Trumpyrrhic

And a word about Barney Frank...

Donald Trump just keeps winning. He has won his way to the lowest popularity of his presidency. He has won so many primary elections—in Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana—that his Republican Party is furling itself into a cult. It’s the reverse of those stop-action photos of flowers unfurling. It is like watching a slow, angry, gangrenous death. And he keeps traveling the path—a straight line toward self-aggrandizement—that gives him immediate joy, but will result in long-term agita. The rest of the year doesn’t look good for Donald.

Here is what Senator Lisa Murkowski had to say about the defeat—and liberation—of Louisiana Senator John Cassidy, whom Trump targeted because he voted for Trump’s impeachment after the January 6 rebellion:

“There are still many, many weeks, many months, before the election, and this president is going to have to continue to deal with and partner with or battle with this group of lawmakers,” Ms. Murkowski said of herself and her fellow Republicans. “The president may have just opened some opportunities for people.”

Indeed, Trump may have lost his zombie majority in the Senate, now that Cassidy and John Cornyn have been freed to vote their conscience on crucial issues. The President waved goodbye to Cornyn’s traditional conservatism when he endorsed the comprehensively loathsome Ken Paxton in the U.S. Senate primary in Texas. “John Cornyn is a good man, and I worked well with him,” Trump said, “but he was not supportive of me when times were tough.”

According to Cornyn’s campaign, he supported Trump 99.2% of the time. But oh, that rebellious .8%! Fealty has to be total. And even if Cornyn had given absolute support, it wasn’t with the rancid flair of Paxton’s MAGAtude. And so the “message” was reified in the confines of the cult this week: Support Donald or die…Or maybe, support Donald and die. The liberation of Senators Cassidy and Cornyn may—as per Senator Murkowski—open the door to more votes to thwart Trump and his crew of incompetents. Dr. Cassidy may seek ways to atone for his own cowardly vote for Robert Kennedy Jr. in committee.

The larger reality, available to sane Republicans—such as they are—and avoidable, as always, by the President is that Trump has had a very embarrassing few weeks in the world. His obeisance to Xi Jinping—his gnawing away at the creative ambiguity of the American non-pledge to defend Taiwan—was classic Trump. Just as he believed Iran would be Venezuela, he believed that the titanium Xi, fresh from firing a roster of his top generals, would be susceptible to flattery. It was America as untrained, yapping, lovesick puppy, just as Trump’s constant public indecision about Iran sends a message of frail foolishness to the world. He was going to attack Iran again this week, he said, but there was tremendous progress made in the talks with the Iranians. One would hope so. . .but can anyone, especially the evildoers in Tehran, trust a word he says anymore?

His cult can. But that leaves two-thirds of the American people open to be won by his opponents…if only his opponents weren’t Democrats. The party’s delusions deepen. Tom Edsall reports this week a plethora of polls showing that Dems are even less popular among the American people (39% approve of them) than Republicans are (40%). And yet, the Dems have a clear path—a superhighway—forward, if they just rejoin the rest of American society:

Two political scientists, David Broockman at the University of California, Berkeley, and Joshua Kalla at Yale, describe a tentative path to strengthen Democratic performance on Election Day…

For Democrats, Broockman and Kalla write, that includes moving toward the center on affirmative action, transgender issues, unauthorized immigration, minor crime enforcement, funding and regulating the police, and the environment.

Democrats would, however, lose votes if they moved toward the center on Social Security, Medicaid or where to set the minimum wage..

This is nothing new. The Left has been the heart of the Democrats’ problem since Bill Clinton identified it as such. This week CNN released the party’s hidden autopsy of the 2024 election: No surprises there, either. Democrats run to win arguments; Republicans run to win elections, the report concluded. And, oh! Ugh! Identity politics! Such a problem! But no solutions. Indeed, the Democratic strategy since 2024 has been to hold “affordability” as an amulet against the Republican vandals while trying to hide their own, still-unacceptable, positions on cultural issues. They will not acknowledge that the party’s racialism—that is, benign bigotry for “identities” it has, well, identified--is a dead end. For example: the majority of Americans know that the Supreme Court’s decision to modify the Voting Rights Act certainly doesn’t mean the disenfranchisement of black people—it only removed their imagined “right” to vote in districts corkscrewed into a configuration where a majority of the residents are black. Far too many Democrats claimed it did, which it didn’t. Far too many Democrats have called this “Jim Crow 2.0,” which it isn’t. We are not going back to segregated water fountains…and the Democrats’ pretense that we are is transparent propaganda. Transparent in that it continues their disastrous policy of making distinctions according to race. The abhorrent DEI industry seeped into universities and corporations across the country. Where are the Dems willing to admit that DEI was egregiously applied, and transparently racialist—and that it provoked a national anger that Trump exploited?

The Democratic strategy of affordability, as opposed to honesty, won’t work in 2026, either. It is too easily disembowled by Republicans. Yeah, people are bummed by high gas prices. But the notion of boys on girls’ sports teams—however rare—cuts deeper. There weren’t more than a handful of Democrats who wanted to “defund the police” or pay for prison sex-change operations, but Trump’s minions managed to convince a plurality of voters that arrant permissiveness was the Donkey brand. I suspect that Susan Collins will school the preppy oysterman with the Nazi tattoo, Graham Platner, on the vulnerabilities of cultural adventurism in November.

Which brings me to Barney Frank, whom I’d known for 50 years, since his days working for Mayor Kevin White in Boston. I watched his journey from ur-liberal to Sanity Centrist over that time; I made a similar hejira. Being a couple of left-handed Jews, we had a lot of fights about it, starting with my opposition to busing in the 1970s. It was not beyond Barney to inform me: “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.” I was less brutal, “You’re missing the real issue, here.” I didn’t want to risk losing him as a friend; he was too much fun. And yet, we pretty much ended up in the same place politically:

Progressive Democrats have “embraced an agenda that goes beyond what’s politically acceptable,” he said. “Until we separate ourselves from that agenda, we don’t win.”

Barney’s journey took decades. I remember visiting him in his Congressional office at some point in the 1980s and him saying: “The biggest mistake we made was underestimating the importance of markets.” Well, that was one. There were others. The cautious sterility of the party’s language was another. When Barney first ran for state rep. in Massachusetts, he produced one of my favorite campaign posters of all time: A vastly overweight Barney—he trimmed down when he came out—shirt-tail hanging out, sitting at the world’s messiest desk…and the words: Neatness isn’t everything.

For Barney, honesty—intellectual honesty—was everything. Neatness was the clumsy eggshell walk, imposed by the consultant-industrial complex, that precluded honesty on tough issues. For Barney, neatness implied sterility. Sterility was boring. Boring was a death wish for a working politician. (He did make a fool of himself at one point, fixing DC parking tickets for one of his lovers. He was so happy to be out.)

For Democrats, neatness has involved avoiding the difficult truths on too many issues. They have settled for an empretzeled politics of evasion. They have opposed racial equality, favoring instead a program of patronizing and infantilizing blacks. (When was the last time you heard a white liberal dispute a black activist?) They favored social experimentation over traditional truths. (When was the last time you heard a Democrat acknowledge the rock-solid sociology that two parents are better than one?) They have ignored the education of poor children, ignored the cascading wealth of evidence that charter schools are a necessary reform. “Look, we’re in the tank to the teachers unions,” a leading Dem once told me. It is a septic tank. In an attempt to appease their various activist groups, especially feminists, they have done mortal damage to the English language. The left scorns billionaires when it is clear, as Barney realized, that free enterprise, carefully regulated— as his Dodd-Frank financial reform bill tried to be—was necessary for prosperity. There has never been a socialist economic boom.

In the end, it takes real ineptitude to allow a sociopathic charlatan to win two presidential elections. The Democrats have achieved that. And while history suggests that they will transcend their ineptitude and win a House (and maybe a Senate) in 2026, they will have to do so in the most painful way, body-surfing a cultural minefield. Barney Frank was a good man who refused to be dishonest with himself. It would be nice if one of our two parties learned something from that.