the media want us to think. Then we nominate him and he loses in a landslide in November, taking the Senate and House down with him.”
Today, the Journal — which previously only hinted at the notion that Jack Smith might be deliberately trying to help Trump beat DeSantis — goes all in:
“The political point to keep in mind is that this is exactly where Democrats want voters to focus: On Mr. Trump all day, every day …
Mr. Trump on trial also means his competitors for the GOP presidential nomination can barely get media attention …
All of this has Democrats elated because they want Mr. Trump to be the Republican nominee. They hope GOP voters will respond to the indictments by nominating Mr. Trump as a form of political retribution. No matter that this essentially means Republicans would be letting Democrats choose their nominee.”
That this theory is totally deranged hardly requires saying. There is no evidence any, let alone all, of the prosecutors investigating Trump have coordinated with the Biden administration or have any interest in affecting the Republican nomination. Trump’s legal woes are easily and parsimoniously explained by the fact he has habitually flouted the law throughout his career, beginning at least 50 years ago, when he and his father refused to allow Black people to rent apartments, and continuing through decades of assorted schemes and swindles.
More to the point, the Republican electorate’s attachment to Trump is explained even more easily. The party’s voters thrill to his bullying style; they believe his stream of lies and exist in an information ecosystem in which every fresh piece of evidence of Trump’s misconduct merely affirms the scope of the conspiracy against him. The fact that they wish to renominate a man whom they consider one of the greatest presidents in history, and who most of them believe legitimately won the 2020 election, follows naturally from their own beliefs. The choice was not imposed on them by the Democrats, the liberal media, or Jack Smith.
So why do the anti-anti-Trumpers insist on seeing Trump’s nomination as an externally imposed plot? One reason is a desperate attempt to convince Republicans to support DeSantis, by grabbing them by the lapels and insisting they are being duped by Democrats unless they vote for Ron.
But I think this conviction also reflects a deeper psychological need, one I’ve observed frequently since Trump appeared on the political scene. Trump initially commanded almost no support at all from the conservative movement’s intelligentsia.
Over time, his unstoppable rise produced three divergent reactions. Some conservative elites learned to embrace Trump. Others (“Never Trumpers”) recoiled from Trump and developed criticisms of the party that supported him. Between these two factions, the third, anti-anti-Trumpers, remained more or less openly disgusted with Trump but remained loyal to the party and the conservative movement even as they persisted in adoring him.
Their loyalty to the GOP and their contempt for Trump created a cognitive dissonance. Depicting Trump as a liberal creation resolves that cognitive dissonance. They could remain loyal to the party and disdainful of its cult leader because the Trump cult was the sinister result of a Democratic plot.
I think this is right. These people are suffering from severe cognitive dissonance. They are committed to a party that is supported by voters who are in thrall to hate and grievance and they can’t seem to bring themselves to admit it.
The anti-anti-Trump right’s need to explain Trump as a Democratic plot serves one additional psychological function: It excuses their own apologias on his behalf. After all, if the Democrats are to blame for Trump’s hold on the Republican Party, then the anti-anti-Trumpers are justified in refusing to defect from a Trump-controlled party. By focusing their opposition on Trump’s left-wing opponents, they are directing their main energies against the very people who are responsible for Trump’s rise in the first place.
It is almost certainly not a coincidence that the anti-anti-Trump right had returned to its belief that the Democrats are secretly boosting Trump now, at the moment when the DeSantis campaign is collapsing. Now that they are realizing they will have no respite from the ugly work of justifying a figure they loathe, they must make their inner peace with the role they have chosen.
These are the people whose only real problem with Trump is that he’s a loser. If he could gain a real majority they’d be fine with him.