GOP 'delusions of moral superiority' can’t erase MAGA’s fatal flaws: George Will

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Conservative Washington Post columnist George Will in Scottsdale, Arizona on December 1, 2022 (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)

Democrats' hopes of flipping the U.S. Senate in the 2026 midterms hit a major bump in the road when scandal-ridden Graham Platner dropped out of Maine's U.S. Senate race — a scandal that, Never Trump conservative George Will argues in his Washington Post column, underscores the Democratic Party's dysfunction. But Will also emphasizes, in his column, that Republicans are in no position to claim "moral superiority" when President Donald Trump has such a stranglehold on the GOP.

"Oblivious of their insult to America's working class," the 85-year-old Will writes in his column, "Democrats wonder why what once was their base has abandoned them. Republicans, however, should shed any post-Platner delusions of moral superiority. Ten years ago, they turned the louche star of the 'Access Hollywood' tape, and the payer of hush money to his (adult film) star paramour, into a president. Conjured from the populism of celebrity worship, he today is frighteningly out of his depth, dumbstruck that his son-in-law, in tandem a New York real estate crony, cannot pacify Iran and end the war against Ukraine."

Will himself was a Republican for much of his life, but he expressed his vehement disdain for Trump and the MAGA movement by leaving the GOP and becoming an independent. And in his July 10 column, Will is highly critical of both of the United States' two major political parties.

"The paradox of today's populism is that it empowers not 'the people,' but small, intense, compact minorities," Will argues. "They dominate the parties' candidate-selecting primaries. They are the kind who thought 'Senator Platner' was a neat idea. They are the kind who, on August 4, might give Michigan's Democratic Senate nomination to someone comfortable in the company of Holocaust deniers. But look who the Republican Party has placed a heartbeat away from Lincoln's chair."

The conservative columnist continues, "Consider Vice President JD Vance's solicitude, though inconstant, for the white supremacist, Holocaust-denying antisemite Nick Fuentes, who demonstrates that sinister infantilism is not an oxymoron. Vance is broad-minded about the narrow-minded. Fuentes luxuriated in a long, friendly session on a podcast with Vance's friend Tucker Carlson, who, speaking at the memorial service for Charlie Kirk, insinuated that Kirk's assassination could be blamed on a 'bunch of guys sitting around eating hummus' — Jews — in Jerusalem. Vance high-mindedly rejected, as intolerable 'purity tests,' demands that people like Fuentes should not have a place in the conservative movement.... Neither party seems likely to pose what should be the election-defining question for 2028 voters: Do you want the nation's unsavory recent past and exhausting present to also be its foreseeable future?"

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