The hysterical Peggy Noonan says Trump, whom everyone now knows to be a bumbler because of Iran, still might not bumble the overthrow of the republic?!

You've got to be kidding me.

He's been bumbling everything since he was elected in 2016. Hell, he bumbled his 2016 campaign, during which he switched from Lewandowski to Manafort to Bannon/Conway! He wasted 2017 trying to repeal and replace Obamacare. He could never get The Wall built. He lost the House in 2018. He handed the war on terror over to the Taliban! Weeks later he utterly capitulated to hysteria during the pandemic, even boasting about the spending orgy of the $2.2 trillion CARES ACT. His cosplaying revolutionaries who strolled through the Capitol in January 2021 had dinner reservations for that evening at The Olive Garden. In 2025 he launched an insane tariff regime, fought the Houthis to a draw, made our friends in The Great White North our enemies, sent ICE goons into the streets who ended up executing two Americans in broad daylight in January, and in February started this stupid war completely unprepared to finish it.

Trump has never been a threat to the Republic. He's the chief clown in a circus act. He's ten times the bungler we ever thought Obama to be.

But whatever happens Tuesday, just remember that Peggy is just fine with giving the revolutionaries of the other side power and influence.

Better to keep your head while everyone else is losing theirs.   

The Case for a Historic Wave: The president should be dealt a rebuke, a rebellion and a rout. Only then can the Republican Party be rebuilt.

 ... Mr. Trump’s problem is that everyone on both sides of the issue knows that he’s out of his depth in running a major war. They weren’t sure of that when it started.

Democrats think he went in because he’s a bumbler, Republicans think he can’t win because he’s a bumbler. Supporters and opposers of his decision are united: He’s a bumbler whose bumbling made things more expensive.

... If Tuesday yields only a small wave, it will embolden and empower the president’s attempts to undo the results. He will try—he’s Donald Trump. They rigged it! We won’t certify!

He never misses an opportunity to toy with the republic, and it didn’t start in 2020. McKay Coppins’s recent biography of Mitt Romney recounts how supporter Donald Trump reacted to Mr. Romney’s 2012 loss to Barack Obama. In transit to Mr. Romney’s victory party, “Trump sat in the dark of a helicopter, unraveling.” He decided, based on nothing, that the election had been stolen. He started tweeting: “This election is a total sham and a travesty.” “We are not a democracy!” “We should march on Washington and stop this travesty.” “Revolution!”

The 2012 election wasn’t a sham, Mr. Trump just made his charges up, as he did in 2020, when his supporters stormed the Capitol.

It’s what he does. He’ll likely do some variation next week.

... It is likely true that if the Democrats get a big, historic outcome Tuesday, they will misread their mandate and go off on various toots. They’ll think that change by definition must be extreme or won’t be noticed. A growing number will continue their grim plodding toward socialist revolution. ...

John O'Sullivan: Rubio is the poster boy for the liberal immigration policies which Trump launched his campaign to oppose

Green card holder John O'Sullivan at National Review prefers Trump to the ever mendacious Marco Rubio, here:

[N]one of the three leading Republicans have been exactly models of truth-telling in this campaign. So the relevant question then becomes “Compared with whom?” Let’s compare Trump’s boastful and evasive untruths with the very different lies of Marco Rubio on various immigration bills he has tried to sell to conservatives (as detailed by John Fonte on NRO on Wednesday.) These amounted to a long campaign of deliberate mendacity intended to deceive allies on a matter of the greatest public interest so that they would unknowingly support what they really oppose.

O'Sullivan correctly acknowledges that Trump's is a non-ideological conservatism which is widely shared among Americans:

Conservatives in practice accept that their realism about human nature shouldn’t (or can’t) stop at the door of the voting booth. What there is of Trump’s conservatism seems to be of that kind. And that seems also to be true of “ordinary” conservatives outside Washington, as several writers such as Rod Dreher have pointed out. They tend not to have highly consistent ideologies but to tolerate contradictions within a broadly conservative outlook. One very likely effect of a GOP conservatism influenced by Trumpery, therefore, is that it will remain conservative but in a less consistently ideological way. It is likely to be more spasmodically interventionist in economic policy, more concerned with directly protecting the interests of Americans (and especially the voting groups who have surged up to back Trump), more anxious about how to solve the problems identified by Charles Murray in Fishtown without spending too much more on them, more protective of entitlements, and more loudly patriotic in general. As a fully paid-up Thatcherite, I will find a lot of this irksome and mistaken. It will remind me of the pre-Thatcher Tory party and its bumbling resistance to economic rationality. And I’m beginning to feel grouchily that I want to hear a little less about American exceptionalism until the U.S. manages not to lose a war.