PubliusMonticello

Never underestimate the stupidity of MAGA.

“Special envoy for manufacturing…. “

Just change it to the Lake of Amnesty.

Bad Instincts The Republican Party's Day of Reckoning There is a great deal of soul-searching taking place among Republicans these days. And for many, the question is painfully simple: How in the hell did we get it so wrong? Not just in 2016, but again in 2024. It's not as though the warning signs were difficult to find. They were everywhere, beginning in 2015. Donald Trump revealed who he was, repeatedly and unmistakably. Millions of Republicans simply chose not to believe him. Now, Trump obviously possesses certain political instincts that have served him extraordinarily well. He understands attention, grievance, celebrity, and the psychology of political loyalty. But possessing the instincts necessary to acquire power is not the same as possessing the judgment, character, and wisdom necessary to exercise it. And that brings us to the great Republican failure of our time. Bad instinct is not knowing when to speak, when to remain silent, when to exercise power, and, perhaps most importantly, when to restrain yourself from exercising it. Bad instinct is endorsing extraordinary restrictions on commerce and individual liberty during a pandemic, with insufficient regard for the constitutional principles and livelihoods being sacrificed. Bad instinct is losing a presidential election and refusing to accept the result. It's perpetuating the fiction that your defeat was illegitimate, convincing millions of Americans that their country had been stolen, and then summoning thousands of angry supporters to Washington on the very day Congress was certifying the election. What in God's name could possibly go wrong? We found out on January 6, 2021. Bad instinct is treating sensitive government records as personal possessions, removing them to your private residence, and resisting efforts to recover them. Bad instinct is picking unnecessary fights with America's closest allies while demonstrating an inexplicable fascination with some of the world's most dangerous authoritarian leaders. Bad instinct is imposing enormous financial barriers between willing buyers and sellers, interfering with international commerce through tariffs and economic coercion, while pretending that such interference is somehow consistent with free-market conservatism and making America rich. A cockamamie theory if ever there was. Bad instinct is refusing to sufficiently separate your personal financial interests from the extraordinary powers of the presidency, inviting questions about whether public decisions serve the country or the man making them. And bad instinct is spending years promising to drain the swamp, only to become its largest and most conspicuous creature. These are not isolated lapses in judgment. They are a pattern. And patterns reveal character. So what does good instinct look like? Good instinct is recognizing that character matters, even when recognizing it is politically inconvenient. Good instinct is understanding that the presidency is not a prize to be awarded to the loudest personality, the most entertaining candidate, or the man most willing to humiliate his opponents. Good instinct is being a loyal, card-carrying Republican, someone who reveres Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan, and nevertheless recognizing in 2015 that Donald Trump was fundamentally unfit for the office he sought and the office they elegantly occupied. Not because he couldn't win. Obviously, he could. But because he might. Because winning an election and being worthy of winning are two entirely different things. And perhaps that is where so many Republicans made their most consequential mistake. They confused combativeness with courage, arrogance with strength, cruelty with toughness, and personal loyalty with fidelity to principle. Worst of all, they confused defending Donald Trump with defending the United States of America. Then, having witnessed the consequences of those judgments during his first presidency, they did it all over again in 2024. Think about that. By then, they had seen the chaos, the constitutional controversies, the election denial, and the assault on the Capitol. There were no surprises left. They knew what they were buying. And they bought it again. That is a level of collective political misjudgment that future historians will struggle to explain. Because when a political party makes a catastrophic mistake in choosing its leader, the consequences do not remain confined to that party. The country suffers. Our institutions suffer. Our alliances suffer. The credibility of American leadership suffers. And millions of Americans who wanted no part of the original decision are forced to live with its consequences. Some decisions unleash forces that cannot easily be reversed. Their destructive momentum continues long after those responsible have lost the ability to control them. And that brings us to November 3, 2026. The Party of Donald J. Trump suffered a devastating national repudiation. The reasons voters rejected the GOP, Donald Trump, and Trumpism are varied, but the magnitude of the defeat is unmistakably huge, and catastrophic. It demands accountability. Republicans can spend the next twenty years dissecting polling data, analyzing demographic trends, hiring consultants, and searching for better messaging. But until they confront their own judgment, they're wasting their time. Donald Trump did not impose himself upon the Republican Party. Republicans nominated him. Republicans elected him. Republicans defended him. And when given every reason to know better, Republicans nominated and elected him again. They own that decision. And no amount of finger-pointing, excuse-making, or political reinvention will absolve them of responsibility for its consequences. The question now is whether they've learned anything. Because a political party that cannot distinguish between character and celebrity, conviction and obedience, principle and personality has no business asking the American people to entrust it with the government of the United States. And until Republicans demonstrate that they understand those distinctions, they should not be surprised when the American people refuse to give them that trust. November 3 wasn't simply an election defeat. It was the arrival of a bill Republicans had been running up for eleven years. And if they still haven't learned their lesson, the party of Lincoln and Reagan, the American people, and the rest of the free world may spend the next generation paying it.

mr tough guy come lately.

An inconvenient truth, if ever there was.

Because nobody else in the party fits that description.

Never underestimate the stupidity of MAGA.

Never underestimate the stupidity of people who hate Reagan.

Ugly weird perv guy says what?

Perusing my feed here on X, I've come to a startling conclusion: MAGA hasn’t learned a gosh dang thing. They’re as insufferable as ever.

How’s This for a Legacy? A hundred years from now, historians may look back on the presidency of Donald Trump and conclude that 2026 was the year the Republican Party suffered an extinction-level political event. Not simply a bad election. Not merely a temporary setback. But a catastrophic collapse of political power from which the party would not recover for a generation. Think about that. Fifty years from now, perhaps a hundred, historians may be able to write that under Donald Trump’s leadership, the Republican Party ceased to be a serious contender for national political power for twenty years. Maybe thirty. Maybe fifty. Who knows? Before dismissing that possibility as hyperbole, consider a little history. Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace in August 1974. Three months later, Republicans suffered another devastating electoral defeat, losing 43 seats in the House of Representatives. Now, Republicans had already been out of power in the House since 1954. But Nixon and Watergate managed to take an already weakened Republican Party and drive it even deeper into the political wilderness. It would be another twenty years before Newt Gingrich led Republicans back to a House majority in 1994. Forty years after they had last held it. Forty years. And yet, as catastrophic as Watergate was, Nixon’s political disgrace may ultimately pale in comparison to what Donald Trump has done to the Republican Party. Because Trump’s legacy may not simply be that he lost Congress, alienated millions of voters, or presided over one of the most humiliating midterm defeats in modern American history. His legacy may be that he so thoroughly corrupted the Republican Party’s political identity, so completely subordinated its principles to his personality, and so systematically drove away the voters necessary to build a sustainable governing majority that the party simply could not recover. And here’s what really makes this historically extraordinary. We are talking about the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln. The party of Dwight Eisenhower. The party of Ronald Reagan. A political institution that survived the Civil War, the Great Depression, Watergate, and countless periods of internal division. And it may ultimately be Donald Trump who destroys it. Imagine that. A man who promised to make America great again may be remembered by historians as the man who made the Republican Party politically irrelevant for a generation. That is one hell of a legacy. Well done MAGA.

Does anybody know or give two shits who Jon Cooper is?

Retarded, indeed. This is the same moron @realMikeLindell who accused Ron DeSantis of cheating in 2022 because he got too many votes in Miami-Dade County.

Unbelievable. The dumbassery that spews forth from these MAGA accounts is obnoxious.

He's a myopic dwarf.

Never underestimate the stupidity of MAGA.

Never underestimate the stupidity of...MAGA.

I think what makes it so conspicuous is that he stands to inherit a state that has been running like a Swiss watch for eight years, making his job a lot easier. Grace, humility, and frankly just good politics dictates that you throw the guy a gift, even if it's somewhat noncommittal but unambiguous. I'm a fan. He's done a great job. He'd be a great president. Others would be great presidents too, in my view. Too early for me to make a decision on who I would back at this point, but let there be no misunderstanding about my admiration for Governor Ron DeSantis.