Stephens:
The right’s political huckster gives Al Sharpton a run for his money.
The right’s political huckster gives Al Sharpton a run for his money.
It was
probably inevitable that Donald Trump and his media munchkins would alight on
the stab-in-the-back theory to explain his probable defeat in November. The
surprise is that they are doing so with the election still three months out.
“If in
96 days Trump loses this election, I am pointing the finger directly at people
like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham and John McCain and John
Kasich and Ted Cruz,” Fox News host Sean Hannity told his radio audience last
week. “I have watched these Republicans be more harsh toward Donald Trump than
they’ve ever been in standing up to Barack Obama and his radical agenda.”
“Establishment
Republican types,” he insisted, had in effect “created Donald Trump.”
Mr.
Hannity has never made a secret of his feelings for Mr. Trump, which is the
love that dares to speak its name. But his comments were also a revelation, and
not just that it has dawned on him that the Republican nominee is likely to
lose and lose big. Like members of a cult who discover too late that their
self-proclaimed messiah is mortal after all, rationalizations are required.
Mr.
Trump has lately been road-testing one such rationalization, saying the
election will be “rigged.” Voter fraud is a reality in
American elections, but it is typical of the candidate to confuse anecdote with
data and turn allegation into conspiracy. Mr. Trump also says the media is
“rigged” against him, which is amusing coming from the beneficiary of the equivalent of $3 billion in free advertising.
Mr.
Hannity’s excuses are even more disgraceful, combining oily self-absolution
with venomous obloquy for the very conservatives who have spent the year warning
that a Trump candidacy is an epic GOP disaster that all-but guarantees Hillary
Clinton’s election. The habit of shifting blame and refusing to take
responsibility is supposed to be the curse of the underclass and its political
hucksters, but Mr. Hannity is giving Al Sharpton a run for his money.
Mr.
Hannity’s other goal is to preserve the fiction—first cultivated by Ted Cruz
and later adopted by the Trumpians—that a wan GOP “establishment” and its
“Acela corridor” voters sat on their hands while Mr. Obama traduced the
Constitution and sold us out to the enemy. “They did nothing, nothing!” the anchor fumed Thursday on his show. “All these phony votes to repeal and replace
ObamaCare, show votes so they go back and keep their power and get re-elected.”
Maybe
Mr. Hannity thinks that Messrs. Ryan and McConnell should have jumped the White
House fence and stuck a pitchfork in the president. Or that they should have
amended the Constitution to repeal Article One, Section Seven—the one that
gives the president his veto. Otherwise, it’s hard to understand the constant
lament about a do-nothing Congress except by wondering whether Mr. Hannity is
stupid or dishonest.
On
Thursday evening I opted to give him the benefit of the doubt by writing on Twitter that he was Fox’s “dumbest anchor.” He immediately proved my point by
re-tweeting me to his 1.5 million Twitter followers—an audience I could never
have reached on my own. Later, on the radio, he called me a “dumba— with his head up his a—,” demonstrating he can’t even swear
competently.
But Mr.
Hannity’s tantrum obscures the uglier side of what he is trying to do, which is
to paint targets on the GOP’s genuine Reaganites—pro-trade, pro-immigration,
pro-NATO, pro-entitlement reform—and replace them with the Party of Trump—anti-all
of the above—no matter what happens to the candidate come November.
Who
might help lead this Unglorious Revolution of the crass, clueless and
shoulder-chipped? Those who can make themselves rich by shouting and hearing
echoes of themselves even as the GOP loses one presidential election after
another.
This is
the reason I’ve consistently argued
that the only hope for a conservative restoration is a blowout Hillary Clinton
victory, held in check by a Republican majority in Congress. If Mr. Trump loses
the election narrowly, the stab-in-the-back thesis will have a patina of credibility
that he might have won had it not been for the opposition of people like me.
But a McGovern-style defeat makes that argument impossible to sustain except
among the most cretinous. We can count on Mr. Hannity for that.
***
Last
week, I appeared on Fareed Zakaria’s CNN show opposite a Trump supporter named
Emily Miller. At the end of the show, I said Americans deserve a president who
can speak grammatical English. Ms. Miller retorted that it was “snobby” of me
to say so.
There
was a time when the conservative movement was led by the likes of Bill Buckley
and Irving Kristol and Bob Bartley, men of ideas who invested the Republican
Party with intellectual seriousness. Today’s GOP is on the road to
self-immolation, thanks in part to the veneration of ignorance typified by Ms.
Miller and Mr. Hannity. As conservatives go through their pre- and
post-mortems, they should think about the damage that such veneration can do.
