The president did something incredible, but his tactics don’t work against candidates who aren’t Hillary Clinton.
For a year now, there’s been a myth among Republicans: the Legend of Trump. It goes something like this. Once upon a time, there was an unbeatable candidate, a world-famous politician whose husband had been president, who received unquestioning loyalty from the media. Then came the Dragonslayer: a real-estate mogul with a toilet of gold and a tongue of iron, who cut the unconquerable evil queen down to size and seized the throne from her. The laws of political gravity simply didn’t apply to him: He could utter any vulgarity, brazen through any scandal, batter down any media infrastructure. And if Republicans followed him — if they lit their torches from his — they too could slay dragons.
.. But Trump truly won not because he was a stellar candidate — far from it — but because Hillary Clinton was an awful candidate. And this means not only that his dragonslaying isn’t duplicable, but also that other candidates with similarly shady backgrounds who attempt to imitate him will end up failing dramatically.
.. Moore ran the worst campaign in recent memory, and he lost because of it. Republicans weren’t going to show up in droves to vote for a man credibly accused of child molestation, a fellow who deployed his campaign spokespeople to explain that Muslims can’t sit in Congress and that homosexuals ought to wind up in prison.
.. Moore was already in a dogfight before the sexual-abuse allegations. And he attempted to Trump his way out of those allegations: He stonewalled, he insisted it was all a media witch hunt, he shouted “establishment” over and over. He even called in the Dragonslayer himself, who tweeted from on high and rallied on the Alabama border. And Moore lost.
.. Yet the wandering minstrels will continue to sing the Legend of Trump for donors near and far. They’ll continue to suggest that Trumpism is a sword in a stone, ready to be plucked up and used against the “establishment” by any person brave enough to wield it.
.. They’ll never define “nationalist populism”; they’ll just state that anyone who opposes it opposes “the people.”
.. To acknowledge reality — to state simply that Trump did something amazing, but that he also had the help of a horrifying Democrat, and to recognize openly that Republicans will have to do better if they hope to win in the future — is uncomfortable.