If Trump blows it, the effort to shift the blame away from him will require spectacular feats of creative rewriting that would make the Comintern blush.
Laura Ingraham is warming up the bus. She tweeted on Wednesday: “The most deluded people in American politics are the folks at National Review and elsewhere who think that a win by Harris will give them more influence in the GOP.”
Now, leave aside what this says about Ingraham’s familiarity with NR’s coverage of the Harris/Walz ticket. Leave aside also what this says about her concept of the role of opinion journalism. What’s interesting here is that it’s the middle of August in a presidential-election year where Donald Trump has led in the polls all year and, even after recent reversals, is in something like a coin-toss election against a completely untested opponent . . . and Ingraham is already looking to pre-spin a potential Trump defeat by blaming it on us.
There’s a larger pattern at work, and examples of it over the past eight years have been too numerous to mention: For a certain type of Trump supporter, everything is about finding internal enemies within the Right and the Republican Party who can be blamed for any setbacks, even when it is screamingly obvious that those setbacks are the result of Trump’s own actions. In part, this derives from a tendency among right-wing commentators (especially on talk radio) that predates Trump, but it has been greatly accelerated under Trump. He can never fail; he can only be failed. The only solution is more purges, which of course these folks propose to conduct themselves. It’s easier work than fighting the Democrats and the Left, after all. But this time, it really requires a lot of suspension of disbelief. The favorite scapegoats are gone: Paul Ryan retired five years ago, Mike Pence is gone, and Mitch McConnell is stepping down soon. Trump totally controls the RNC and other official party organs, and he chose a blind loyalist as his running mate. Even Kevin McCarthy is gone, at the hands of Matt Gaetz.
Sure, Trump still has enemies who do things to him. But it wasn’t conservatives or “RINOs” who got Trump indicted, or who nominated him knowing he was under indictment. It was nobody outside the Trump campaign who decided to debate Joe Biden in June when there was still time to replace him. It was his own allies within the party that released Project 2025. It was Trump who chose J. D. Vance and endorsed a number of dubious Senate candidates. It’s Trump who decided, for no sensible reason, to attack Brian Kemp. It’s nobody but Trump who can control what policies his campaign releases, or what comes out of his mouth at rallies, debates, and press conferences. This remains an eminently winnable race in what ought to be a very strong Republican year. If Trump blows it, the effort to shift the blame away from him will require spectacular feats of creative rewriting that would make the Comintern blush.