Interesting article by Douthat. Strange that of his three scenarios, the one with, IMHO, about a 1% chance of happening is the one he put first. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/22/opinion/sunday/trump-republican-party.html

The phrase “the ideas he campaigned on” is truly lol-worthy. Trump, of course, has no policy ideas besides what he got from Breitbart. And those ideas are just watered down Daily Stormer, and also based on no actual empirical data.

So sure, you can reverse engineer some sort of non-racist, non-nostalgic, non-xenophobic version of Trumpism and try to bring it to life like Petri dish hamburger...but few people would actually buy it.

Douthat’s last two scenarios are far more plausible, and are terrifying. By implying that the benign first scenario is within the realm of possibility, I worry that Douthat is giving himself and other principled conservatives permission to be more hopeful than they should be.

It's as if he's riding in the back seat of a car careening toward a cliff and he's like a) we might land in a 100ft deep pile of down feathers and be fine, b) we might drown in the ocean, c) we might be smashed on rocks. Fingers crossed for scenario A!

Anywho, any pundit who thinks the GOP is going to get behind universal health care any time soon is...well...I guess his paycheck enables him to buy some really good stuff to smoke.