MAGA 'jabronis' have failed to deliver — now they’re going down: conservative

Jonah Goldberg, the founder of conservative news site The Dispatch says the thing that drives many people nuts about the Trump administration — and the broader MAGA industrial complex — have to do with incompetence instead of villainy.

“What complicates that analysis is that the incompetence is very often the result of the villainy,” said Goldberg. “The key distinction between the two Trump terms is that in the second one, he has been determined to hire people for loyalty first and competence a distant second.

Trump’s premium on loyalty involves a willingness to lie about a stolen election and fawn “ridiculously” about Trump, and Goldberg said if anybody constrains their search criteria this way, the pool of qualified people “shrinks spectacularly” down to a wet patch imbeciles.

But, it’s worse than just that, said Goldberg. The party apparatchiks most rewarded in the Trump era come from the “slice of young people in the deepest, darkest corners” of an extremist filter bubble.

“Many of these people may be intelligent, but they have come of age in a remarkably stupid time, and being young they’ve never really known any other political reality. They think politics is about demonizing the opposition, owning the libs, posting killer memes, and turning out the part of the base that agrees with them,” Goldberg said. “Concepts like ‘governing’ or ‘state capacity’ are alien to many of them. The fact that, say, Benny Johnson is a person of considerable influence on the right is profound testimony to the fact that the new normal is incredibly dumb. And a lot of people have a normalcy bias for this idiocy.”

Take Trump’s floundering new press secretary Katie Zacharia, who Goldberg calls “the quintessential beneficiary of MAGA affirmative action.”

“A hot blonde who has trafficked in conspiracy theories and Trump worship, she got the job by curating her media hits to moments she believed Trump would be watching TV,” Goldberg said. “… She will undoubtedly get better at the job; it’s hard to see how she could get much worse. But you could make [GOP pundit] Scott Jennings do 20 shots of tequila or give him a minor lobotomy, and he’d be better out of the gate than Katie Zacharia was this week.”

The Dispatch founder warns there is “an entire MAGA industrial complex” that has risen up in the Trump era that thinks it has permanently won arguments, when it is merely following behind a trampling Trump and his Trumpism.

“They’ve pushed through open doors and doors knocked off their hinges by Trump, and think they’ve won an intellectual argument,” said Goldberg, but the months ahead are preparing to deal a massive blow to all that.

“[I]n part because their arguments for protectionism, industrial policy, and mass deportation have not yielded anything like the ‘golden age’ that was promised,” said Goldberg. “I find the idea that these guys — the self-styled intellectuals, the jabroni remora apparatchiks, and the get-rich-while-the-getting-is-good grifters, alike — will be well situated to win arguments on the right or anywhere else in the post-Trump era very implausible. Because the record of their tenure, in terms of policy and politics, won’t look like a golden age to anybody. Except maybe Benny Johnson.”