We’ve already had inklings of this sort of ridiculous manipulation during the primaries. Last December, Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post wrote a column stating, “If Ted Cruz is the Republican Party’s cure for Donald Trump, the antidote may be worse than the poison.” Jonathan Chait tweeted in February, “I also think Trump would be a better president than [Marco] Rubio, and that and most Republicans voters [would] be better presidents than Rubio.” Matt Yglesias of Vox.com wrote an entire column titled, “Why I’m more worried about Marco Rubio than Donald Trump.” Yglesias has now updated his piece and admitted he was wrong — but that didn’t stop Elias Isquith of Salon.com from arguing that Yglesias let Ted Cruz off the hook: Yes, Trump would do damage to the country, Isquith wrote, but Cruz’s policies are far worse. Henry Zeffman of The New Statesman wrote that Cruz was more “terrifying” than Trump.
Even after Trump became so toxic that most of these critics acknowledged they’d been wrong, some decided that running mate Mike Pence was far more frightening than Trump. Katha Pollitt of The Nation wrote that Pence was worse for women than Trump, calling him “a flaming reactionary.” Erika Smith wrote in the Sacramento Bee that Pence would be worse than Trump, arguing that he was just the other side of “the same crazy coin.” Vox’s Emily Crockett wrote, “Mike Pence is no less of a threat to women than Donald Trump” — shortly after the recording emerged of Trump saying he could “grab ‘em by the p***y.”
Such cries will be replayed and amplified in 2020 no matter who Republicans nominate, because presumably Republicans won’t repeat the mistake of nominating a Democrat. Democrats in the media would prefer two Democrats battling it out for the White House. This is their favorite election ever: not only do they get a Democrat running against a Democrat posing as a Republican, they get to castigate the Democrat posing as a Republican as a racist and sexist, then smear other Republicans with him.
And then, they’ll get to claim that Trump was part of a moderate new wave rejected by the GOP in 2020 in favor of “extremism.”
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