Never Trumpers Never Learn – WSJ

A new book from Georgetown University scholar and former CIA analyst John Gentry, Neutering the CIA, is worth your time. His academic detachment makes all the more eye-opening his chapter on how James Clapper and John Brennan used diversity as a screen to fill the intelligence community with partisan Obama allies. Only a psychiatrist, though, can explain the media s silence on the biggest resulting disaster, the fake Russian intelligence supplied by the CIA and used by the FBI to justify its unorthodox actions in the Hillary Clinton email case, now widely understood to have inadvertently delivered Mr. Trump to the White House in 2016.

In some sense, this accident is already trying to replay itself in 2024. The latest exhibit is the Kagan essay in the Washington Post. Work through its 6,000-word argument and try to discern how Mr. Trump, with his limited appeal to an uninfluential base, checks and balances, and a mobilized opposition controlling almost every establishment institution, is supposed to make himself a dictator, when, say, FDR, with the most powerful electoral coalition in history, a 75% approval rating, and a world war to fight couldn t have done so.

It makes no sense and isn t required to. Mr. Kagan replicates the failed strategy of the past eight years: Donald Trump is so bad, we must lie about him. The lies are so obvious and easily discovered, though, they end up validating Mr. Trump s critique of the establishment and win him more voters. In fact, the only way not to see Mr. Kagan as dotty is to assume he s trying deliberately to justify civil disorder and unconstitutional resistance when Mr. Trump is elected.

Interestingly, the Post itself seems to have gagged on Mr. Kagan. With an insightful and well-balanced news report a few days later, it not only gave (as the press rarely does) the complete context of recent overplayed Trump quips. It went out of its way to note that the dictator talk comes from Democrats desperate over Mr. Biden s sagging polls. Maybe Trump opponents are finally wising up to their own self-defeating tactics. Seeing the ex-president for what he is but knowing something about dictators, the former CIA analyst and formidable political philosopher Martin Gurri writes at Unherd.com: Relax. Trump is too old, too isolated, and too ADD to have a shot at dictatorship and if he tried, the result would be comedy rather than tyranny.

via www.wsj.com

Holman Jenkins.