The Field Hospital

Or: Who's Holding the Scalpel, and what comes after the end of Trump... The uneasy truce between the Never Trump cohort and the Democrats on what comes next

So I’m at the lanes the other night, right, third frame, Walter’s explaining for the forty-seventh time how the Geneva Convention applies to league bowling, and I’m thinking about Charlie Sykes.

Bear with me, man.

Sykes has this bit he does — and look, I dig Charlie, he’s done the work, I’m not gonna pretend he hasn’t — but he’s got this medical metaphor he keeps running. MAGA and Trump, that’s like a dude presenting at the ER with a heart attack. Acute emergency. All hands on deck. You deal with that first.

Sidebar: Deuce Davis nails what the Dude is driving at in this video (long)

Reality Checking the Bulwark: Charlie Sykes

But then, once you’ve stabilized the patient? The leftism, man. That’s the cancer. And that’s gonna need to be burned out or cut out, and brother, that is a whole other procedure.

I just want to sit with that metaphor for a second, because I think Charlie is accidentally telling on himself.

Who is the patient in this scenario? It ain’t democracy, man. The patient is the center-right political order that existed before Trump showed up. The goal of the whole operation — the wartime alliance, the holding your nose, the Bulwark subscriptions — is to get that patient back on his feet. The rugged, free-trading, NATO-loving, fiscally-responsible patient who has been in a coma since approximately 2015.

And what are the left-populists in this scenario? The nurses, man. Useful during the emergency. Handed the scalpel when it’s time to operate on the cancer.

Now look. I want to get along. That’s my thing. I abide. But I have spent enough time at the Ralphs on Lincoln to know when somebody’s making nice because they want something.

Walter — my Walter, the man who pulled a piece on Smokey for a foul in a goddamn bowling league — Walter would make a perfect Never Trumper. He’s outraged, he’s principled, he will absolutely go to the mat for you, and every single thing he does is ultimately in service of his own framework. You’re out of your element, Donnie? That’s what Charlie Sykes says to the progressive left every single time they try to talk about healthcare or labor or housing. Every. Single. Time.

Here’s my question for the Never Trump field hospital crew: you keep describing a patient. What if the patient’s dead? What if there’s no center-right governing coalition left to restore, and what you’re actually doing is performing CPR on a worldview that the Republican base rejected, comprehensively, over the course of about a decade?

Because the dudes voting for Graham Platner in Maine aren’t waiting for a restored Reaganism with better manners. They’re an oyster farmer who thinks Schumer is the problem. They want something different, man. Not your thing. Something different.

The rug, man. There used to be a rug that tied this whole room together. Functioning two-party system, both parties capable of governing, argument conducted within shared norms. That rug has been thoroughly pissed on. By several parties. And the Never Trump coalition’s plan, best I can tell, is to restore the rug — their rug, the one they liked — and call it a day.

That’s just, like, their opinion, man.

The Dude abides. But the Dude is watching who’s holding the scalpel.