A Response to J Mart
Jonathan Martin writes that the best thing for Republicans is a Trump loss. He's wrong.
I like Jonathan Martin. I went to his wedding. He is a good guy who married a good woman in Betsy Fischer.
J Mart and I disagree on one big thing. He wants Trump to lose. I want Trump to win.
He is a columnist now for Politico but he used to be a reporter for the New York Times and he has been around Washington for a long time. Maybe not as long as me, but longer than most reporters who do most of the reporting on Capitol Hill.
If you follow his Twitter feed, it is pretty clear that he strongly dislikes the Republican standard-bearer. That is not an unusual position of columnists and reporters, especially those who have strong ties to the Washington establishment.
The Establishment dislikes Donald Trump. Big time. They have disliked him since the very day he came down that elevator. And J Mart is channeling that dislike in real and substantive ways.
His latest column, which you can find here https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/09/04/kamala-harris-republicans-after-trump-00177194, says that the Republican Party would be better off if Trump lost this election. He quotes many unnamed Republicans who undoubtedly believe this to be the case, and he obviously believes it himself.
But I don’t think the GOP would be better off if we lose this election. In fact, I think not only would the Republican Party be worse off, but the country would be worse off.
I also believe that if Kamala Harris wins the election, she would most likely win a second term and then the country would be in really, really big trouble. And forget about the Supreme Court. It would be lost for a generation.
I think the better argument is that Democrats would be better off if Kamala loses.
They would be better off because they would regain the House in two years (because Republicans will inevitably overreach) and will have a much better Senate cycle, with few vulnerable up for election and plenty of opportunities to take back the upper chamber.
They would also have some excellent candidates who would run in an open primary, including Josh Shapiro, Wes Moore, Gretchen Whitmer, and Gavin Newsom (as much as I dislike him).
They could finally dispense with the Obama shadow that has overhung the party, the reliance on DEI over competence, the reliance of Marxist ideology over the pro-business centrism of Bill Clinton, the support of Iran over Israel.
The other thing that a winning Trump campaign would do is restore faith in our electoral system. Most Republicans believe that the Democrats stole the election of 2020 and they don’t believe that the “establishment” will allow Trump to win in 2024. This distrust of the electoral process is not some fantasy dreamed up by Alex Jones. It was created by all kinds of curious incidents in critical swing states that haven’t been thoroughly explained.
J Mart says that flushing Trump out of the party would help it because the party has only won the popular election once since Ronald Reagan. But that fact is the precise reason why Trump is so important to totally revamping the party and making it one that appeals to more people than the narrow band of country club white males who used to run this country,.
Trump has changed the party utterly from one that held Bill Buckley and his Brahmin outlook to be its North Star to one that gains inspiration from the perspiration of the common man. Yes, the GOP is now the working class party, a party that transcends race and religion, to one that seeks to return power, control and prosperity to America’s middle class of shopkeepers and shop repairmen.
Telling the party faithful to turn their back on Trump is like telling 19th Century Democrats to turn their back on Andrew Jackson. Sounds good in theory, but impossible in practice.
Because in America, at least the America where I was raised, it is the people and not the Washington establishment that decides who their leaders are. If Trump should win the election, it would be the case of the working man telling the upper crust that you are going to like our form of democracy and you are going like it good and hard, as H.L. Mencken might say.
Need to see you more in the arena, John, as in on the air. How can we make this happen? Great piece.