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WHAT HAPPENS AT THE WASHINGTON POST WHEN ONE PERSON ADMITS SHE MIGHT RELUCTANTLY VOTE FOR TRUMP? Hysteria.
This week the paper published an op-ed by Danielle Pletka, a scholar in foreign policy at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington. The headline was: “I never considered voting for Trump in 2016. I may be forced to vote for him this year.”
In the piece, Pletka worked hard to establish her anti-Trump bona fides. She dislikes “his odious tweets, his chronic mendacity and general crudeness.” She believes the president is like “an oil slick that besmirches all it touches.” He engages in “nasty schoolyard jibes.” He practices “erratic personality-driven decision-making.” And he’s a “Johnny-come-lately Republican.”
OK. Pletka doesn’t like Trump. She fears for the country if he is re-elected. And then she wrote: “But I fear the leftward lurch of the Democratic Party even more.” Pletka worries that Joe Biden would be a “figurehead” president who is “incapable of focus or leadership.” In the absence of a strong president, the Democrats’ “hard-left ideologues” would be in charge. They would abolish the filibuster in the Senate, pack the Supreme Court, pass the Green New Deal, nationalize health care, dismantle the nation’s borders, and wreck the economy.
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Those are entirely reasonable fears. Maybe some or all of them would happen in a Biden presidency, and maybe they wouldn’t. But given the strength of the left in Democratic politics these days, given the anger and sense of ends-justify-the-means among the Resistance today, Pletka’s concerns are not crazy. At the very least, a President Biden would be under a lot of pressure from his left to do many of those things.
It was all too much for the Post. In short order, columnist Alexandra Petri published a parody headlined, “I can’t believe you’re forcing me to vote for Trump, which I definitely didn’t already want to do.” Wrote Petri: “Believe me when I tell you that the LAST THING I could POSSIBLY want would be to vote for Donald Trump. That’s why I am so stunned that you have taken it upon yourself to go to such lengths to FORCE me to vote for him! You sick, sick monster!”
And so on. Petri’s notion was that someone like Pletka has always been a closet Trump supporter — paranoid, comfortable with racism, and looking for an excuse to vote for Trump instead of a Democratic agenda which she knows nothing about. “Much as I hold deep, principled reservations about Trump’s leadership,” Petri wrote in the parody of Pletka, “I just want to say that if anyone makes me the least bit uncomfortable about the legacy of racism in this country or urges me to learn one participle of history that I would not like to learn, I will panic, and when I panic, I vote for Trump.”
OK. We get the point. But that wasn’t enough for the Post. A little more than an hour after Petri’s piece was published, another columnist, Daniel Drezner, posted another parody headlined, “I never considered voting for Trump in 2016. I may be scared into voting for him this year because of my exaggerated fears.“
Like Petri, Drezner, in a parody of Pletka, went to some length to point out how horrible Trump is. And then: “All of these trends scare me. But then I look at Joe Biden, and he scares me even more. I am scared very easily! Perhaps I should see someone about that.”
But wait — there is more. “With Trump, I know what I am getting,” Drezner-as-Pletka wrote. “His sins are on the outside. Biden is a Trojan horse, like John Hurt’s character in ‘Alien.’ Sure, he seems nice and affecting on the outside, but how can I be sure that some baby Bernie Sanders won’t poke out of Biden’s chest? I saw that movie when I was very young, and it scarred me for life.”
Just by chance, the two mocking columns were published on the day Trump hosted a historical Middle East peace ceremony at the White House, celebrating agreements between Israel and Bahrain and Israel and the United Arab Emirates. It is the kind of success that has not happened in the region for a generation or more, and Trump made it happen. A sample headline:
But back to the mockery. The point, from the columnists at the Post, is that even a reluctant admission of possible support for Trump — and of grave concern over the leftward movement of the Democratic Party — must be shouted down. Because an election is nearing, and this is no time for such talk.
