Longtime National Review and New York Post columnist Andrew McCarthy has been adamantly insisting for years that Donald Trump stands literally zero chance of defeating Joe Biden. For a certain strain of anti-anti-Trump conservative, electability is the most comfortable ground upon which to stand against Trump. The Ron DeSantis campaign has made electability its principle rationale for claiming the nomination. And McCarthy has pressed this argument with an indefatigable spirit that has crossed into stark raving lunacy.
“Donald Trump cannot win the presidency again,” he wrote in 2021. By last fall, McCarthy was already growing tired of hectoring his readers about the impossibility of Trump winning. (“To repeat what I’ve said for a long time, it is a ripe dead certainty that Trump cannot win a national election.”)
But McCarthy’s campaign to deny even the theoretical possibility Trump could eke out a victory over Biden was just getting started. He continued banging out a series of columns with headlines like “Why Trump Can’t Win,” “Trump Can’t Win,” and so on. And when McCarthy asserts that Trump can’t win, he is not saying that Trump would face long odds of winning. He is saying that a Trump victory in 2024 is an absolutely zero-probability event:
I am supposed to concede that if Trump wins the Republican nomination, anything could happen, so of course he has a chance to be elected president again. … No, I am not playing along… I am as certain as I am writing this that Donald Trump will never again be elected president of these United States.
By springtime, McCarthy had begun developing the theory that the Democratic Party and the mainstream media, which naturally are working in secret partnership, have manufactured a false narrative that Trump might stand a chance against Biden, in order to trick Republican voters into nominating him and thus ensuring Biden’s reelection. (“Why would the New York Times and its woke-progressive, Trump-loathing comrades be serenading us with, ‘Trump Can Win’? Because that’s what they want us to think at this moment,” he insisted, in a column headlined “The Big Trump Con Is Working.”)
Over time, the polling evidence has increasingly undercut McCarthy’s fervent claims that Trump cannot possibly defeat Biden. Not only have trial heats shown a tight race between Trump and Biden, they have also shown McCarthy’s candidate, DeSantis, faring worse against Biden than Trump would.
As the electability argument has collapsed, other anti-anti-Trumpers have slowly backed away and tried to emphasize other reasons to nominate DeSantis. But changing your mind in the face of overwhelming evidence is not the McCarthy way. Instead, he has interpreted this evidence as proof that he was right all along. If polls are showing Trump really might have a chance against Biden, then it just proves the polls are part of the conspiracy to nominate him.
In his latest, and to date most insane, column, McCarthy argues the polls have been rigged in order to make Trump appear electable and trick Republican voters into nominating him.
“I’ve repeatedly predicted that the media-Democratic complex would, over the next months, project a Trump 2024 victory, intentionally prompting irrational exuberance in the Trump base and rendering it practically impossible for an electable Republican candidate to emerge,” he argues. And now their plan is to release skewed polls:
Former president Trump has a nine-point lead over President Joe Biden in a recent Washington Post/ABC poll! Yeah, right. So skewed in Trump’s favor is this survey, it’s hilarious — at least until it dawns on you that this nonsense was put out by reliable media-Democratic-complex organs, in the undoubted calculation that Republicans would crow, “See? Trump must be the nominee!”…
The recent neck-and-neck Trump/Biden polls should surprise no one. It has been crystal clear for a couple of years that, because Democrats desperately want Trump to be the Republican nominee, they would do whatever they could, at this stage of the race, to make it look like he could win the general election.
Ta-da!
The pollsters are in on the plot too!
It bears mentioning that McCarthy is not some random lunatic who’s permitted to publish his rants on a forgotten corner of National Review’s website without supervision. Just today, editor-in-chief Rich Lowry has a fundraising appeal singling out McCarthy as the reason donors should support NR’s vital work. “He’s been right about nearly everything,” gushes Lowry.
Does that include McCarthy’s theory that two local and one federal prosecutor, the Democratic Party, the national media, and all the pollsters are working together on a secret plot to fool Republicans into thinking Trump might win, so that they can beat him next year?
