Gerard Baker: BULLSHIT ARTIST OF THE DAY

My interpretation of what is going on here: Gerard Baker saying “I am anti-Trump too!”, in the hope of shifting to firmer ground on which he can argue that he and his friends should get to keep all their ill-gotten gains from the Trump tax cuts. After all, aren’t the only things that matter (a) that, (b) making liberals sad and (c ) keeping non-”white” non-male non-elderly people in their place?: So how come Google Maps now calls the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario the Gulf of and Lake America, but does not yet show New Mexico relabled as “New America” anyway? We have the absolutely remarkable, in so many ways: Gerard Baker: Help—I Feel a Bad Case of TDS Coming On : ‘A signal achievement [of Trump] has been getting control of the border and removing some of the people who have no legal right to be here. But even with this proper and overwhelmingly popular policy, the administration has managed to harm the country and the GOP’s standing. The unnecessarily cruel and indiscriminate approach has caught many in its dragnet who shouldn’t be treated that way and is fundamentally un-American. The political effect has been to devastate support for the GOP among Hispanics, more than reversing the gains Mr. Trump had made with the fastest-growing ethnic population in the country… In what sense can this possibly be a “signal achievement” if it is “cruel and indiscriminate… caught many… who shouldn’t be treated that way… fundamentally un-American?” Baker’s closing: The looming Republican calamity… will be the result of presidential hubris, vanity, recklessness and the wider party’s abdication of accountability. Instead of seizing an unrivaled opportunity to shift America off the path of progressive endangerment, the GOP risks handing it back to the Democrats and their own obsessions. It’s enough to give anyone a case of Trump derangement syndrome. Given Baker’s earlier—I am not sure what to call it? admission?—the fact that it is “the wider party’s” rather than my own “abdication of responsibility” is an interesting attempted evasion to see at this late date. What was the earlier “admission” you ask? This: Jan. 6… removed any doubt about the threat Donald Trump might pose to our constitutional norms and rules, [but] I thought the institutions of the U.S. would… constrain his worst instincts and intentions. And by November 2024, after four years of a Democratic presidency had revived the prospect of a restoration of the progressive left’s crippling hegemony, the risks he posed seemed smaller than theirs… But is anyone other than Gerard Baker really surprised by any of: a self-indulgent tariff fixation based on a profound misunderstanding of international economics, an insouciance about public finances that has widened the deficit, and a reckless military adventure that has choked off global energy supplies,.. alienat[ing] everyone in the world who could be helpful to us (perhaps excepting Israel)… embolden[ing] and even embrac[ing] every country in the world that threatens us… the grotesque self-enrichment, the self-satisfying prosecutorial pursuit of political enemies, the endless projects of self-grandiosity… ballroom… Kennedy Center… Memorial Arch. …the buffoonish symbolic acts… the Gulf of America, Lake America, New America, the 51st state [of Canada]... ? No. The only surprising thing is not any of Trump’s lunacies but, rather, that it is without a peep that the Republican congressional majorities have gone along with it all, on the Gingrich Principle that above all one must and the only thing that matters is to make the president of one’s own party look good—not actually be good, but look good—and the president of the other party look bad, no matter what the cost to the country. Thus it is not any individual one of these. It is that all of them have happened because there is no block of Republican senators and representatives willing to stand up and even threaten to, temporarily, cross the aisle to make Jeffries and Schumer Speaker and Majority Leader for one single day. And, by the way, how the f*** does Gerard Baker imagine that Binyamin Netanyahu could possibly be “useful” in any way to anyone? Perhaps if Baker had written this in the winter of 2025 it might have done a little bit of good, and one might be obliged to at least think of him as being, very partially, and incompletely, something one might consider calling “a man”. But at this late date? This smells very much like somebody who wants to still be in the game after November if there is in fact a decisively Democratic congress. Thus he is now trying to join the anti-Trump parade that he has spent so much of the past eight years belittling and trying to destroy.