Ezra Klein: The Republican Party’s NPC Problem – And Ours

I enjoyed this.

I encourage our lurkers to thumb through our archives.

It would be an understatement to say that I hated the first Trump administration.

The reason why I hated it is because I had supported Trump in 2015/2016 because I saw him as a blunt instrument for getting rid of the “True Cons” who used run the GOP. This did not happen in his first term. Mike Pence and Reince Preibus staffed the administration with their own people.

In Trump’s first term, Donald Trump was like an island in his own administration and didn’t know what he was doing. Congress was controlled by Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan. The executive branch was full of “True Con” resistance fighters like Miles Taylor who were trying to sabotage Trump’s agenda. Trump spent his political capital pushing their unpopular agenda and endorsing people like Mitt Romney.

Looking back on it, I remember it as a time of countless own goals – there was, for example, John McCain torpedoing the reconciliation bill that would have ended Obamacare, Rod Rosenstein hobbling the administration with the Mueller probe, the refusal of the Republican Congress to even fund the border wall, Trump walking back his plan to withdraw troops from Syria in deference to Senate Republicans, the Doug Jones fiasco and finally when they voted to impeach him after January 6.

Trump 1.0 was essentially a coalition government. He shared power with the Mike Pences of the world. They spent their political capital on tax cuts. They passed Tim Scott’s stupid First Step Act. Trump deferred to people like General Mark Milley who refused to put down the George Floyd riots. Trump tore up NAFTA only to replace it with USMCA. The Platinum Plan in the 2020 campaign was another signature conservative consultant mistake. As a result, Trump spent his entire first term politically underwater. He bled political support as his base deflated. Republicans lost the midterms. Trump lost the 2020 election. This whole space blackpilled on L after L and some activists never recovered from it.

Gradually though, I watched the course correction as it unfolded, which led to the second coming of Trump. I watched people like Jeff Flake and Ben Sasse leave office. I watched Mitch McConnell’s allies like Pat Toomey, Richard Burr and Rob Portman retire one by one. I watched Liz Cheney get humiliated and lose her seat in Congress in Wyoming. Adam Kinzinger left Congress to appear on CNN panels. Trump began to systematically destroy the people who had voted for impeachment.

Elon’s radicalization and money changed the social media landscape and Trump’s reliance on the Republican donor class. It changed the willingness of Republican senators and congressmen to stand up to him. The base of the party radicalized after COVID and the George Floyd riots. Finally, Trump surrounded himself with a team of loyalists who spent four years preparing for their return to power.

Ezra Klein is lamenting the fact that all of these people – the Liz Cheneys, the Miles Taylors, the John McCains – aren’t around this time to f*** up and derail Trump’s momentum. Politically, the Republican Congress has fallen in line behind the president. This is a terrible development for people like Ezra Klein who want Trump to take his shot, “thermostatic politics” to kick in and his popularity to collapse like Biden in six months which is the seesaw cycle we have been living through for twenty years and which would restore Democrats to power in 2026 and 2028. Democrats don’t have their usual allies to bail them out. All they have left to work with is Mitch McConnell in his wheelchair voting against RFK Jr.