REPUBLICANS TELL THEMSELVES THAT ATTACKING ANTI-RACISTS IS ANTI-RACIST

Everyone who's paid attention to the Southern Poverty Law Center knows why it did things it's been indicted for:

... the SPLC was not paying members of [racist] groups to provide material support to their activities or out of ideological sympathy. They were cultivating informants who could provide damaging (or even basic) information about extremist groups, their members, and their operations, thereby furthering the SPLC’s goals of “dismantling” those groups. Sunlight, as Justice Louis Brandeis once said, is a potent disinfectant.

Donors knew this. News accounts informed the public about it:

In a 1996 New York Times article that was published on the eve of the first anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, for example, the newspaper reported that the SPLC had “spies” at a white nationalist convention at Lake Tahoe the preceding weekend.

The government worked with the SPLC to monitor hate groups. None of this was a secret. None of this was intended to help or enrich hate groups -- just the opposite.

But as is so often the case, Republicans know that the overwhelming majority of Americans know nothing about the SPLC one way or the other. So they've all agreed on the same lie, because if it were true, it would be really bad, and they assume most Americans will never bother to learn whether it is true:

We know why Republicans hate the SPLC:

In recent decades, mainstream conservatives have often criticized the SPLC for categorizing anti-LGBTQ organizations as “hate groups,” arguing that the label unfairly treats them as akin to the Klan. Kristen Waggoner, who runs the conservative legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, claimed in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in 2025, after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, that the SPLC’s labeling of Talking Points USA and her own organization “encourages violence.” ...

The Trump administration had already taken steps to break ties with the SPLC even before the indictments, citing its research into far-right traditionalist Catholic groups. “The Southern Poverty Law Center long ago abandoned civil rights work and turned into a partisan smear machine,” FBI Director Kash Patel wrote on Twitter last year.

They don't like the fact that the SPLC considers anti-LGBTQ hate to be hate, or anti-Muslim hate to be hate. (Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an ex-Muslim who has positioned herself as the thinking person's Muslim-basher, crows about the indictment in a piece for Bari Weiss's Free Press.)

But the message that's going out to rank-and-file Republicans in meme form is the lie they love to tell themselves: that the modern Democratic Party is exactly as racist as the party was when it aligned itself with segregation and the Klan. The memes are already multiplying:

The people who delight in these memes are the same folks who are furious if a Confederate general's statue is taken down or a military base is renamed so it doesn't honor a hero of the Confederacy. But they also tell themselves that they're the real anti-racists. And they seem to have had no trouble sustaining this doublethink for a few decades.

I don't think the GOP messaging will resonate with the general public, but it will motivate base voters who might be wavering these days. Hurting the libs is what they wanted Trump to do.

THE ARC OF HISTORY DOESN'T SEEM TO BEND TOWARD JUSTICE, BUT WE CAN HURT THE UNJUST

I found myself thinking about gerrymandering when I was reading this New York Times roundtable featuring Nadja Spiegelman, the opinion section's culture editor, and two fellow lefty thirtysomethings, streamer Hasan Piker and New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino. Their subject: shoplifing and other crimes against capitalists, up to and including CEO murder.

Nadja Spiegelman: ... Would you share your Netflix password?

Jia Tolentino: I do. With anyone.

Hasan Piker: I also do....

Spiegelman: Would you get around a paywall on an article you’re trying to read?

Piker: I do it every day on my stream.

Tolentino: I support it when people do it for my own work. I say, go off, use the Wayback Machine.

Spiegelman: Would you pirate music from an indie band?

Tolentino: Is it 2005 and I’m using LimeWire? Because yes.

Spiegelman: I feel like every millennial has at some point.

Tolentino: I mean, I feel like, fundamentally, Spotify is kind of deleterious to the musician livelihood, and I use that, but then I go to the shows....

Spiegelman: Would you dine and dash from your local diner?

Tolentino: Never. Never! Tip 35 percent. Come on.

Piker: No, I wouldn’t do that. If I saw somebody doing that, I’d probably pay for their meal.

Spiegelman: Yeah. Would you steal a book from the library?

Tolentino: Never.

Piker: No.

Spiegelman: Would you steal from the Louvre?

... Piker: I think it’s cool. We’ve got to get back to cool crimes like that: bank robberies, stealing priceless artifacts, things of that nature. I feel like that’s way cooler than the 7,000th new cryptocurrency scheme that people are engaging in.

They agree that the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was wrong, but that stealing from a Whole Foods is okay -- though as Tolentino says about the latter,

The ideal world is not one in which this continues and this increases to somehow even it out, right? The ideal world is one in which the theft from above is broken by regulatory means and/or bottom-up means, like unionization.

And as for Thompson's murder, Tolentino says:

I felt enormously frustrated in the weeks following that. I don’t know why I thought that Democrats would immediately take this up as pushing a unified message toward universal health care. I don’t know why I expected that. I don’t know why I was disappointed that it didn’t happen.

It's bizarre reading some of this in the Times, but I don't want to focus on the fact that well-remunerated media figures are boasting about stealing lemons from Whole Foods, as Tolentino does early in the conversation.

What seems significant to me is that the panel is discussing these options because actual justice seems unattainable. Neither Thompson's murder nor any other healthcare outrage has gotten us closer to universal health coverage in America, and, in fact, the Republican trifecta in Washington has taken health insurance away from many people and closed many rural hospitals. Tolentino thinks unionizing a Whole Foods is preferable to shoplifiting from one, but, as she says about the retail theft,

As an atomized individual action, it’s useless. It’s much harder to get a job and accept $17.50 an hour and then to organize your colleagues, a process that takes years and is often unsuccessful.

We might be on the verge of electing a Democratic Congress, and maybe a Democratic president after that. But will real change come from that? While discussing Thompson's murder, Piker makes a familiar argument:

Democrats are failing. Are they feckless because they’re just bad at politics, or is it something more indecent? And that their fecklessness is simply cover for their ulterior motives, which is participating in this grand design. They’re funded by the same corporate lobbyists that Republicans are funded by, especially when it comes to private health care providers, and they have a vested interest in the continuation of private health care. There is consensus in American politics, when it comes to the continuation of the private health care system, that the system must be private.

By disempowering Republicans, we might prevent terrible things from happening -- the utter elimination of the social safety net, a total war on undocumented immigrants, and so on -- but it seems as if the best we can do is prevent the arc of history from bending toward injustice as much as it does under Republican rule.

And that's what I'm thinking about as I think about Democrats' success in responding to GOP gerrymandering with gerrymandering of their own. It's not justice -- it's our injustice in response to their injustice. It's stealing from Whole Foods because Jeff Bezos is sickeningly rich in an era when we can't tax Bezos and his fellow multi-billionaires at anything close to an appropriate level, or compel him to treat his workers decently, even though we know he can easily afford to.

On voting, this is admirable:

This is expert trolling from Jamie Raskin. If Republicans are suddenly angry about losing in the gerrymandering wars, then they're welcome to join him and Dems in passing bans on gerrymandering in the next Congress, he tells me: newrepublic.com/article/2093...

[image or embed]

— Greg Sargent (@gregsargent.bsky.social) April 23, 2026 at 8:23 AM

But will this ever happen? And if it does, how much will we further discredit American democracy -- something we care about even if Republicans don't -- before we reach an anti-gerrymandering truce?

But I don't see an alternative, because we're so far from bending that arc toward justice right now.

VOTERS STILL NEED REASONS TO VOTE DEMOCRATIC

I'm pleased that Virginia's voters approved a redistricting plan that should shift four House seats to the Democrats, but I hate the fact that it's come to this. In a better country, neither the GOP gerrymandering that's taken place since 2010 nor the pro-Democratic Party gerrymandering in California and Virginia would be allowed -- but, of course, our Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that federal courts can't intervene when nakedly partisan redistricting takes place, at a time when Republicans were redistricting and Democrats were sitting on their hands, so here we are.

I'm not happy about the way the Virginia story is being reported. We often complain that reporting in the mainstream political press focuses on the odds -- which party is winning, which party is losing -- but not the stakes for ordinary Americans. The Virginia fight, by its very nature, is a story about the odds. It's about Democrats gaining an advantage in the upcoming midterms, and beating the GOP in a mid-decade redistricting battle that's been going on throughout Donald Trump's second term. It's not being discussed in terms of what Democrats would do with a majority in the House.

That's bad, because average American voters are angry at the Republican president, but also exasperated by how our political system is failing them. They've had it with Trump -- his net job approval is -17.1 points according to Real Clear Polling, -18.8 according to Nate Silver, and -22 according to G. Elliott Morris -- but the Democrats' lead on the generic House ballot is much smaller than Trump's approval deficit (5 points according to Morris, 5.9 according to Real Clear).

Middle-of-the-road voters know that they're against Trump, but they're not sure what they're for. Democrats have been winning big in off-cycle elections, but the midterms will be higher-profile, and I wonder whether Democrats will be as dominant. Do Democrats have a positive agenda? Are they even talking specifically about a negative agenda -- that is, specific ways they can keep Trump in check, or even reverse his worst policies?

At Paul Krugman's Substack, today's post concerns the abysmal consumer sentiment numbers of the second Trump era. Krugman accepts G. Ellott Morris's belief that cumulative price increases since the end of COVID are responsible for Americans' dissatisfaction with the economy. (I still believe, as I've said before, that many Americans are carrying balances on their credit cards and are exasperated by high credit card interest rates, which prevent them from paying down what they owe, but Krugman doesn't talk about that.)

Krugman notes that consumer sentiment is worse now than it was in the Biden years, even though inflation was higher under Biden. Krugman thinks Americans are more dissatisfied now because many of them really believed Trump could wave a wand and make all the post-2019 inflation go away.

I think Krugman may be right about that -- but I also wonder if many Americans just think they've tried both parties recently and both have failed them. Trump didn't just run as an opponent of Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris -- he ran as their antithesis. Biden was sleepy, Trump was vigorous. Biden and Harris were stupid and weak and naive and ineffectual, while Trump would get stuff done. Biden and Harris hated America, Trump loved it. Biden and Harris were terrible stewards of the economy, while Trump was the world's greatest businessman and dealmaker.

All that was bullshit, but I think millions of Americans believed it -- and now some of them probably think we've tried everything and nothing works.

Will those voters show up at the polls at all? I think quite a few of them won't. I think those are the ones who despise Trump but aren't on board with Democrats. I hope Democrats can give them real reasons to vote Democratic in November.

YOU DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, "GOTTA HAND IT TO" TUCKER CARLSON

Mediaite reports:

Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson apologized on Monday for campaigning for President Donald Trump, declaring that he would be “tormented” by the decision “for a long time” to come.

During an interview with his brother Buckley Carlson – a Republican Party operative who previously wrote speeches for Trump – Carlson expressed regret for having publicly supported the president, who has repeatedly attacked him in recent months.

“You wrote speeches for him, I campaigned for him. I mean, we’re implicated in this, for sure,” said Carlson to his brother on The Tucker Carlson Show. “It’s not enough to say, ‘Well I changed my mind,’ or like, ‘Oh this is bad, I’m out.’ ...”

... The former Fox News host continued, “So I do think it’s like a moment to wrestle with our own consciences. You know, we’ll be tormented by it for a long time. I will be, and I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people, and it was not intentional. That’s all I’ll say.”

Well, that's nice, but please don't offer Tucker Carlson honorary membership in the resistance. Note what else he's been saying in response to Trump's Truth Social attacks on him and other right-wing critics.

Responding to Trump’s attacks this month, Carlson remarked, “I’ve always liked Trump and still feel sorry for him, as I do for all slaves... He’s hemmed in by other forces. He can’t make his own decisions. It’s awful to watch.”

Carlson said that to Newsmax on April 10. At that time, Carlson portrayed Trump as a victim -- specifically, of Israel. The "morning note" he published on his website that day said that we're fighting a war with Iran because Israel blackmailed Trump.

Establishment media never reports this, but the Israeli government has a storied history of blackmailing U.S. presidents.

Perhaps the most jarring example occurred in the 90s, when Israel used recordings of a Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky phone sex session as leverage to pressure Clinton into releasing convicted spy Jonathan Pollard from prison. We’re not joking. That really happened.

(There are reports to that effect.)

The phone sex story is worth remembering as President Trump attempts to end the Iran War. Like many other things Israel has done, it shows that America’s “special ally” is willing to play very dirty to achieve its goals....

Based on the country’s past, its leaders are doubtlessly willing to push as hard as necessary to ensure the bloodshed continues. That could mean Clinton-style blackmail against Trump, or something far more morbid....

He is under a level of pressure that most people cannot fathom, with rabid Israel Firsters viciously harassing him any time he dares to stray even slightly from their favorite country’s agenda. Their shameless pursuit is steadfast enough to make even a man like Donald Trump go mad.... They are never grateful, they always want more, and they refuse to give the president even an inch of breathing room....

He is facing a level of pressure that is dark enough to make him abandon his campaign promises and morph into the precise kind of politician he once vowed to destroy. He would not have let that happen unless his personal stakes were really high. We hope he overcomes.

I'm no fan of the Israeli government, but while it's obvious that Benjamin Netanyahu persuaded Trump to go to war, Bibi was clearly pushing on an open door. Trump's egomania is at its peak right now, and he's casting about for projects that, in his view, will secure his legacy as the greatest and most consequential president -- the greatest and most consequential person -- who ever lived.

What's new in the Buckley Carson interview is that he and his brother portray Trump as a villain and not just a victim. Starting at about 2:02:00, Tucker implies that Trump is pursuing the war with Iran because he's a secret Jew -- yes, really.

BUCKLEY CARLSON: So, um, the enormous amount of money he got from Miriam Adelson now seems -- it seemed suspect to a lot of people at the time, but, you know, there's a lot of money in politics, to run for president requires an enorm-- I mean, Cackling Cameltoe [Kamala Harris] went through two billion dollars in four months. So, um, sure, there's an argument to be made that you get money from those who will give it to you. It's just the nature of that game. But it's still reprehensible and it's still a big question mark. Why would someone who has obvious and demonstrated allegiance to a foreign power give Donald Trump 250 million dollars while he's running for president? I mean, how is that defensible? It's really not....

TUCKER CARLSON: ... I just think, given his behavior and his demonstrated disloyalty and viciousness to previous supporters....

BUCKLEY: Yes.

TUCKER: ... why wouldn't he display the same lack of loyalty to Miriam Adelson? I mean, that's kind of the ques-- the only people he's been loyal to are the neocons and his donors. So he's attacked, you know, so he attacks Islam. Some of us stand up and say, "Probably shouldn't be attacking a religion." "Oh, you're a Muslim. Secret Muslim. You love Muslims." No, just-- I like reverence, and I don't think you should attack people on the basis of their religion. You don't attack their religion.

BUCKLEY: Yes.

TUCKER: And all these, like, evangelicals are like, "Oh, yeah, see? You're a Muslim." The next week he attacks Jesus. Okay. 'Cause it's all connected, right?

BUCKLEY: Clearly.

TUCKER: Of course.

BUCKLEY: You know, well beyond money, obviously.

TUCKER: Well, right, but the one person he's never going to attack is Rebbe Schneerson.

BUCKLEY: Yes.

TUCKER: And, uh, you know, Chabad leader, who's passed, but-- who I'm not attacking, by the way, but who was regarded as the Messiah by many of his followers. I don't think Trump should attack him, to be clear, but Trump would never attack him. That's the one Messiah he will never attack. So, like, what is that?

It's bizarre to me that Tucker fixates on Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, who was the leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement but is not revered by the majority of Jews, and is certainly seen as the Messiah only by members of that movement. But Tucker needs to elevate some Jew to the status of Jesus or Muhammad in order to make this batshit argument, so Schneerson it is.

If you open up the information panel on the YouTube page for this video, you see links to some merchandise you can buy at his site. This is the one that jumped out at me:

It's a parody of the famous logo for The Godfather, with marionette strings. It reads, "AIPAC: An offer you can't refuse."

I loathe AIPAC. I wish it had less influence over American politics. But I don't think it kills people, or tries to. The Brothers Carlson seem to blame AIPAC and/or Israel for the Trump assassination attempts (shortly after 2:01:00 in the clip):

TUCKER: But what was this? Was this always the plan?

BUCKLEY: You know, looking back after the last year and a half, it seems like it kind of was, and it's easy-- well, you could get really deep about it and say, "What was Butler? Like, how was it that he-- and Ryan Routh?" I mean, he was subject to two legitimate assassination attempts. Have we ever gotten to the bottom -- I know you've talked a lot about this, but have we ever gotten to the bottom of that?

TUCKER: I have talked a lot about it. I don't know the answer, but I know that those investigations have been stymied. Fact.

Translation: (((They))) tried to kill him twice, so he's fighting the war (((they))) want him to fight. See also "That could mean Clinton-style blackmail against Trump, or something far more morbid" in the April 10 "morning note."

Did Israel use death threats to persuade Trump to attack Iran? Nahhh. Trump attacked Iran because he's a blithering idiot.

THE SHEEPLE WHO CALL US SHEEPLE

We're living through one of the worst episodes of The Apprentice ever. We have this woman trying to nab a promotion:

The Justice Department has demanded that Wayne County, Michigan, turn over all ballots from the November 2024 election, another escalation in the Trump administration’s voting inquiries.

In a letter to the chief election official of Wayne County dated April 14, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon ... gave the county 14 days to produce the requested documents, which included ballots, ballot receipts and ballot envelopes.

Michigan's governor, secretary of state, and attorney general are resisting this effort. Much of MAGA wants Trump to choose Dillon as his new attorney general, and I'm sure Dillon knows that continually trying to prove that elections are rigged by Democrats, particularly in big cities, will make Trump more inclined to pick her.

Another competitor on this episode is doing something similar because he's trying to avoid being fired.

FBI Director Kash Patel has insisted he has the “evidence” to finally prove President Donald Trump’s long-standing claim that the 2020 election was rigged against him and hinted he could make it available this week.

Patel – who was hit by allegations of alcoholism this weekend, sparking rumors he could soon be fired – told Maria Bartiromo on Fox News’s Sunday Morning Futures: “We have the information that backs President Trump’s claim....

“Stay tuned this week,” he urged Fox viewers. “You might see a thing or two.”

As I'm reading this, I'm also reading about the latest "wellness" trend: nicotine.

A new wave of health influencers ... many of whom are aligned with the Make America Healthy Again movement, are championing nicotine as a health product. They promote nicotine patches, gums and lozenges as well as pouches, which are often filled with nicotine salt powder and give people a convenient way to consume the compound.

To these boosters, nicotine is another “natural” product that the medical establishment has unfairly demonized, like beef tallow, peptides or raw milk....

Tucker Carlson, the conservative TV host and vocal MAHA ally who sells his own brand of nicotine pouches, has called the nicotine pouch brand ZYN a “lifesaving” product that can increase productivity and “male vitality.” Mr. Carlson went so far as to say that the pouches are “like the hand of God reaching down and massaging your central nervous system.”

... Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ... has been photographed carrying a tin of ZYN....

Last month, The Atlantic's Adam Serwer wrote about Americans who seem to combine cynicism and gullibility:

Many Americans believe that vaccines are unsafe, but will jab themselves full of performance enhancers. They think seed oils cause chronic disease, but beef tallow is healthy. They’ll say you can’t trust federally insured banks, but you can trust the millionaires who want you to invest in their volatile vaporware crypto tokens. They think food additives are toxic but support an administration removing all restrictions on pumping pollutants into the air and water. They’ll insist that you can’t trust scientists, because they’re part of the conspiracy. The podcaster selling you his special creatine gummies, though? He seems trustworthy.

... Americans are ... facing a bizarre epidemic of gullibility and cynicism—gullicism, if you need a portmanteau—that is drawing people into a world of conspiracism and falsehoods, one where facts are drowned out by a cacophony of extremely loud and wrong voices.

Serwer quotes Hannah Arendt:

The philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism that “a mixture of gullibility and cynicism is prevalent in all ranks of totalitarian movements.” She argued that “the whole hierarchical structure of totalitarian movements, from naïve fellow-travelers to party members, elite formations, the intimate circle around the Leader, and the Leader himself, could be described in terms of a curiously varying mixture of gullibility and cynicism.”

But what we have in America today isn't merely a curious "mixture of gullibility and cynicism." The cynicism is the gullibility. The people who think we're "sheeple" for believing what experts tell us -- that vaccines are safe, that nicotine and raw milk are dangerous, that American elections aren't rigged -- have the same naive faith in anti-experts that they claim we have in experts.

If they were the skeptics they claim to be, they'd be as wary of anti-experts' claims as they are of experts' claims. But they aren't. They'll believe anything an anti-liberal, anti-expertise influencer tells them.

And while mainstream experts might look at new data and tell us that a drug they thought was safe has dangerous side effects or is ineffective, that rarely happens on the anti-expertise side, because none of the claims are backed by evidence. In fact, evidence that debunks their claims is often cited as a reason to believe them even more -- Look how far the so-called experts will go to cover up their lies! they say. (See, for instance, every failure to find election irregularities after the 2020 election.)

I see genuine cynicism among mainstream people -- we criticize politicians we vote for and news outlets we rely on. We think doctors are basically knowlegeable but sometimes downplay our symptoms or don't listen. We trust vaccines and other medical treatments from Big Pharma, but are wary of Big Pharma's greed.

I don't see a similar cynicism among the believers in anti-expertise. They implicitly trust Donald Trump, Fox News, right-wing podcasts, and wellness snake-oil peddlers. They trust these anti-experts even when the quack treatments don't work, the tariffs don't turbocharge the economy, the war doesn't achieve any of its goals.

The most gullible sheeple in America are the ones who apply the term "sheeple" to the rest of us.

PALANTIR, VANCE, AND THE POST-TRUMP RETURN OF THE DENIABLE DOG WHISTLE

Yesterday, for some reason, Palantir's X account tweeted out a 22-point summary of CEO and co-founder Alex Karp's 2025 book, The Technological Republic. Some of this summary reads like the work of a basement-dwelling underachiever recycling fourth-generation Reagan-era talking points ("it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet"). Some is Palantir essentially saying, Civilization won't survive unless you build an Orwellian hellscape using our technology ("The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose"; "Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime").

And then there's point #21:

21. Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures ... have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.

This is ... really racist. It's Bell Curve-level racist.

But it's not Trump-style racist or groyper-style racist. It's vague enough that it slides under many people's anti-racist radar.

I think this and not the open bigotry of Nick Fuentes and young-Republican message boards is the future of the post-Trump GOP. I addressed the subject of GOP anti-Semitism in a post last month: Despite the popularity of open anti-Semitism among young right-wingers, I believe the party will still remain friendly to right-wing Jews and Christian Zionists, while quietly sending signals to bigots reassuring them that they're welcome in the party. That's what likely 2028 presidential nominee J.D. Vance does every time he downplays the seriousness of chat-group bigotry among young Republicans and refuses to condemn bigots. Vance has also told us in multiple speeches that he believes some people just aren't Americans, even if they come to America and believe in American ideals.

America is not just an idea. We’re a particular place, with a particular people, and a particular set of beliefs and way of life....

You cannot swap 10 million people from anywhere else in the world and expect America to remain unchanged. In the same way, you can’t export our Constitution to a random country and expect it to take hold.

That’s not something to lament, but to take pride in. The Founders understood that our shared qualities—our heritage, our values, our manners and customs—confer a special and indispensable advantage.

As Josh Kovensky recently noted at Talking Points Memo, a Texas group that campaigns against Muslims says it fights on behalf of "heritage Americans." It's a term that doesn't raise the same alarms as overt racial slurs or open declarations of white superiority. I think the post-Trump GOP will focus on euphemisms like this rather than the open insults of the groypers and the message-board youth -- and get away with it.

DON'T ASSUME THAT THE REPUBLICAN PARTY WILL COLLAPSE WITHOUT A CULT LEADER

In a New York Times roundtable discussion conducted after the fall of Viktor Orban, and also after a series of failures by J.D. Vance, David French says this about a possible end to our current political era:

French: Look, political eras do end, parties do reform, so when it comes to when will this era end, I feel confident it will at some point. I just don’t know when and how much damage will be done before it does. And that’s very much an open question. And I do think in JD Vance’s failures, we’re beginning to see maybe how this political era ends. Because the question has always been: Who is getting the baton from Donald Trump? Who is the next standard bearer?

And for a long time it’s been JD Vance. JD Vance is sort of the heir apparent, and he has been faceplanting time and time and time again.

And one way to think of his phase as a leader of the Republican Party is that he’s got all of the toxicity of Trump and none of that real charisma that Trump has. It’s charisma that I don’t fully understand. It’s never landed with me. Although I will say, early on I did enjoy “The Apprentice.” But it has never really landed with me, this hold, this charisma that he has. But one thing I know is that JD Vance does not have it. He just doesn’t have it.

Michelle Cottle replies:

Cottle: No, the man can’t order a donut without alienating people.

That's true. I get it. I really do. Vance is not loved. He or Marco Rubio could lose in a blowout two years from now, the way John McCain did in 2008.

Or he could be George H.W. Bush -- also an unloved, charisma-challenged successor to a beloved figure in the GOP. Bush wasn't the spiritual leader of the right on Election Day 1988. Nevertheless, he won 40 states and a 426-111 Electoral College blowout.

What this tells us is that the conservative movement can survive an uncharismatic leader, because the leader of the Republican Party and conservative movement doesn't have to be a GOP president or presidential candidate.

During that election, arguably, the leadership of the right passed into the hands of Lee Atwater, who ran the most vicious presidential campaign in living memory. Bush took control of the conservative movement during the Gulf War, but he was unpopular by 1992 and lost his reelection bid badly. By that time, however, power on the right was passing into the hands of Rush Limbaugh and his fellow radio talkers. Soon the leadership of the party would be shared with Newt Gingrich in the House. Eventually, it would settle on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, at the headquarters of Fox News.

The point is that the GOP can survive the loss of a charismatic leader. During periods without such a leader, the party might not control all of government, but even if a Democrat is in the White House, it will have the power to make his life miserable. Gingrich's congressional majorities did that to Bill Clinton. A generation later, the Tea Party's congressional majorities did that to Barack Obama. The Republican Party did just fine without an object of cult worship in the White House.

Democrats' mission in 2028 is to engineer a repeat of 2008 rather than 1988, but Democrats don't have a Barack Obama in their likely candidate field, so they're at risk of running a candidate who's mocked and othered the way Mike Dukakis was. You might think Vance is a national laughingstock, but he beat Gavin Newsom and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez by 3 points each in an early-April survey from UMass-Lowell/YouGov.

But even after the 2008 election, the GOP regrouped, making a comeback with the help of the Murdoch media and the Koch-funded Tea Party movement. There was no Reagan then. There was no Trump. There was just lots and lots of right-wing billionaire cash and lots and lots of propaganda. After Trump, sadly, the GOP will be just fine.