Guess who is responsible for Donald Trump being the GOP presidential candidate in 2024?

The Democrats, naturally.

Back in 2016, Trump had almost no support among the right wing pundit class. Today the situation is strikingly different, but in a particularly neurotic way. Although Trump now does have some straightforward fans among right wing intellectuals, the vast majority of right wing pundit types are anti-anti-Trumpers: they don’t like Trump and may even openly despise him, but in the end they support him, because he’s a Republican. This creates a lot of cognitive dissonance, that has to be managed somehow.

A key management strategy is to conclude that Trump is going to be the nominee because the Biden administration has manipulated the DOJ into indicting Trump:

That this theory is totally deranged hardly requires saying. There is no evidence any, let alone all, of the prosecutors investigating Trump have coordinated with the Biden administration or have any interest in affecting the Republican nomination. Trump’s legal woes are easily and parsimoniously explained by the fact he has habitually flouted the law throughout his career, beginning at least 50 years ago, when he and his father refused to allow Black people to rent apartments, and continuing through decades of assorted schemes and swindles.

More to the point, the Republican electorate’s attachment to Trump is explained even more easily. The party’s voters thrill to his bullying style; they believe his stream of lies and exist in an information ecosystem in which every fresh piece of evidence of Trump’s misconduct merely affirms the scope of the conspiracy against him. The fact that they wish to renominate a man whom they consider one of the greatest presidents in history, and who most of them believe legitimately won the 2020 election, follows naturally from their own beliefs. The choice was not imposed on them by the Democrats, the liberal media, or Jack Smith.

So why do the anti-anti-Trumpers insist on seeing Trump’s nomination as an externally imposed plot? One reason is a desperate attempt to convince Republicans to support DeSantis, by grabbing them by the lapels and insisting they are being duped by Democrats unless they vote for Ron.

But I think this conviction also reflects a deeper psychological need, one I’ve observed frequently since Trump appeared on the political scene. Trump initially commanded almost no support at all from the conservative movement’s intelligentsia.

Over time, his unstoppable rise produced three divergent reactions. Some conservative elites learned to embrace Trump. Others (“Never Trumpers”) recoiled from Trump and developed criticisms of the party that supported him. Between these two factions, the third, anti-anti-Trumpers, remained more or less openly disgusted with Trump but remained loyal to the party and the conservative movement even as they persisted in adoring him.

Their loyalty to the GOP and their contempt for Trump created a cognitive dissonance. Depicting Trump as a liberal creation resolves that cognitive dissonance. They could remain loyal to the party and disdainful of its cult leader because the Trump cult was the sinister result of a Democratic plot.

This is clearly happening all over the right wing intellectual world. Yes Trump is a clownish authoritarian trending toward outright fascism, but the voters who are choosing him are being forced to do so because, as David Brooks pointed out recently, some liberals have used the word “intersectional” on Twitter. (Think this is a joke? Get out of the boat and click on this link).

A related factor here is that if Rich Lowry, Andrew McCarthy, the WSJ op-ed page etc. were to admit that Trump is now being indicted every other Tuesday because he’s spent his whole adult life as a one-man crime wave and it’s finally beginning to catch up with him, they might have to ask themselves some hard questions about the political movement they’ve spent their whole lives supporting.

Obviously that isn’t going to happen, so the rise of Trump has to be attributed to the same thing that has caused all of America’s ills, i.e., somebody once said something mean about white people on TV (Even this didn’t actually happen btw, but it could have happened, and isn’t that the deeper truth here?).