Conservative Front Group Issues Their Demands

No Labels -- the Ratcheting-The-Overton-Window-Ever-Rightward-By-Blathering-About-Centrism patent medicine show that has been soaking up money from credulous idiots since 2010 (and about which I have been writing since two days after they launched)  -- began finally setting off alarms among some of those credulous idiots this year when it decided to play presidential kingmaker by threatening to use its $70M, dark-money slush fund to run a third party ticket in enough swing states to siphon off enough votes to virtually guarantee the re-election of Donald Trump.  

 And now they have named their price for taking their gun out of the mouth of Lady Liberty.

From (sigh) Politico:

No Labels likely to back off third party bid if DeSantis emerges as GOP nominee

This is one of the moves I've been waiting for.  It pairs perfectly with David Brooks' burying his razor-in-the-apple halfway down his sad bastard, coulda-woulda-shoulda, love-ya-but-not-now-my-wife-might-find-out column about No Labels, that begins thusly:

I’ve long been a fan of No Labels, the organization that works to reduce political polarization and Washington gridlock. I spoke at its launch event in 2010. I’ve admired the Problem Solvers Caucus, a No Labels-inspired effort that brings Republicans and Democrats in Congress together to craft bipartisan legislation. Last September, when No Labels wanted to go public with its latest project, I was happy to use my column to introduce it to people.

And continues thusly:

Personally, I have a lot of sympathy for the No Labels effort. I’ve longed for a party that would revive the moderate strain in American politics exemplified by Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, John McCain and contemporaries like Michael Bloomberg.

But concludes, in Brooks' sad bastard way, that now is not the time for a third party challenger that would almost certainly put Trump back in the Oval Office.  

Because Trump is unacceptable.

So far so good.

But then we find out that, for Brooks, Trump and Trump alone is unacceptable.  But the smarter, more cold-blooded, more cynical fascist to Trump's immediate right named Ron DeSantis?

If the 2024 election was Bernie Sanders versus Ron DeSantis, I’d support the No Labels effort 1,000 percent. An independent candidate would bring this moderate tradition into the 21st century, and if Sanders or DeSantis ended up winning, his agenda might not be my cup of tea, but I could live with him.

I am deliberately (and, I must say, heroically) skipping over all of Brooks' noxious, standard-issue Beltway drivel about "moderation" and "polarization" because I've already written (no kidding)  thousands of posts about that very subject.

Instead, let's focus on the fact that Sanders isn't running for president, but DeSantis is, and strip-down Brooks' claptrap accordingly:

...if ... DeSantis ended up winning, his agenda might not be my cup of tea, but I could live with him.

This leads straight to the Big Lie that Never Trumpers have been telling themselves and everyone else from the very beginning about the relationship between Trump and the GOP, and especially the GOP base.   So let's talk about that for a minute.

Never Trumpers need the Trump origin story to go something like this.

Ahem.

Up until 2016, the GOP was doing great.  They had (in David Brooks' own words) "detoxified" their "brand" and were now a perfectly normal political party.  The base were noble, Burke-quotin', balanced-budget-lovin' yeomen laborers.  Salt of the Earth!  And Republican elected officials were sharp-eyed superpatriots who were on the verge of stamping out the dirty commie menace from the Left and our  Kenyan Usurper leader once and for all. There was nothin' but upside -- nothin' blue sky and peach pie ahead.  

Then, suddenly and without warning, Donald Trump showed up and unleashed some hitherto unknown form of dark magic, which somehow managed to instantly ensorcelle those tens of millions of noble, Burke-quotin', balanced-budget-lovin' yeomen laborers and turn them into a zombie army of bigots and imbeciles who actually believed what they were watching on Fox News.  And if Fox wouldn't deliver the goods, they'd lurch on over the OAN or Newsmax or Stormfront Action News.  

And -- horrors! -- the power of the mighty sorcery that Trump wielded also extended to Republican officeholders, turning those sharp-eyed superpatriots who could quote chapter and verse from the Bible and Bill Bennett's Book of Virtues into slavering myrmidons who climbed all over each other to see who could be the most obsequious Trump asskisser.

It is important to understand why, in the Never Trumper's Trump origin story, Trump's takeover of their political party almost overnight must be explained away as a unique and inexplicable work of dark sorcery, which means that Trump must be a unique and irreproducible threat.  Because any other explanation for the ease with which Trump took the nomination and earned the dog-loyalty of the GOP base involves looking past 2016 and into the decades that preceded him.  Decades during which these  Never Trumpers were just, standard-issue, scumbag Republicans.  Decades during which  -- despite repeated warnings that they were setting loose terrible forces that they could never control --  these Never Trumpers eagerly fell to the task of building a compliant, reprogrammable political party of bigots and imbeciles that would turn out to be the perfect feeding ground for a monster like Trump.

And that's not 2023 Driftglass saying that.

That's 2015 Driftglass saying that, just 36 hours after Trump oozed down the Golden Escalator:

...As I wrote a few years ago,the brain-caste of the GOP spent 40 years and billions of dollars carefully breeding an army of reliably angry, paranoid, racists chumps. And they have been so successful at completely re-engineering the Right's ideological digestive system that they can no longer process any information which does not come to them in the form of Fox-approved Benghaaaazi goo.

In other words, in order to win elections and rake in vast fortunes, the Conservative brain caste has painstakingly created the perfect feeding-ground for con men and demagogues like Trump, the louder and more bombastic the better. And from David Brooks and the Wall Street Journal and "Meet the Press", to Ann Coulter and the Washington Free Beacon and the Breitbart Collective, in one way or another, virtually everyone in the media makes bank by flattering Conservative meatheads and pandering to their delusions.

Walk into any Liberal diner in Murrica -- especially Liberal diners in deep, red areas -- and ask "When did the GOP lose their fucking minds?" and you'll likely get a variety of answers from "Fucking Goldwater" to "Fucking Nixon and his Southern Strategy" to "Fucking Lee Atwater" to "The rise of fucking Hate Radio" to "Newt Fucking Gingrich".  But no Liberal anywhere (who is not on the payroll of, say, The Bulwark or the Niskanen Center") would tell you "Yeah, it all happened magically overnight in 2016".  

Because that is patently absurd.

And yet that's basically the explicit or implied answer you will get from virtually every Never Trumper.

So why is their bullshit fairy tale about Donald Trump's Chaos Magic now the received wisdom of the Beltway media, while our clear, fact-based "Jesus, Mary and William Shirer, all you have to do is fucking look at the trajectory the GOP has been on for the past 50 years" explanation nowhere to be found?

Simple. 

They're on teevee every goddamn day and we're not.

That's the difference between all those Liberals who dare to remember the Before Time and all those Never Trumpers who refuse to.  They're enjoying hundreds of millions of dollars in free publicity by the Beltway media for their various media enterprises, and while we're standing on the metaphorical street corner every day, speaking truth to the empty air and passing the hat the buy groceries and gas.  

And what have the Never Trumpers -- who have been wrong about everything since forever -- done with this massive boon they have been handed?   

Brick by brick, they and their allies in the Beltway media have been building a big, thick wall across 2016, behind which they have concretized their ridiculous Trump origin myth into the established and accepted History of Our Times.  Week after week they are offered up by the Beltway media as savvy experts who must be deferred to because Dems are idiots and only the unique, penetrating genius of, say, the Lincoln Project can save us from [checks notes] the hellbeast they created and then failed to stop so utterly that they got run out of their own party. 

And if Trump is a uniquely existential threat, then prying him off the neck of the GOP like a carbuncle should solve the problem, right?  

Right?

Then all of those Never Trumpers who still clearly loathe us Liberals but who have been been dependent on largess of what little remains of the "Liberal" media can get on with the exciting work of  remaking the GOP exactly as it was before Trump. 

The way it was back in 2015.  

This is why Charlie "I Will Never Forgive Chris Christie" Sykes has begun the Christie reputation rehab project.  

It's why Brooks would lay out in print (albeit in the most weasel-worded way possible) that, yeah, he'd be cool with a President DeSantis.  

It's why Never Trumpers are endlessly reading goat entrails and parsing poll numbers to figure out what percentage of the GOP base and which GOP office holders they can rope in to help put them back in the driver's seat...and how much heinous, unforgivable shit they'll have forgive to get what they want: a return to power with their record of shitting on Liberals more-or-less still intact. 

And it's why the Conservative front ground called "No Labels" is willing to lay down its arms if the GOP is willing to clear the field for Ron DeSantis.  

Except, of course, all of this is exactly backwards.

Trump is not the problem.   The voters that elected him are the problem. And those voters will not accept a candidate who is not  built from at least 85% authorized Trump components.  They want Trump's cruelty and giddy malice, but without the Tweets, and they will not accept a candidate who does not reflect and amplify the decades of madness that the GOP and Conservative media pumped into their skulls.  They will not accept a candidate who doesn't understand that the poison that comes vomiting out of Newsmax every day is gospel, and Owning The Libs is a mandate from the Almighty.   

Yes, Trump is a unique existential threat the same way that the atomic bomb was a uniquely terrifying threat...until that asshole Edward Teller invented the hydrogen bomb.  

Trump isn't Hell.  Trump is the anteroom of Hell.  

And if you peek through the door in the main hall you can see row after row of Trump wannabes ready and eager to incinerate the Constitution if that'll make Liberals cry.  

I Am The Liberal Media