By Issues & Insights Editorial Board | December 12, 2024
We are not in the habit of reading Jonathan Chait’s bloated regurgitations, but the headline on his latest column in The Atlantic — “The Bizarre Normalcy of Trump 2.0” — intrigued us because only a leftist could describe the orderly and upbeat transition that is happening right now as “bizarre.”
To Chait, what’s bizarre is that people on the left aren’t freaking out more because “what is actually happening in the capital is, by any rational standard, disturbing.”
A prime example, Chait says, is Trump’s appointment of Michael Anton as director of policy planning at the State Department, which, he says, highlights “the banal ubiquity of authoritarian thinking in the Trumpified Republican Party.”
What he says next is one of the purest, most unadulterated forms of projection we’ve ever come across.
Here’s what he writes about Anton:
Anton is best known for an essay published eight years ago called ‘The Flight 93 Election.’ In it, he argued that conservatives should support Trump, despite their serious reservations about his character, because another Democratic term in office would amount to the death of the republic. (Hillary Clinton, like the 9/11 hijackers, would steer the country toward the equivalent of a fiery demise.) At the time, Anton’s argument stood out for its existential tone and hysterical life-and-death metaphor. Now his logic — that permitting Democrats to win a single national election is tantamount to national suicide, the prevention of which justifies any measures, legal or otherwise — is a required belief for service in the power ministries. Once an oddball, Anton is just another Trump bureaucrat who subscribes to the party’s rule-or-perish ideology. (emphasis added)
Say what?
Chait is a guy who for eight years has been issuing that exact warning: that permitting Donald Trump to win a single national election is tantamount to national suicide.
In March 2016, he wrote for New York magazine that “Donald Trump Poses an Unprecedented Threat to American Democracy.”
Unprecedented.
Chait went so far as to argue that even if Trump failed to get the nomination, he “is spreading poisons throughout the system that could linger beyond his defeat.”
In early 2022, Chait wrote that electing Gov. Ron DeSantis – whose star was rising at the time – would kill the country, but more slowly. “Trump poses a greater danger of triggering an immediate constitutional crisis,” he wrote, “while DeSantis is more likely to methodically strangle democracy through a series of illiberal Orbanist steps like he has modeled in Florida. I suppose the threat of a quick death is more dire than the threat of a slow one, but I have little confidence in projecting out these comparative dangers.”
In July of this year, Chait attacked Democrats for not sufficiently recognizing the unprecedented danger of Trump returning to the White House.
It seems obvious to me that the threat of a second Donald Trump presidential term, with its authoritarian inclinations unchecked, poses a civic emergency that supersedes any other normal political consideration. (emphasis added)
Chait went on to complain that Democrats who were sticking with Joe Biden “decided to save their own skins at the expense of their country.”
After the second assassination attempt on Trump in September, Chait wrote — in a column titled “Trump Threatens Democracy. Saying So Is Not Incitement” – “Donald Trump is a threat to democracy. That was true before an assassination attempt was foiled at his golf course Sunday, and it remains true after.”
We also looked around but could not find anywhere where Chait complained about Joe Biden’s “rule-or-perish ideology” when he said: “There is one existential threat: it’s Donald Trump. I mean this from the bottom of my heart, Trump is a threat to this nation.”
Looks aside, Chait isn’t some oddball. He’s just another overpaid pundit who subscribes to his party’s rule-or-perish ideology.
Issues & Insights was founded by seasoned journalists of the IBD Editorials page. Our mission is to provide timely, fact-based reporting and deeply informed analysis on the news of the day – without fear or favor.
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