Trump's quiet victories

Now it is Trumpism, and not the corrupt left, that is advancing in ant-like, unpublicized, but constant forward movement, every week. The House health care vote confirms Republican solidarity, just six months after Speaker Ryan declined to share a platform with candidate Trump. Trump’s followers, who knew it would be a slog, are solid at near his electoral result in the mid-forties in the polls. His outnumbered media supporters and talk-show and social media backers are in place, despite some grumbling about the Syrian Tomahawk attack from the magnificent Ann Coulter and some others. The intellectual left has gone all the way to the end of the diving board. Michael Kinsley (as intellectual as left-wing journalists get in the U.S.) declares the president a fascist, as if mentioning the side on which his hair is parted. Christopher Browning in the New York Review of Books, with a few pro forma distinctions, laboriously likened Trump with Hitler, at such length that the unwary might imagine that there was a comparison to be made.

The bizarrerie of the intellectual right is illimitable. My dear and esteemed friend George Will, after an acrobatic exercise in the columnar snobbery that Trump was unaware that Andrew Jackson died 16 years before the start of the Civil War, (Jackson was concerned about the danger of civil war throughout his presidency, as George knows and Mr. Trump was alleging), has fled into the television embrace of Rachel the Madd and Mika Buzzfeed at MSNBC, the most astonishing flight since Joachim von Ribbentrop went to Moscow. They have all walked the plank; President Trump has induced self-destructive political bilharzia in the deranged effigies of once-serious and important people. I still love them, but I grieve for them.