Who Controls The Narrative?

1,000 years ago there are a few of us out there, a very few, who warned that, if you give a Never Trumper a cookie -- and do so without caveats, without asking for genuine atonement in return, without some acknowledgement that the Left had been right all along -- that sooner or later that Never Trumper would own your cookie factory.

That we on the Left -- who really had been right about the Right all along -- would lose control of the narrative history of our times and those who have been wrong all along would set themselves up as the arbiters of what was true and what wasn't.   What had happened, and what hadn't.  What was to be done about it, and what needn't.

Took a lot of shit for that opinion.

Well, let's take a look at an article from The Guardian today about the state of Republican food fight over who is going to lose to Trump in the primaries.  It begins thusly:

For Asa Hutchinson, former governor of Arkansas, there were boos and chants of “Trump! Trump!”. For Francis Suarez, mayor of Miami, there were jeers and cries of “Traitor!” And perhaps most tellingly, there was no Florida governor Ron DeSantis at all

And goes on to recount how much the base luuuurves them some Donald Trump and everyone else is cold eggs and liver on a soggy paper plate. 

Events and numbers like this are cause for sleepless nights among those Republican leaders and donors desperate to believe it would be different this time. The Never Trump forces bet heavily on DeSantis as the coming man and the premise that Trump’s campaign would collapse under the weight of myriad legal problems.

But six months away from the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses, none of it seems to be working. DeSantis’s campaign is flailing and leaving some with buyers’ remorse...

This is perfectly in-line with the Liberal analysis of the GOP going back decades.  That the base are reprogrammable meatbags who have been given a taste of the pure smack injected directly into their skulls and they ain't going back to methadone and sermons about balances budgets. 

For anyone interested in history, I was writing 15 years ago about the dynamic of the GOP base as junkies who hated Clinton because he was -- 

...mere addiction maintenance delivered in measured doses under adult supervision: all policy-wonk that wasn’t cut with that industrial-waste-grade bigoted, psychotic bloodlust that gives Conservatism its wild, freebasing edge. Clinton was methadone, and for the hardcore lifestyle junkie, that shit is for babies.

-- and loved Dubya because:

Dubya was meth with a ketamine chaser delivered hammer-and-anvil directly to the lizard brain.

Dubya was 40 million Pig People tired of the hard, fussy job of being a tolerant, powerful democracy finally once-and-for-all blowing America’s family inheritance on an eight-year, blood-drunk bender.

Dubya was the United States crawling through dumpsters at our national soul’s midnight, killing anything that moves, licking out the contents of random baggies, hoping the little white flakes clinging to the plastic is crank and not rat poison, and waking up the next day -- that horrible, horrible sun-also-rises morning after -- broke and twitchy, arguing over what more they can sell off to keep the party going and who they can blame for their gone-to-shit lives.

Now multiply the GOP's loathing of Clinton by 100 and you arrive at the white-hot, unhinged, racist hatred of Obama.  Another calm, rational, open-hearted policy-wonk.

Then multiply the GOP's sunk-irretrievably-into-their-addiction racist backlash madness by 100 and you arrive at their frothing, dog-loyal love of Trump. 

Back when all your never Never Trump allies were just regular, vicious, Clinton-hating, Bush-loving, Obama-loathing Republicans...a few of us on the Left were were making ourselves pariahs by using our tiny platforms to point out, over and over again, where this insane trajectory must inevitably lead. 

So when I got wind that The Guardian was doing a story about how shocked donors were waking up to discover that the Republican Party was full of Republicans...I waited by my phone for them call.  Or, if not me, then surely Charlie Pierce, right?  Or Joan Walsh.  Or Digby.  Or Rick Perlstein.  Or Bob Cesca.  Or Nicole Sandler.  Or anyone on-staff at Crooks & Liars, including my amazing wife.  

But our bells remained unrung because now the Never Trumpers own the cookie factory.  They own the narrative.  So when The Guardian needed perspective on WTF was going on with the Party of Personal Responsibility they called...

Bulwark employee and MSNBC employee, Tim Miller:

“They’re experiencing a brutal wake-up call that the party is not interested in hearing critiques of Trump,” said Tim Miller, who was communications director for Jeb Bush’s 2016 campaign. 

Also cited, Trump-regime dead-ender Miles Taylor who is currently having his reputation rehabilitated and his book simultaneously promoted on four different Never Trumper podcasts

In 2018, the White House whistleblower Miles Taylor wrote an anonymous column in the New York Times under the headline “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration”...

Also cited...

Former Republican operatives in groups such as the Lincoln Project and Republican Accountability Project welcomed Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election and hoped...

Also...

 Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman, said: “They were all hoping that Trump’s legal troubles would kick him to the side of the road but every indictment or potential indictment just strengthens him among the base...

Also...

Just as in 2016, Trump is also benefiting from a divided opposition. Michael Steele, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, suggests that Never Trumpers coalesced around DeSantis too soon.

And when direct quotes are not available --

Donors ignored the warnings of longtime political operatives who said DeSantis was “undercooked”, had a glass jaw and lacked the personal warmth and charisma required for retail politics...

-- they link to previous Guardian articles such as: 

‘They will bend the knee’: Lincoln project cofounder cautions against dismissing Trump

Rick Wilson, a veteran Republican strategist, suggests the ex-president still holds sway despite multiple crises

And the one nominal Liberal they contact?  No Labels charter member and Bulwark podcast housebroken "center/left" guy, Bill Galston.  

Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington and former policy adviser to Bill Clinton, said: “There’s still a chance that the steady drip, drip, drip of indictments and other problems will open up a larger portion of the party to an alternative because they see him as increasingly risky, as someone who might well not only be indicted but convicted of a major crime, or more than one, during the presidential campaign.

And so it goes.

Which is almighty discouraging.  

But when I get discouraged, I find a little B.B. King can take the edge off.  So...

Burn The Lifeboats!