Conservative mangles 'stupid and pernicious' Trump for giving Dems Congress

Conservative Dispatch staff writer Nick Catoggio lined up a legion of lies that will inevitably be the undoing of the Republican Party in November.

In addition to pushing a tariff policy that China leaders themselves praised as damaging to the U.S., Catoggio said Trump “bungled the task of taming the dragon about as thoroughly as it can be bungled, most recently by burning through weapons stockpiles in Iran that were supposed to keep China honest in the Far East. And the Chinese have noticed.”

Oh, but there’s so much more, gripes Catoggio, referring to Trump’s recent claim on Fox News of considering making Venezuela the 51^st state because of its oil reserves. Trump probably wasn’t entirely serious, but the claim contradicts everything about his MAGA promise to prevent: “importing the third world” to the U.S if he turns “a country of almost 30 million Hispanics into a U.S. state, particularly a country that’s famously impoverished,” said Catoggio.

But Catoggio said “practically everywhere you look over the past 16 months, you’ll find Trump breaking one of the promises that got him elected,” with Trump’s Iran war possibly being “the most consequential ideological betrayal by any president in my lifetime, poisonous to everyone except his core base,” said Catoggio.

“If you’re one of the three or four people in America who took Trump at his word when he promised to end the weaponization of government, you’ve been rewarded by getting to watch him turn the Justice Department into a menagerie of vengeful hacks and henchmen whose headquarters now bears his photo over the front entrance,” Catoggio said. “If you believed him when he and his party complained about the so-called Biden crime family, you’ve had to endure the Trump clan turning the presidency into a full-time influence racket worth many billions of dollars in plain sight.”

On the economy, Catoggio said: “If you’re the sort of chump who set aside your qualms about January 6 and the president’s basic fitness for office and voted to reelect him because you hoped he’d stabilize your family’s finances, his negligence toward the cost of living is the ultimate electoral bait-and-switch.

But a president “who knows he can break (almost) every promise he’s made and still retain the support of at least 85 percent of his base, no questions asked, is a president who’s going to do stupid and pernicious things that will inevitably alienate most of the rest of the electorate,” said Catoggio. “So when Democrats take back the House this fall — and they probably will despite the GOP’s best ‘hacking’ efforts, as the generic ballot has begun to widen in their favor and now looks downright gruesome in some polling — don’t blame the president or his cronies in government for the party’s failure.”

Instead, Catoggio said “blame the enablers, the right-wing rank-and-file.”

“They’ve been the problem since June 2015, and they’ll continue to be the problem after Trump is gone.