On a list of people who should be banned from ever dishing out advice on how to win national elections, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens is certainly near the top.
But here he is the day after Christmas with utmost confidence that he knows what is and isn’t necessary for the Democrats’ quest to defeat President Trump in 2020. (Stephens identifies as a conservative but coincidentally happens to share the same goals as Democrats, much like every other “conservative” writer in the national newspapers.)
“While Trump’s critics might be partly right about him, they’re a lot less right than they believe,” Stephens wrote. “In a contest between the unapologetic jerk in the White House and the self-styled saints seeking to unseat him, the jerk might just win.”
He went on to offer his best advice on “how to avoid that outcome,” which was more or less the same trite, useless guidance offered by the typical Never Trumper still unable to grasp that: 1. There was an election in which Trump was chosen and 2. If Trump is reelected, it will be for the same reason that any candidate wins a national U.S. election. (He won the argument with enough people in the right places.)
“What would work?” Stephens asks. His first proposal is “smart infrastructure spending.” Wow, who would have ever thought of such proposal, other than the Trump administration itself, a proposal that Democrats, if they weren’t devoting every shred of energy to impeachment, would have passed by now?
Without a flicker of self-awareness, Stephens also said it’s working against Democrats that “too much of today’s left is too busy pointing out the ugliness of the Trumpian right to notice its own ugliness: its censoriousness, nastiness and complacent self-righteousness.”
This is from the man who started that very same column by literally recommending “soap” as the fix for Trump’s presidency, because, he said, “America needs a hard scrub and a deep cleanse” after the 2016 election.
That’s how Stephens describes the vote cast by 63 million Americans.
The description of liberals as harboring a “complacent self-righteousness” is also from the man who this year devoted an entire column to calling Trump unfunny (yes, he actually did that) and in the past wrote that the only reason Republicans supported Trump in 2015 was because they wanted to lose the election. (He wrote in that same column that Hillary Clinton was certain to win.)
In light of this stellar record in political forecasting, Stephens maintains the most prestigious job in journalism.
Finally, Stephens offered that “the key to beating Trump is to treat him as the nonentity he fundamentally is.”
“The winning Democrat,” he said, “will need to make Trump’s presidency seem insignificant rather than monumental — an unsightly pimple on our long republican experiment, not a fatal cancer within it.”
Ah, yes. The campaign that beat all the odds and every machine working against it — the entire Democratic Party, the entire Republican Party, the entire national media, all of Hollywood, and all of academia — will certainly go down in history as “an unsightly pimple,” if only we once again ignore that the country elected the president.
Stephens, like every Never Trumper, still believes that the 2016 election happened to him. It didn’t happen to him, it happened for Trump’s voters. He doesn’t understand that and so probably shouldn’t be dispensing political advice to the rest of us.
