Conservative Nick Catoggio does not appear to expect big things from American voters after the debauchery of the Trump administration is finally over.
“It will be good if, as I say, the right concludes from November’s results that the electoral cost of unapologetic degeneracy is too steep to continue promoting candidates who suffer from it,” said Catoggio. But don’t get your hopes up.
Citing former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Catoggio is confident a deplorable Republican attack ad in Ohio and vice president’s defense of it proves the party is hopeless in regaining its soul. “For the last decade, our party has been infected by a corrupted moral center,” Christie said. “Vance’s acceptance of this campaign ad only breathes life into the disease we should be seeking to cure.”
The Trump movement inside the Republican Party is a dark and slithery thing not “known for rationality,” Catoggio warned.
“Rationally, the right-wing base should want to hedge against Trump’s unpopularity in 2028 by prioritizing electability and inoffensiveness in its congressional candidates,” said Catoggio. “… My guess is that Republican voters will do the opposite.”
They’ll blame any elective misfortune on a working-class base that doesn’t show up for midterms, he said
“They’ll also have spent two years listening to Tucker Carlson and other J.D. Vance apologists insist that real Trumpism has never been tried,” he said. “The president, a warmonger, betrayed ‘America First’ postliberalism by attacking Iran, and his party paid for it …, they’ll hear.”
The path back to power, they’ll argue will inevitably require nominating a “committed isolationist like Vance for president” and more like him down ballot in Senate and House races in safe-ish R+10 districts where the GOP is likely to win regardless of what’s on the ballot.
“As pleasant as it is to imagine scores of House Republicans being wiped out this year, and as much as they deserve that fate, the remorseless moral logic of 10 years of right-wing postliberalism is that things will get worse,” Catoggio said. “I’m open to the possibility that the right will regain its moral bearings someday, but within one election cycle of a drubbing at the polls? Not bloody likely. So if you’re excited for a ‘fresh start’ for the GOP and its House candidates in 2028, I’ll tell you the same thing I’ve said about practically every political impulse Republicans have had since 2016: Be careful what you wish for.”
Catoggio then referenced Trump’s Wednesday Truth Social post, in which he blasted Democrat Amy Acton as a liar for claiming she was sexually abused as a child — a crime for which her stepfather was indicted by a grand jury before going on the run.
“Can you guess whether Trump endorses that smear or condemns it? If not, here’s a hint: Postliberalism is a movement of sociopaths, by sociopaths, for sociopaths,” said Catoggio.