President Donald Trump is changing America for the worse, a prominent scholar argued for The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday — and both of America’s major parties are failing to rise to the challenge.
Comparing both parties to a legendarily inept baseball team, the 1962 New York Mets, both the Democrats and Republicans are utterly failing to effectively counter Trump, wrote the Brookings Institute’s William A. Galston for The Wall Street Journal. First he took on the Democratic Party, which recently released an autopsy of their failed 2024 presidential campaign after delaying it for months.
“As months dragged by, rumors spread that the report was being suppressed because it would embarrass Kamala Harris and Joe Biden and expose internal party divides over the Israel-Hamas war and transgender issues,” Galston wrote, citing DNC chairman Ken Martin’s attempts to manage the PR around the report. “The chairman in December announced that the report wouldn’t be released, which did nothing to dampen these suspicions.”
After CNN published a draft report last week, Galston described Martin’s product as “incredibly bad—disorganized, poorly written, nearly devoid of sources and substance. It was an embarrassment, most of all to Mr. Martin. A serious autopsy would have involved representatives of the entire party, not just a part-time consultant obsessed with mechanics, media and money. It would have explored the decision to nominate Ms. Harris without discussion or competition after Mr. Biden withdrew. It would have examined the vulnerabilities that the Trump campaign exploited. It would have asked why Hispanics, independents and young adults—especially men—deserted the party in droves. And it would have clarified the strategic choices Democrats face.”
Galston then turned to his critique of the MAGAfied Republicans.
“The other inept team is the Republicans, whose leader seems fixated on architecture and revenge,” Galston wrote. “After President Trump requested $220 million to secure his new East Wing ballroom, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced a $1.776 billion fund to compensate people who claim to have been subjected to unjust treatment by the government—likely including rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.”
Quoting the former Majority Leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) who said “So the nation’s top law-enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops? Utterly stupid, morally wrong—take your pick,” Galston called out the Republicans for being ineffectual in stopping Trump’s blatant corruption.
“Fresh from helping purge Sen. Bill Cassidy in Louisiana’s primary election, Mr. Trump endorsed Attorney General Ken Paxton over Sen. John Cornyn in this week’s Texas Republican runoff primary,” Galston wrote. “Mr. Cornyn, a judicious conservative, enjoys the respect of his colleagues. Mr. Paxton, in the words of a longtime aide, ‘was Trump before Trump was Trump.’ That was seemingly enough for the president—even though if the scandal-ridden Mr. Paxton wins the primary, it could jeopardize the Senate seat. (The polls hadn’t closed at press time.)”
He summed up his critique by quoting McConnell’s colleague, Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), who said in response to Trump’s endorsement of Paxton “I don’t understand. He is an ethically challenged individual.”
According to Galston, “Her professed confusion calls to mind the old political trope of the piano player in a brothel who claims to have no idea what’s going on upstairs. Surely Ms. Collins has noticed that being ‘ethically challenged’ is no obstacle to office in Mr. Trump’s America.”
Galston is not the only intellectual to blast congressional obsequiousness to Trump on the pages of The Wall Street Journal.
“There’s a time and place for every fight, and choosing the best battleground isn’t one of the impatient Donald Trump’s strong suits,” wrote The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley A. Strassel last week, in response to the congressional GOP’s attempts to cope with Trump’s $1 billion ballroom and $1.8 billion slush fund. “See his demand that a Republican Congress dedicate its recent weeks to a damaging side debate over ‘security funding’ for his proposed East Wing rebuild. The party urgently needs to move beyond what is now a three-month circus over lapsed funding for the Department of Homeland Security and pivot to more-positive midterm messages. It is instead bottled up in a debate over a 90,000-square-foot sliver of White House real estate.”
Strassel continued, “The joke is that this isn’t really even about the money. It’s about helping the White House overcome a lawsuit. But the means to that end are proving controversial within the GOP, even as they have provided Democrats an opening to brand their opponents ‘ballroom Republicans.’”