More Excellent News for John McCain

I don't know if Colorado booting Trump off the ballot (if it stands) is a good thing or a bad thing. I suppose I lean slightly toward the former, on the basis that more courts recognizing the seriousness of what he did might tend to make non-MAGA-diehards pay attention...but that could be wishful thinking. But I am extremely skeptical of the instant conventional wisdom, which can be summed up in the title of today's piece by Jonathan Last: The Colorado Decision: Heads Trump Wins. Tails America Loses.

It's actually a very good piece, worth quoting at length:

Have you ever noticed how, whenever Trump does something terrible, there is always an argument that holding him accountable can only help him?

You can’t impeach him in 2020, because it’ll just make him stronger.

You can’t impeach him in 2021, because you’ll turn him into a martyr.

You can’t raid Mar-a-Lago to take back classified documents, because you’ll rile up his base.

You can’t prosecute him for crimes X, Y, and Z, because it’ll make Republican voters love him more.

There is a strange, self-limiting, helplessness to that thinking: A wicked man does immoral and illegal things—and society’s reaction is to say that we must indulge his depredations, because if we tried to hold him accountable then he would become even worse.

And, while he doesn't mention Murc's Law, he clearly understands the concept:

I want to close by noting yet another asymmetry in American life.

Here is a partial list of things we are often told must be done in order to prevent Americans from choosing to elect a manifestly unfit, aspiring authoritarian:

• National Democrats should stop talking about certain issues that matter to them. 
• Congressional Democrats should have crossed the aisle and saved Kevin McCarthy. 
• Local Democrats should stop governing in ways which their liberal communities prefer so as to avoid offending Republicans in other states. 
• The Manhattan district attorney should not have brought an indictment against Donald Trump. 
• Privately-held corporations should conduct themselves so as to be pleasing to white, working-class voters and should abstain from marketing themselves in ways that might appeal to disfavored groups. 
• Joe Biden should pass even more bipartisan legislation. 
• Joe Biden should not have tried to forgive federal student loans. 
• Joe Biden should replace his vice president, even though she has conducted herself honorably. 
• The Colorado Supreme Court should have allowed Donald Trump to be on the state’s presidential ballot. 

It is (we are told) because of actions like these that tens of millions of Americans will vote to make Donald Trump president 11 months from now.

Note what is not on that list: Anything that is imperative for Republican elected officials or Republican voters to do in order to cause the electorate to reject Trump.

It is simply assumed that those people lack agency. That they are automata who can only be expected to do one thing: that they will make their decisions about the future of the United States purely in reaction to inputs from their betters.

They simply have to vote for Trump because the girl at Starbucks has a nose ring and a name tag with pronouns. Or because Disney put a gay kid in Strange World. Or because the Colorado Supreme Court issued a ruling they neither liked nor read.

This is a profoundly paternalistic, bigoted view of Republicans.

But also, maybe it’s true?

I'll just leave you with a comment from Matt Gertz that sums it all up nicely:

"It's a bad idea to keep Trump off the ballot because he might respond by leading his supporters in a violent insurrection" strikes me as both a reasonable point and very much a statement of the problem.

— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) December 20, 2023