"Never Trump" - left and right

Victor Davis Hanson has one of the more interesting articles out today (over at NRO).  He outlines the fire Trump has taken in his first month in office from both the left and right.  In a few paragraphs, he summarizes what these two sides of the same coin have done and accomplished.  In fact, it seems, they've accomplished very little.

Of the left he says:

The Democratic party has been absorbed by its left wing and is beginning to resemble the impotent British Labour party. Certainly it no longer is a national party. Mostly it’s a local and municipal coastal force, galvanized to promote a race and gender agenda and opposed to conservatism yet without a pragmatic alternative vision. Its dilemma is largely due to the personal success but presidential failure of Barack Obama, who moved the party leftward and yet bequeathed an electoral matrix that will deprive future national candidates of swing-state constituencies without compensating for that downside with massive minority turnouts, which were unique to Obama’s candidacy. The Democratic party bites its tail in endless paroxysms of electoral frustration — given that the medicine of broadening support to win back the white poor and working classes is deemed worse than the disease of losing the state governorships and legislatures, the Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court.

The left is acting in a purely predictable albeit infantile manner since seeing their "sure bet" of a candidate go down in flame.  No one, and I mean no one who has followed politics even passingly these past few years will be surprised by their actions, words or the epic whining and crying they're engaged in right now.  That's today's left, and as VDH points out, they're headed even further left, all the while pretending they're interested (not really) in a attracting votes from a class and race of voters they've vilified and willingly abandoned.

So, you say, all hail the GOP.  They've run the table.  They own a majority in Congress. They get to name the next SCOTUS justice.  They can roll back Obama's over reach and, by the way, they control about 2/3rds of the state governments.  Happy times, no?

Uh, no.  Because, much like the left, for a portion of the GOP's establishment Republicans, their candidate of choice didn't win and they are as bitter and whiny as anyone on the left:

Usually conservative pundits and journalists would push back against this extraordinary effort to delegitimize a Republican president. But due to a year of Never Trump politicking and opposition, and Trump’s own in-your-face, unorthodox style and grating temperament, hundreds of Republican intellectuals and journalists, former officeholders and current politicians — who shared a common belief that Trump had no chance of winning and thus could be safely written off — find themselves without influence in either the White House or indeed in their own party, over 90 percent of which voted for Trump. In other words, the Right ruling class is still in a civil war of sorts.

They too are unable to fathom, much less accept, that their political agenda has crashed and burned.  It's been rejected by those who have put Trump in office.  They, like the Democrats, are sure their message is sound, it's just it hasn't been properly explained or executed.  And, more importantly, in the midst of a GOP romp, they're on the outside looking in, primarily because they declared themselves unalterably opposed to a Trump presidency.

So they attempt, like the left, to subvert it.

Let me lay it out for you one more time - their side won.  They could easily control what comes out of a Trump presidency since they have the majority in both houses of Congress.  Pass the legislation they've wanted to pass for 8 years,  reform or do away with the legislative abomination called Obamacare, tax relief, etc all while tempering or dampening (or flat not passing) legislation that may appeal more to Trump's liberal side.

Instead they choose to go to war with him.

For some, the best pathway to redemption is apparently to criticize Trump to such an extent that their prior prophecies of his preordained failure in the election will be partially redeemed by an imploding presidency. It is no accident that many of those calling for his resignation or removal are frustrated that, for the first time in a generation, they will have no influence in a Republican administration or indeed among most Republicans. Yet, in private, they accept that Trump’s actual appointments, executive orders, and announced policies are mostly orthodox conservative — a fact that was supposed to have been impossible.

That's the bottom line.  The shots are being called by others because of the supposed "principled" stand they chose to take.  Note the word - chose.  It was a cheap and easy stand to take early on because not one of them and almost no one else thought Trump stood a chance of taking the GOP nomination.  Cheap grandstanding before getting back to business as usual.  But surprise - the voters were dead tired of "business as usual" and let the "Never Trumpers" know resoundingly in the primary.

Did they listen to their voters? Did they pay attention? Did they understand that this was the second time their voters had spoken to the establishment Republicans (they didn't turn out for Romney 4 years earlier).  Did they modify their stance?  No.  Because none of them and very few others ever thought Trump would edge out Hillary.  Their cheap stance was still cheap - they never thought there would be any consequences to taking it.  They painted themselves in a corner with never drying paint and there they sit today - bitter and disloyal to their party.

The irony, of course, is they can't understand how the left failed to see all the signs and signals that were seemingly obvious in hindsight leading up to Hillary's defeat.

One could easily ask the very same question of the right's "Never Trumpers".

~McQ