Well, who can blame him? The dude gets up in the morning and falls hard on his big red ass—on a floor which is freezing, by the way—all because National Review dude Charles Cooke told his National Review brethren that they should believe the New York Times!
Yeah, I know you don’t believe me, so I’ll say it again: National Review dude Charles Cooke told his National Review brethren that they should believe the New York Times!
In his article, which bears the hitherto inconceivable title “Maggie Haberman Is Right, Charlie not only endorses but independently confirms (in spades) NYT chick Maggie Haberman’s can you believe this tweet that “Trump has been telling a number of people he’s in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated by August”.
According to Charlie, Maggie ain’t just a-whistlin’ Dixie:
I can attest, from speaking to an array of different sources, that Donald Trump does indeed believe quite genuinely that he — along with former senators David Perdue and Martha McSally — will be “reinstated” to office this summer after “audits” of the 2020 elections in Arizona, Georgia, and a handful of other states have been completed. I can attest, too, that Trump is trying hard to recruit journalists, politicians, and other influential figures to promulgate this belief — not as a fundraising tool or an infantile bit of trolling or a trial balloon, but as a fact.
Cooke unloads on Trump in paragraph after paragraph, trying to explain to his fellow “conservatives” that, this time, Trump really is, well, insane—as opposed to all those other times, when it really was, you know, fake news. Cooke naturally engages in a little whataboutism, quoting stupid things that Hillary and Jimmy Carter said about Trump’s 2016 “win”, which was not a steal, but also did not reflect the will of the American people, since the painfully uncharismatic Clinton still beat Trump by almost three million votes. And, in a final, clumsy effort at ass-covering, Cooke asserts that “To acknowledge that Trump is living in a fantasy world does not wipe out his achievements or render anything else he has said incorrect.” Yeah, like this is the first lie that Donald Trump has ever told. Uh-huh, Charlie, uh-huh.
So what Charlie is saying is to his compadres is “Okay, you’re free to believe that up until now Donald was, well, pretty much perfect, but now, somehow, he’s gone completely off the rails.” Because who could have seen this coming? Who?
Afterwords
Anguished Never-Trumper Charlie Sykes, whom I haven’t always cared for, has an extended, anguished take on all this, telling you more, probably, about the horror that the Republican Party has become than you want to know, but if you want details, well, Charlie’s got ‘em.
