Never-Trumper rejoices as MAGA 'takes huge bites' of you-know-what

“I can’t deny it: I’m enjoying the tumult on the right,” said Dispatch co-founder Jonah Goldberg, referring to MAGA’s civil war as factions come to terms with Trump finally turning his lies upon them.

“Let’s start with poor J.D. Vance,” said Goldberg, a former senior editor at the National Review. “He has spent the last few years grounding his support for Donald Trump in Trump’s wise rejection of ‘forever wars,’ ‘stupid wars,’ ‘regime change wars,’ etc. Now, he’s stuck trying to explain why this war on Iran is not — and cannot possibly be — any of the above without looking exactly like what he is: a guy who reinvented himself as a Trump vassal for political power.”

Goldberg recalls with glee Vance telling the Wall Street Journal that he gave his support to Trump “because I know he won’t recklessly send Americans to fight wars overseas.” In fact, the op-ed title of Vance’s article was “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars.”

Now Goldberg concedes that a non-negotiable attribute required of every vice president is a “willing appetite for … eating a healthy portion” of biological waste “365 days a year.” Currently, for example, Goldberg said Vance is spinning so hard for reporters trying to justify his change of heart that he's tying himself in knots. But the net effect is that he spends his days taking “huge bites of the ‘that’s not-Shinola!’ sandwich Trump is serving.”

The problem for MAGA, said Goldberg, is that normal presidents have somewhat coherent worldviews and ideological commitments for their supporters to follow, but Trump has no such qualities. So, Vance and Trump’s other defenders “end up holding the bag.”

“I’ve been making the point that Trump offers no intellectually and ideologically coherent safe harbor for the intellectuals and politicians who attach themselves to him for a decade now,” said Goldberg, who is also a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “Love him because he’ll lower taxes? Great — now explain how tariffs aren’t taxes. Support him because he’ll end lawfare, fight corruption, revere the Constitution, resist foreign adventures? Bahahaha. Look at you now.”

Some MAGA stalwarts appear to be belatedly catching on to what Trump has been feeding them all these years, said Goldberg, citing right-wing entertainer Megyn Kelly confessingto her audience that “I’ve got serious doubts about what we’re doing [in Iraq.]

“I support the president. I voted for the president. I campaigned for the president, as you know. But that doesn’t mean — being a conservative or being a Trump supporter or being part of MAGA does not mean you have to accept another Middle East war without questions,” said Kelly after nearly a decade of supporting Trump. “And anybody who tells you that can s---- it.”