Trump Blames Pro-Life Success For His Endorsement Failures

Welcome to even stupider politics in 2023!

Jan 3

It’s a bold strategy, Cotton. Let’s see if it pays off for him.

After ignoring my question on whether he’d back a national abortion ban last night, today Trump says the “abortion issue” was handled poorly by Republicans — and comes out against the “No Exceptions” pro-life crowd:

It’s hard to express how many factually false claims Trump makes in this “Truth”.
First, not one single candidate Trump endorsed who lost backed his fictional “no exceptions even in the case of rape incest or life of the mother.” While a handful of pro-life Republicans take issue with rape and incest exceptions — under the argument that punishing an innocent child for the vile nature of its creation is no corrective — literally no one Trump endorsed oppose abortion in cases where the mother’s life is at stake. Arguably the most pro-life candidate he endorsed was Tudor Dixon in Michigan, who still backed such an exception.
Second, Trump claims the pro-life position moved large numbers of voters against Republicans. This is true, to a degree — a post-election report from the Heritage Foundation found that abortion is the only policy issue where Democrats earned more trust than Republicans.
But if abortion was the determining issue of the cycle, you would expect a slew of pro-life candidates to struggle. Instead, they all won — even in high stakes targeted races. Marco Rubio and Ron DeSantis won easily in Florida, Brian Kemp won in Georgia, Greg Abbott won in Texas, Mike DeWine and J.D. Vance won in Ohio and the long list of Trump-endorsed Senate candidates who won — such as Ted Budd in North Carolina, Eric Schmitt in Missouri, Markwayne Mullin in Oklahoma and Katie Britt in Alabama — were all solidly pro-life. Arguing that abortion politics was more to blame for the one Senate seat that flipped — Pennsylvania’s — than the utter failure of Trump-endorsed gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano to even field a campaign is quite the stretch.
Third, Trump says pro-life voters got what they wanted from the Supreme Court then “just plain disappeared, not to be seen again.” There is literally no evidence for this statement whatsoever. The Republican Party had a massive success in turning out its voters, winning the popular vote nationwide by 51-48 percent. There’s plenty of evidence that Democrats increased the number of young voters, which was the largest in a midterm in thirty years, thanks to the abortion issue. But the increase of the pro-abortion vote doesn’t decrease the other side. Trump’s suggestion that pro-life voters didn’t show up is just a lie.

Read the rest.

Damar Hamlin’s Tragic Injury

Horrific.

It felt different because it was different. You are smart enough to read faces and you’ve watched enough football to know. Sean McDermott saying a prayer under his breath. Reggie Gilliam looking up to the sky and yelling. Josh Allen and Joe Burrow embracing, while Stefon Diggs wiped away tears and Tre’Davious White was simply unable to look. It all happened at once, around Damar Hamlin, a 24-year-old who made a routine tackle, stood up, and immediately collapsed.
On Monday Night Football in Cincinnati, Hamlin made a chillingly normal tackle on a 13-yard Tee Higgins catch that led to the worst thing I have ever seen on a football field. Only three things matter now: (1) the health of Hamlin and his ability to lead a normal life; (2) the mental and emotional well-being of Hamlin’s family, friends, and teammates, who witnessed something so traumatic; (3) and that whatever happened to Hamlin is so thoroughly investigated that we never have to go through this ever again.
Quite literally everything else can be left for another day, including the game itself, which was abandoned in the first quarter with no makeup date announced and the Bills headed back to Buffalo. The idea that the game needed to go ahead because it featured two top teams playing for AFC seeding is silly and not even all that widespread. Most people agreed it needed to be suspended. Football stakes and life stakes are two totally different things and only one actually matters. The Bills said in a statement that Hamlin suffered cardiac arrest during the play, his heartbeat was restored on the field, and he is currently in critical condition:
In the four hours before that update, we were left with the bare, terrifying facts of the situation. It was the most upsetting event ever broadcast during a football game. ESPN announcer Joe Buck described first responders pounding on Hamlin’s chest; the compressions were not visible on TV but certainly clear to those in the stadium and probably far too visible for the players who packed tightly around. The initial idea of a five-minute break and a warm-up period, as if it were a silly little delay—as if there had been a busted stadium light—was always ludicrous (the NFL later clarified there was never a plan to resume the game), but it was quickly corrected by the teams themselves. Head coaches Sean McDermott and Zac Taylor met and decided to return their teams to their locker rooms to begin to process what they had just seen. From there, seemingly the only path toward playing again would be really good news really quickly. That wasn’t coming. Allen and Burrow looked crestfallen. We all saw their faces on national television and we knew: Playing would have been impossible, even if the NFL had forced it through, which it thankfully did not.

Tech’s Homer Simpson Problem

Inez Stepman.

Likely for much the same reason that has made James Burnham into the prophet of our times, our modern managerial economy seems unmatched in generating what anthropologist David Graeber calls “bulls*** jobs.” And increasingly, the justification for those jobs, especially overstaffed human resources and diversity departments, is not economic but political. Just as in the case of the environmental, social, and governance scam, there’s a tenuous economic explanation of ostensible benefits designed to keep the dollars-and-cents guys happy. CEOs, perhaps even more than the rest of us, probably hear constantly about the alleged productivity benefits of diversity, inclusiveness, and social responsibility — and why they need to hire the graduates of Wharton’s new degree program in diversity, equity, and inclusion.
But Musk’s tenure at Twitter could disprove those platitudinal explanations with a cold, hard, contrary example: You can cut most of your payroll, stick a finger in the eye of the Harvard-credentialed diversicrats, and run the company at a fraction of the cost with a core staff of competent, dedicated (and in the tech industry, mostly male) hump-busters. Your personnel expenses will plummet, and your company will become profitable.
Charles Haywood, the head of The Worthy House magazine with a law and business background, did some back-of-the-envelope calculations based on Twitter’s public finances and the estimated reduction in staff. “Musk has overnight changed Twitter’s net [profit] margin from negative 20% to approximately plus 28%, more than Apple or Google,” he tweeted. Haywood’s analysis assumes advertisers can’t be kept away forever, but even if a drop in ad sales changes the bottom line due to external pressure (i.e. leftist activist pressure) it still shows that the legions of well-paid hall monitors were irrelevant to the functioning of the actual product. Plus, Haywood’s calculation doesn’t factor in hundreds or perhaps thousands of dollars in TikTok-famous perks that tech companies have been told they must offer in order to attract the right “profile” of employee — Musk famously canceled Twitter HQ’s $400 lunches.

The Worst Article of 2022

Steven Hayward.

I have tried to maintain cordial relations with my old Weekly Standard friends who have gone on to their successor media outlets, especially The Bulwark. I’ve even placed an article or two there. I have acknowledged the reasonable case at the core of The Bulwark’s outlook that Donald Trump and the broader populist current he galvanized have exerted some negative forces in the Republican Party, though my own balance sheet concludes that Trump was much more sinned-against than sinning, and think the populist turn among conservatives is long overdue and largely healthy. (By the way, someone who thought this a long time ago was . . . Irving Kristol. See below.*)
But it became clear a while ago now that the “Never Trump” disposition has become fanatical to the point that Bulwarkers and others in the same camp have gone nuts, throwing every conservative principle over the side simply because Trump embraced them. But Last—tempting to call him “the Last Man”—really scraped bottom with his clubfooted treatment of Scruton. Much of Last’s article consists of classic “ventriloquist journalism,” citing in a faux-questioning way an article by Alan Elrod (I’ve never heard of him either) in Arc Digital, most of which doesn’t deserve the dignity of a response.
Last fully associates himself with Elrod’s condemnation of the existence of, among other things, two Scruton Cafes in Budapest (both of which I have visited). Some Last excerpts with commentary:
Would Scruton be horrified by all of this? By having his name affixed to a self-consciously revanchist coffeeshop by an aspiring authoritarian? By having fifth-rank, self-proclaimed “anti-liberal” intellectuals acting as if they are the champions of his legacy?
As I said: Scruton was the real deal in terms of intellectual horsepower and he was, by all accounts, a good egg. So it’s nice to think so.
First, Last really shouldn’t be throwing around characterizations of “fifth-rank” intellectuals. Last doesn’t have the intellectual chops to carry Scruton’s jock strap. Full stop.
Second, would Scruton be “horrified” at these tributes to his thought and influence? Well let’s see: Sir Roger’s widow, Sophie, has enthusiastically supported the Scruton project in Hungary, making substantial donations of some of Roger’s most treasured memorabilia and a good portion of his personal library to the two cafes and to Matthew Corvinus Collegium. You’d think a “reporter” like Last might have tried to contact Sophie Scruton to ask her. I suspect she has a better handle on what would “horrify” Roger than Last.
Last implicitly admits he has little familiarity with Scruton’s rich body of work—more than 60 books in addition to countless popular articles (and even a BBC documentary on aesthetics), but somehow feels justified in this summary judgment:
. . . reading Scruton’s critique of liberalism from the safety of, say, 1995, with communism vanquished, liberalism ascendant, and Europe beginning to heal from an 80-year-old wound is one thing.
Stop right here—with the phrase “from the safety of, say, 1995, with communism vanquished. . .” The “safety of 1995” is an amazingly crass and clueless thing to say, given than in the mid- to late-1980s few Western intellectuals were more active than Scruton behind the Iron Curtain championing the liberal tradition. Scruton not only smuggled books into Eastern Europe, but helped run a samizdat-style underground “university” at great personal risk. He was arrested more than once. (He also played in a rock band in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere as a cover of sorts.)
There’s a reason why Scruton is so popular in Eastern Europe today. We should be so lucky as to have a figure capable of inspiring such deep interest among young conservatives. Incidentally, one of Elrod’s slurs is that the Scruton Cafes are spots “for ex-pats” to congregate. That wasn’t my perception on the days I lingered for several hours over coffee or beer working away on my computer: they were a hotbed of traffic by Hungarians of all descriptions.