National Review’s Charles Cooke Emphatically Confirms Haberman’s Reporting: ‘The Scale of Trump’s Delusion is Quite Startling’
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Maggie Haberman is right. That’s the four-word summary of a report from National Review’s Charles Cooke on the news this week that ex-president Donald Trump is operating under the delusion that he will be “reinstated” to office this summer.
Yes, “delusion” is the correct word. So is “report.” Cooke’s piece is not an op-ed and you’ll note no opinion tag above on ours, either. Because it is a fact that Trump won’t be “reinstated” to office. His belief otherwise is delusional. Or apocalyptic to democracy, take your pick.
Charles Cooke’s conservative bona fides are not in question, nor should that be pertinent, except to say that it creates the journalism equivalent of a bipartisan consensus. A nice structure for the facts, from a political standpoint, but does not change the facts.
The other facts from Haberman’s reporting that Cooke confirms in his article are the depth and extent of the delusion and the appropriateness of the word “operating” above. Because it is not merely a thought but a mission that Trump and his operation are undertaking.
I can attest, from speaking to an array of different sources, that Donald Trump does indeed believe quite genuinely that he — along with former senators David Perdue and Martha McSally — will be “reinstated” to office this summer after “audits” of the 2020 elections in Arizona, Georgia, and a handful of other states have been completed. I can attest, too, that Trump is trying hard to recruit journalists, politicians, and other influential figures to promulgate this belief — not as a fundraising tool or an infantile bit of trolling or a trial balloon, but as a fact.
Cooke appeals to conservatives to see the magnitude and implications of Trump’s frame of mind on the subject. He outlines the temptation to dismiss the news as reflexive anti-Trumpism and urges that such an impulse should be ignored and that the stakes are real. He compares this to the previous understanding among conservatives- which was never shared by media outlets like Haberman’s New York Times – that it was a serious and consequential problem when the press, Hillary Clinton, and Jimmy Carter et al refusing to accept Trump’s own legitimate election in 2016.
But most importantly, Cooke succinctly outlines what specifically is wrong with Trump’s current obsessive presidential fantasy.
“The scale of Trump’s delusion is quite startling,” he writes. “This is not merely an eccentric interpretation of the facts or an interesting foible, nor is it an irrelevant example of anguished post-presidency chatter. It is a rejection of reality, a rejection of law, and, ultimately, a rejection of the entire system of American government.”
“There is no Reinstatement Clause within the United States Constitution. Hell, there is nothing even approximating a Reinstatement Clause within the United States Constitution,” he states.
The article is a wholesale endorsement of Haberman’s reporting as accurate, and an unapologetic rebuttal to Trump’s mirage. It’s also a direct entreaty to the right at large not to join the ex-president in it.
“The idea is otherworldly and obscene,” he says. “There is nothing to be gained for conservatism by pretending otherwise.”
There is hardly a thought one can add to the article. One might point out that even those who do believe some kind of voter fraud affected the outcome are injured by Trump’s hijacking of their concerns into an inane quest that is, as Cooke puts it, “unmoored from the real world.”
But that’s a footnote. The only real thing to add is “go read this.“
