National Affairs editor Yuval Levin penned a column for the conservative National Review on Thursday talking about just how "awful" President Donald Trump's presidency is and has been particularly for Republicans.
It doesn't appear the president has learned his lesson, claiming on TruthSocial that had he really been on the ballot the GOP would never have lost this big. Instead, Trump told his voters to pretend he was on the ballot and that's exactly what happened, said Levin.
What has sent the GOP down with him is how much they've "mostly enabled it all ... and so has earned the rebuke it got, too," Levin wrote. Any gains that the GOP thought it made have been overwhelmed by impulsiveness, corruption and a lack of governing purpose.
Trump's tariffs, his trade war with Canada and the war with Iran are all examples of Trump ventures that he entered into willy-nilly and without a plan for how to get out. Levin argued that Trump has treated national crises like failed business projects, where he starts something dramatic, ignores the consequences and then moves on to the next spectacle.
While the GOP postmortem begins, Levin ignores the exit polls and the data showing exactly why Americans voted the way they did. Instead, he thinks it's about "exhausted" Americans who are done with Trump’s chaos, pettiness, nicknames, grievances and unseriousness.
"Many Americans who had a lot of tolerance for him and once found his antics entertaining are tired of it all. His silly nicknames and his petty whining haven’t gotten any dumber — they were always this dumb," Levin claimed. "But many people who thought they were funny have grown sick of them, and Trump’s sheer unseriousness now strikes some of his former supporters as inadequate to the office and the moment."
Exit polls showed that 90 percent of voters cast ballots based on political corruption and 89 percent said their vote was influenced by the cost of living. The Iran war was a major factor, coming in at 74 percent, and the brutality of immigration enforcement was at 73 percent.
He thinks the 2016 rise of MAGA was about former President Barack Obama being too "liberal," not a repudiation of politics as usual. After all, Obama finished his presidency in January 2017 with an approval rating around 57 percent to 59 percent, according to Gallup. An SRS poll from four months ago confirms that number still stands at 57 percent.
Levin quotes himself from two years ago when he wrote: "This is the trap that our 21st-century presidents have tended to fall into. They win elections because their opponents were unpopular, and then — imagining the public has endorsed their party activists’ agenda — they use the power of their office to make themselves unpopular."
He argues that the lesson is never learned by either party and he doubts Democrats will learn anything from the new victory. Levin wrote, "The party remains exceedingly unpopular, and its politicians didn’t even run on anything in particular in this election."
Levin closes with his own assessment that Republicans must change significantly and the biggest problem is Trump.
"And the way forward for Republicans must begin by putting Trump behind them and asking themselves what they have to offer the country in his wake," he said.
