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we are missing the major point. Like Trump’s six previous Republican presidential candidates (and like many Trump supporters), all of the major 2020 Democratic candidates are decent human beings.

In Episode 8 of the second season of the HBO series “Succession,” Logan Roy’s brother says this about the media tycoon, “He's morally bankrupt. . . . In terms of the lives that will be lost by his whoring for the climate change deniers, there's a very persuasive argument to be made that he's worse than Hitler.”

For many, now and in the future, the 2020 presidential election may not just be an ordinary U.S. election, but quite literally a matter of life or death. 

zombie ideas haven’t eaten just Republicans’ brains. They have also eaten the party’s soul.

Think about what is now required for a Republican politician to be considered a party member in good standing. He or she must pledge allegiance to policy doctrines that are demonstrably false; he or she must, in effect, reject the very idea of paying attention to evidence.

There used to be Republican politicians who were more than that, but they were mainly holdovers from an earlier era, and at this point have all left the scene, one way or another. John McCain may well have been the last of his kind.

What’s left now is a party that, as far as I can tell, contains no politicians of principle; anyone who does have principles has been driven out.

you might have hoped that there would be some limits to what these apparatchiks would accept, that even they would draw the line at gross abuses of power and collusion with foreign autocrats

there is no line. If Trump wants to dismantle democracy and rule of law (which he does), his party will stand with him all the way.

All of these are wrong, of course. But we didn’t get here overnight. It took practice.

The Republican Party has gone from admiring William F. Buckley Jr., an Ivy League intellectual, to viewing higher education as a left-wing conspiracy to indoctrinate the young.

somewhere along the way, it became, “all government is bad.” Now we are in a crisis that can be solved only by massive government intervention. That’s awkward.

Next, somehow, the party of idealistic Teddy Roosevelt, pragmatic Bob Dole and heroic John McCain became anti-intellectual, by which I mean, almost reflexively opposed to knowledge and expertise. We began to distrust the experts and put faith in, well, quackery

Long before Trump, the Republican Party adopted as a key article of faith that more government was bad. We worked overtime to squeeze it and shrink it, to drown it in the bathtub, as anti-tax activist Grover Norquist liked to say.

In retribution, we started defunding education.

Conservatives have spent years trying to cut funds for basic science and research, lamenting government seed money for nearly every budding technology and then hoping for the best

Finally, there is the populist GOP distrust and dislike of the other, the foreign.

Yes, it is annoying that the Chinese didn’t come clean and explain everything to us from the start. But it appears that a Swiss company is helping to jump-start us in testing; and it is a German company that American officials reportedly tried to lure to the United States recently to help develop a vaccine for the virus.

What is happening now is the inevitable result of a party that embraced fear, weaponized xenophobia and regarded facts as dangerous, left-wing landmines that must be avoided.

Yes, elections have consequences. Those of us in the Republican Party built this moment. Now the nation must live with those consequences.

He deplored “the casual undermining of our democratic ideals, the personal attacks, the threats against principles, freedom and institutions, the flagrant disregard for truth and decency” that he said has become so prevalent in American politics.

The remarkable moment came just hours after Mr. Trump had renewed his attacks on another critic in the Republican Party, Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, saying he “couldn’t get elected dog catcher in Tennessee.” Mr. Corker, appearing more weary than angry, said the president “is debasing our country.”

Mr. Flake’s dramatic decision and the back-and-forth between Mr. Trump and Mr. Corker appeared to mark a moment of decision for the Republican Party. A week ago, Senator John McCain, the senior senator from Arizona, spoke in Philadelphia, decrying the “half-baked, spurious nationalism” that he sees overtaking American politics. Former President George W. Bush, in yet another speech, lamented, “We’ve seen nationalism distorted into nativism.”

But Mr. Flake, choosing the Senate floor for his fierce denunciation, appeared to issue a direct challenge to his party.

Without mentioning Mr. Trump by name, Mr. Flake, 54, took direct aim at the president’s policies, notably his isolationist tendencies, but also his behavior and that of his aides. He had already touched on these themes in a book he published in August that was highly critical of the president.

“We must stop pretending that the conduct of some in our executive branch are normal,” Mr. Flake said. “They are not normal. Reckless, outrageous and undignified behavior has become excused and countenanced as telling it like it is when it is actually just reckless, outrageous and undignified. And when such behavior emanates from the top of our government, it is something else. It is dangerous to a democracy.”

“It is often said that children are watching,” he continued. “Well, they are. And what are we going to do about that? When the next generation asks us, why didn’t you do something? Why didn’t you speak up? What are we going to say?”

The second reason why the two plans must be melded into one is political. Democrats will never accept more temporary workers without the legalization of unauthorized foreigners. Republicans will not countenance any type of amnesty if growers, developers, landscapers and the health care industry are not placated by a significantly larger number of legal, low-wage, low-skill workers.

But Trump increased that number to roughly 44 percent, which included posts in some countries that usually went to career diplomats, such Thailand and Kenya.

John McCain; longtime Biden friend and former Sen. Chris Dodd; and Comcast executive David Cohen. Richard Perkins, a donor and former speaker of the Nevada Assembly, told POLITICO that he is lobbying to be the top U.S. diplomat in Canada.

There are some who do a lot for the campaign and they don’t have a lot of experience in government and you want to take care of them and what the fuck else are you going to do with them?”

Instead, the White House has been focused on pushing Covid legislation through Congress and compiling lists of nominees for judgeships and attorneys general. Biden has named only one ambassador thus far: Linda Thomas-Greenfield, a former State Department official and ambassador, to the United Nations.

Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), a Democratic fundraiser who served as ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein, said he’s received calls from about a dozen donors in recent weeks trying to determine their next steps.

On Wednesday, Biden will meet virtually with Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin, though no ambassador is expected to be named.

We continue to engage in conversations with the White House and we've been gratified that our counterparts understand and value the importance of career professionals in senior roles, including ambassadorships,” a senior State Department official said when asked about the status of the situation.

“When you talk to [donors], get them in a private room and off guard, they’ll be real open to the fact that they’re looking to get something out of it,” according to a donor. “Is it openly spoken about? No, but it’s pretty clear.”

“He is a guy who has come through the long Democratic tradition, but unlike Trump, I think he’s going to pick career people for very important posts,” a Biden ally said.

They also hope the administration considers placing career appointees in high-profile but challenging ambassadorships in Russia and China.

Saudi Arabian officials, for example, have often preferred having a political appointee because such figures are more likely to have a direct line to the president. But given the Biden administration’s efforts to de-emphasize the U.S.-Saudi relationship, placing a career diplomat in Riyadh could essentially tell the Saudis that they won’t get backchannels to Biden or special favors.

“No other country has nearly half its ambassadorships vacant, or ever has. This hurts our ability to defend our national interests and pursue our national objectives,” said Eric Rubin, president of the American Foreign Service Association, the diplomats’ union.

A jazzed turnout by the pro-Trump base is vital to GOP hopes of winning the House in the 2022 midterms. But there is also a chance that a flurry of fervently pro-Trump Senate candidates in swing states could damage the party's hopes of overturning the thin Democratic majority in the chamber.

In a key impeachment test vote this week, 45 GOP senators signaled that they plan for Trump to pay no price for inciting the most heinous assault by a president on the US government in history in the Capitol riot.

In another sign of the GOP's future course, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene was not censured by her party after CNN's KFile reported that she expressed supporting in recent years assassinations of Democratic leaders before she ran for Congress.

Greene, was rewarded with a plum committee assignment.

Remnants of the old GOP -- such as former George W. Bush aide Rob Portman -- who are unwilling to sign up to the unhinged populism that now drives the party of Lincoln have nowhere to go. The Ohio senator announced this week that he will not run for reelection.

But in Arkansas, former White House press secretary Sarah Sanders is wearing her wars with the Washington media in her dishonest tenure as a badge of honor to appeal to the fervidly pro-Trump base in a gubernatorial run.

And in Arizona, Oregon and Pennsylvania, anti-Trump Republicans such as Cindy McCain are being purged while Trump loyalists take prominent positions

Former Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who is now a CNN commentator, said on "The Situation Room" that the GOP needed to move swiftly against Greene and compared the failure of leaders to honor its values with the courage shown by detained Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny.

The warning cited the presidential transition "as well as other perceived grievances fueled by false narratives" as potential catalysts for uprisings. Those narratives were pushed for weeks by Trump and his Republican enablers in Washington and still find a home in sections of the conservative media.

The former President has long enjoyed elevated approval ratings in his party that have protected him from the consequences of his unconstitutional power grabs and failures among Republicans leaders he bullied for years.

Still, a CNN/SSRS poll published just before he left office, found however that 48% of Republicans wanted to move on from Trump while 47% hoped that he would continue to be regarded as the leader of the party.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, whose presidential dreams were crushed by the former reality star in 2016, was long seen as the poster boy for a new, more optimistic and inclusive GOP. A career trajectory that now has him standing strongly with Trump and branding impeachment as all about "vengeance from the radical left" is an apt personification of the transformation Trump wrought in the party. It may also have something to do with chatter about a possible primary challenge from Ivanka Trump.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was among the most distraught Republicans over the attack on his beloved US Senate incited by Trump in his effort to thwart the constitutional transfer of power to Biden.

Another key Republican figure, former US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, who expertly engineered her exit from Trump's administration with the ex-President's blessing, has walked back her tame earlier criticism of Trump after the insurrection.

some have adopted a very different political philosophy than the Founders held

This approach to government promises the recovery of a mythical past.

It accepts the lies of a leader as a deeper form of political truth.

It feeds a sense of White victimhood

It denigrates experts and expertise

It slanders outsiders and blames them for social and economic ills

It emphasizes emotion over reason

It warns of global plots by Jews and shadowy elites.

It revels in anger and dehumanization.

It praises law and order while reserving the right to disobey the law and overturn the political order through violence.

The 45th president and a significant portion of his supporters have embraced American fascism.

Though he probably cannot name the political theory he has embraced, his own recklessness, vanity and authoritarian instincts have led him down fascist grooves.

the influence of his treacherous ideology is still being spread by unprincipled people seeking influence and profit. American fascism needs to be aggressively marginalized.

The task of marginalization will also be more difficult if those on the left try to lump all conservatives into Trump’s camp — arguing that fascism is somehow the natural destination of Barry Goldwater’s nomination or Ronald Reagan’s presidency. This is utter rubbish.

there is a massive moral gap between the politics of George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney on one side, and Trump’s civic barbarism.

for American democracy to fully function, civic republicanism will eventually need a home on the political right.

Greene compiled a long list of unhinged comments and social media posts, including endorsement of violence against and assassinations of top Democrats, 9/11 trutherism and denials of school shootings.

Paradoxically, by seeking to punish Trump and Greene, Democrats may actually be helping to perpetuate the cycle of victimhood and complaints about "cancel culture" that each uses to crank up the anger of their radical base.

Greene has seized Trump's mantle by remaining defiant and insisting that she will not apologize for her mistakes in interviews and social media posts

"The entire Marjorie Taylor Greene disaster has been a meteor headed directly at the GOP conference since she won her primary. She should have been put on the bench then," said Republican strategist Rob Stutzman. "But the President liked her -- and liked the Q crazies because they liked him. GOP leadership needs to get onto cutting this craziness out of the party or it will proliferate."

Trump has long used the idea of victimhood as an anchor of his appeal to grassroots supporters who feel ostracized from the Washington establishment. In fact, one of the pillars of his defense in his Senate impeachment trial next week will be an argument that Democrats are trying to cancel his right of free speech -- which he used to discredit a fair election and to send a mob to sack the Capitol. That's a message Greene echoed with her mask on Thursday, which read, "Free Speech."

Greene's loss of her committee assignments may actually give her an opportunity to portray her rebuke as the result of standing up to liberals and even "establishment" members of her own party. She has told her supporters she has raised at least $1.6 million during the uproar over the past week.

While just 11 House Republicans voted to remove Greene from her committee assignments Thursday night, 61 voted the night before to remove Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, the third-ranking member of the conference, from her leadership position over her vote to impeach Trump.

Greene told The Washington Examiner that in removing her from her assignments Democrats "don't even realize they're helping me. I'm pretty amazed at how dumb they are."

Rather than taking full responsibility for her actions in her Thursday speech, Greene said the media that exposed her lies and lunacy is as bad as the QAnon conspiracy theory she espoused. She called Democrats -- rather than Trump's rioters who invaded the Capitol on January 6 -- a "mob."

"Think of Greene as a virus. Forceful and decisive action has to be taken to prevent the spread,"

Republicans could have taken more forceful action to drive Greene and her radical sentiments from their party at any time in the last few months -- or over the past year when she was running for Congress. Instead, Greene got a standing ovation from many in the House Republican Conference meeting Wednesday night.

The former President on Thursday declined to answer for his seditious behavior, turning down a request by House impeachment managers to testify for his trial.

The furor over Trump and Greene shows that even with the ex-President out of office, most of the Washington GOP is not willing to take issue with the radical fringe that festers among its most loyal voters.

"In the House, I tell you what I think's going on. I think they're trying to play both sides," former Ohio Republican Gov. John Kasich said on CNN's "The Situation Room" on Thursday. "They don't want to aggravate the people who sort of sign up to QAnon and these conspiracy theories. They don't want to aggravate them but they also want to win the majority. It's all a fight for power."

For many in the party, Trump's unrepentant departure after trying to tear democracy down with false claims of vote fraud and Greene's rocket to fame as a "Make America Great Again" heroine are a nightmare scenario.

"I do think as a party we have to figure out what we stand for, and I think we've got to be a party of ideas and policies and principles and get away from members dabbling in conspiracy theories," South Dakota Republican Sen. John Thune told CNN's Manu Raju on Thursday. "I don't think that's a productive course of action or one that's going to lead to much prosperity politically in the future."

"The House Republican Conference has been taken over by QAnon caucus, the crackpot caucus and the conspiracy caucus at the same time," Democratic House Caucus Chairman Hakeem Jeffries told CNN's Erin Burnett Thursday night.

"The party of Lincoln is gone. The party of Reagan is gone. The party of John McCain is gone. This is now the party of Marjorie Taylor Greene."

Republican incumbents are straining for survival from New England to the Deep South, in the heartland and the West and even Alaska.

With the chamber now split, 53-47, three or four seats will determine Senate control, depending on which party wins the White House.

What started as a lopsided election cycle with Republicans defending 23 seats, compared with 12 for Democrats, quickly became a more stark referendum on the president as Democrats reached deeper into Trump country and put the GOP on defense.

Suddenly some of the nation’s better-known senators — Lindsey Graham in South Carolina, Susan Collins in Maine — faced strong reelection threats.

Only two Democratic seats are being seriously contested, while at least 10 GOP-held seats are at risk.

Felkel added: “You’d be hard pressed to admit we don’t have a Trump problem.”

The political landscape is quickly changing from six years ago when most of these senators last faced voters. It’s a reminder of how sharp the national mood has shifted in the Trump era.

Younger voters and more minorities are pushing some states toward Democrats, including in Colorado, where the parties have essentially stopped spending money for or against GOP Sen. Cory Gardner because it seems he is heading toward defeat by Democrat John Hickenlooper, a former governor.

GOP senators must balance an appeal to Trump’s most ardent supporters with outreach to voters largely in suburbs who are drifting away from the president and his tone .

Arizona could see two Democratic senators for the first time since last century if former astronaut Mark Kelly maintains his advantage over GOP Sen. Martha McSally for the seat held by the late Republican John McCain.

In Georgia, Trump calls David Perdue his favorite senator among the many who have jockeyed to join his golf outings and receive his private phone calls. But the first-term senator faces a surge of new voters in the state and Democrat Jon Ossoff is playing hardball.

Ossoff called Pedue a “crook” over the senator’s stock trades during the pandemic. Perdue shot back that the Ossoff would do anything to mislead Georgians about Democrats’ “radical and socialist” agenda.

Democrats have tapped into what some are calling a “green wave” — a new era of fundraising —

Competitive races are underway in Republican strongholds of Texas, Kansas and Alaska where little known Al Gross broke state records, Democrats said, in part with viral ads introducing voters to the military-veteran-turned-doctor who once fought off a grizzly bear.

The COVID crisis has shadowed the Senate races as Democrats linked Trump’s handling of the pandemic to the GOP’s repeated attempts to undo the Obama-era Affordable Care Act, particularly its insurance protections for those with preexisting medical conditions.

“In more places in the country than not, the president is not getting good marks” on that, Flaherty said, and it’s damaging Senate GOP candidates, “especially those in lockstep with the president.”

Over the past four years, the Trump administration had constructed 371 miles of border barriers, as of Oct 16. And it is on pace to reach 400 miles next week. However, all but 16 miles of the new barriers replace or reinforce existing structures.

Alan Sanchez, 57, a defense contractor from Maricopa, Ariz., conceded that the president did not get it done. But he said he did what he could.

The yearslong Republican campaign to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act came to a head unsuccessfully and dramatically in the first year of Mr. Trump’s presidency, when Senator John McCain of Arizona cast the decisive vote against the effort.

His campaign boasts that he has flipped the balance of three federal appeals courts and shifted nine appeals courts to the right. His nomination of Justice Amy Coney Barrett in the weeks before the election could reshape abortion rights, immigration law and the government’s regulatory power. Confirming a Supreme Court justice so close to an election was unprecedented, and Democrats framed it as an illegitimate power grab by Republicans.

The Department of Homeland Security has argued that the new barriers have reduced the personnel needed to staff certain sectors, and reduced unauthorized immigration. In Mr. Trump’s first year in office, illegal border crossings did decline to the lowest point since the 1970s, but then increased to the highest point in a decade in the 2019 fiscal year before decreasing again this year during the pandemic.

The 2017 tax cuts are one of the biggest legislative achievements of Mr. Trump’s first term in office, and one celebrated by his supporters.

Some critics, however, have noted that the final tax cut that Mr. Trump signed into law was far smaller than what he promised as a candidate. The Tax Policy Center, run by the Brookings Institution, estimated that it was only one-quarter the size of the plan Mr. Trump campaigned on four years ago

Mr. Trump said he would cut the top corporate income tax rate to 15 percent from 35 percent, for example. His final bill brought it down to 21 percent.Those nuances, however, have been left out of his rallies, where Mr. Trump has been telling his supporters (falsely) that he succeeded in passing the “biggest tax cut in history.”

While most Americans got a tax cut, high earners received 60 percent of the total tax savings.

He vowed to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement or withdraw from it entirely, pull out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and raise tariffs.He has delivered on those promises.

Though some experts are skeptical that Mr. Trump’s trade policies have been economically beneficial — with the conservative Tax Foundation estimating that the tariffs have brought in revenue, but reduced wages, gross domestic product and job growth — supporters have been delighted.

“I did a focus group tonight with women who voted for Trump in 2016,” Ms. Longwell wrote. “Not a single one was planning to vote for him again.”

In other words, Mr. Trump’s effort smacked of a too-late, too-lame apology to an ex who has long since moved on. It also underscored Mr. Trump’s special knack for making statements (or sending tweets) that are perfectly suited to being clipped, saved and hurled back in his face when facts contradict him later on, or in real time. Mr. Trump has proved himself, again and again, a grand master of delivering famous last words.

Mr. Trump seems to be tempting fate on a daily basis since he himself became infected.

He has said he is a “perfect physical specimen,” feels better than he did 20 years ago and is now “immune” from the disease — never mind that the course of the coronavirus has shown itself to be treacherous and unpredictable.

It kicked off on Day 2 when the first of four Trump White House press secretaries, Sean Spicer, claimed that the crowd gathered for Mr. Trump’s 2017 inauguration was “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period.” Overhead photos of Mr. Trump’s inaugural crowd next to Mr. Obama’s proved this remark to be ridiculous, period.

He already boasted a long rap sheet of “unfortunate remarks,” all readily captured and spread via video, Twitter, TikTok and wherever else famous last words get immortalized these days.

“We have it totally under control,” Mr. Trump said in January on CNBC, an opening salvo of denial that would soon be hung around his neck.

Traditionally, presidents have tried to avoid making statements that might prove embarrassing later on

Every president typically gets one or two shudder-worthy sound bites on their permanent record. President Barack Obama promised that “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor” under his health care plan, a proposition that proved false during the troubled rollout of the Affordable Care Act in 2013.

“Politicians are always going to say things they regret,” said Victoria Clarke, a longtime Republican communications strategist who has advised several elected officials and administrations

He continues to insist that the virus is “disappearing,” an assertion flatly contradicted by rising rates of infection across much of the country in recent days.

But the response to the coronavirus has placed the White House’s pre-existing condition on, well, steroids.

The current outbreak in the White House has been accompanied by a video parade of “unfortunate remarks” — or, depending on your point of view, a rampage of karma.

Kayleigh McEnany, testing positive last week was accompanied by a now-infamous clip from a Fox News interview Ms. McEnany gave in February. “We will not see diseases like the coronavirus come here,” vowed the then-future press secretary.

Likewise, when Kellyanne Conway, a former senior White House adviser, revealed her own coronavirus diagnosis, numerous news media outlets and Twitter feeds resurrected an oft-mocked statement she made about the still-emerging outbreak in March. “It is being contained,” vowed Ms. Conway

“No president can go four years without making a comment that can be considered a ‘gotcha moment,’” said Erik Smith, a veteran Democratic spokesman and operative. “But this president seems to pile them up like cordwood and take joy in it.”

It has lent the president a level of credibility as a “straight shooter,” even as he has been caught in thousands of false statements, dubious boasts and comical reassurances.

“It affects virtually nobody!” Mr. Trump declared of the coronavirus at a packed rally in Ohio last month — another remark that would go literally viral. It did not age well.

All of this demonstrates how difficult it is to run as a Republican incumbent almost anywhere in 2020. Strategists who spoke to CNN worry that Trump has become a liability for Republicans needing to expand their coalition beyond the President's core base of supporters.

"Republican candidates need something more like Romney in '12 and less like McCain in '08," said Liam Donovan, a GOP strategist in Washington.

That one-two punch could knock the GOP out of power in Washington-- and it's what has strategists hoping the President's reelection team can successfully transform the race to a choice between Trump and an unpalatable Biden.

"This is the one thing he (Trump) cannot change the subject on," said a Republican strategist. "This is not a political opponent, this is not going way and he has never had to deal with something like this."

Trump overall has a 45% approval rating. While only 42% approve of how he's handled the pandemic, 50% still said they approve of Trump's handling of the economy.

"The economic message resonates strongly, particularly in a time like this," said Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh. "President Trump is clearly the one to restore us to that position. He did it once, he will do it again."

"Absent some sort of V-shaped recovery many people think he is dead in the water," said the Republican strategist.

Trump has solidified his position within the party. That has made it harder for Republicans in Congress to distance themselves from him without antagonizing his base. That, say Republican operatives, risks keeping away voters who may consider the GOP but don't like the President.

"It's a very, very tough environment. If you have a college degree and you live in suburbia, you don't want to vote for us,

The task requires Senate candidates to make appeals to suburban voters who flipped to Democrats in the 2018 midterm elections as a reaction against Trump.

Scott Reed, the political director at the US Chamber of Commerce and a veteran of Republican campaigns, said that a presidential reelection campaign is "always" a referendum on the incumbent and his party.

Congress, he noted is, having a relative boom in popularity -- 31% support in the latest Gallup poll, the highest in over a decade -- thanks in part to the passage of economic relief.

The line aims to combat the most consistent line of criticism from Democrats -- that Collins has voted in line with the Trump administration on everything from judicial appointments to health care to the President's acquittal on impeachment -- without having to disavow Trump himself.

"The truth is despite being massively outspent by liberal dark money groups, Republicans are still well-positioned to hold the Senate majority in the fall," said Jesse Hunt, a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

"When he does it right three days in a row, it really bumps his numbers," said Reed. "We need command performance on message discipline."

In 2008, rumors again circulated online that a candidate was being fed answers during a debate. Ann Althouse, a law professor and conservative blogger, wrote that close-up TV stills showed that Barack Obama “was wearing an earpiece” during a debate with John McCain.

Four years later, during the 2004 presidential debates, rumors circulated among left-wing bloggers that George W. Bush was getting help from a surreptitiously placed earpiece.

2000, when Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing radio host, accused then-candidate Al Gore of getting answers fed to him through an earpiece during a “Meet the Press” appearance.

In 2016, the rumor appeared again, this time attached to Hillary Clinton, who was accused by right-wing websites of wearing a secret earpiece. (One such story, which appeared on the conspiracy theory website Infowars, was shared by Donald Trump Jr. and other pro-Trump influencers.)

Foreign politicians, including Emmanuel Macron of France, have also been baselessly accused of wearing earpieces during debates.

But the idea of a hidden helper giving one side an unfair debate advantage has proved seductive to campaign operatives trying to explain away a lopsided debate, or sow doubts about cheating on the other side.

Mr. Trump has taken to describing shadows on almost every wall: false claims that the election is “rigged” against him, complaints that the coronavirus pandemic was “unfair” to his record on the economy, insistence that people who disagree with him within his own government about policy matters are part of a concerted effort to undermine him.

Claiming to be the victim of the political establishment has been key to Mr. Trump’s political persona since he entered the 2016 presidential race

But in a pandemic, when more than 200,000 people have died and millions have lost their jobs, Mr. Trump’s complaints about the system being unfair to him are discordant at best.

His angry performance in the debate on Tuesday did little to quiet the concerns of such voters. A CNN snap poll conducted that night among registered voters found that by more than two-to-one, debate viewers thought Mr. Biden had been the winner.And in a reminder of how unpopular his pugilistic, taunting style remains with most voters, respondents said by an equally wide margin — 67 to 32 percent — that the president’s attacks on Mr. Biden that night had been unfair.

The third and largest strain is the young. They grew up in the era of Facebook and MSNBC and identity politics. They went to colleges smothered by progressive sermonizing. And they reacted by running in the other direction

I couldn’t quite suppress the disturbing voice in my head saying, “If you were 22, maybe you’d be here too.”

Conservatives have always inveighed against the cultural elite—the media, the universities, Hollywood. But in the Information Age, the purveyors of culture are now corporate titans.

The national conservatives thus describe a world in which the corporate elite, the media elite, the political elite, and the academic elite have all coagulated into one axis of evil, dominating every institution and controlling the channels of thought.

At the heart of this blue oligarchy are the great masters of surveillance capitalism, the Big Tech czars who decide in secret what ideas get promoted, what stories get suppressed

In the NatCon worldview, the profiteers of surveillance capitalism see all and control all

“Big Business is not our ally,” Marco Rubio argued. “They are eager culture warriors who use the language of wokeness to cover free-market capitalism.”

The “entire phalanx of Big Business has gone hard left,” Cruz said. “We’ve seen Big Business, the Fortune 500, becoming the economic enforcers of the hard left. Name five Fortune 500 CEOs who are even remotely right of center.”

The idea that the left controls absolutely everything—from your smartphone to the money supply to your third grader’s curriculum—explains the apocalyptic tone

“We are confronted now by a systematic effort to dismantle our society, our traditions, our economy, and our way of life,” said Rubio.

The first great project of the national conservatives is to man the barricades in the culture war. These people have certainly done their homework when it comes to cultural Marxism—how the left has learned to dominate culture and how the right now needs to copy their techniques

The first interesting debate among the NatCons is philosophical: Should we fight to preserve the classical-liberal order or is it necessary to abandon it?

Some of the speakers at the conference were in fact classical liberals, who believe in free speech, intellectual debate, and neutral government

Glenn Loury gave an impassioned speech against cancel culture, the illiberal left, and the hyper-racialized group consciousness that divides people into opposing racial camps.

But others argued that this sort of liberalism is a luxury we cannot afford. The country is under assault from a Marxist oligarchy that wants to impose its own pseudo-religious doctrine.

If you try to repulse that with pallid liberalism, with weak calls for free speech and tolerance, you’ll end up getting run over by those who possess fanatical zeal, economic power, and cultural might.

Yoram Hazony, the chief intellectual architect of national conservatism, is an Orthodox Jew who went to Princeton before moving to Israel. He argues that you can’t have a society that embraces government neutrality and tries to relegate values to the private sphere.

If conservatives want to stand up to the pseudo-religion of wokeism, they have to put traditional religion at the center of their political project.

Another Israeli political philosopher at the conference, Ofir Haivry, argued that Americans shouldn’t delude themselves into thinking that a nation is built out of high-minded liberal abstractions, like the Bill of Rights. A nation is, instead, a cultural tradition, a common language, a set of rituals and beliefs, and a religious order—a collective cultural identity.

For his part, Hazony argued that the American cultural identity is Christian—and has to be if it is not going to succumb to the woke onslaught. If 80 percent of Americans are Christian, Hazony reasoned, then Christian values should dominate.

The problem in America, Hazony continued, is that LGBTQ activists today, like American Jews in the 1950s, are trying to expel Christianity from the public square.

Hazony said. “Above all else we’ve got to get God and scripture back in the schools.”

Another interesting debate among the NatCons is political and economic.

Conservatives have got the culture-war act down. Trump was a culture-war president with almost no policy arm attached. The question conservatives at the conference were asking was how to move beyond owning the libs to effecting actual change.

Christopher Rufo, the architect of this year’s school-board-meeting protests against critical race theory, argued that conservatives had erred when they tried to slowly gain power in elite cultural institutions.

Instead, Rufo argued, they should rally the masses to get state legislatures to pass laws embracing their values. That’s essentially what’s now happening across red America.

My old friend Rod Dreher of The American Conservative argued that because the left controls the commanding heights of the culture and the economy, the only institution the right has a shot at influencing is the state.

“We need to quit being satisfied with owning the libs, and save our country,” Dreher said. “We need to unapologetically embrace the use of state power.”

The culture war merges with the economic-class war—and a new right emerges in which an intellectual cadre, the national conservatives, rallies the proletarian masses against the cultural/corporate elites.

This is national conservatism pursued to its logical conclusion: using state power to break up and humble the big corporations and to push back against coastal cultural values.

Orbán, in Dreher’s view, understands the civilizational stakes of the culture war; he has, for instance, used the power of the state to limit how much transgenderism can be taught to children in schools. “Our team talks incessantly about how horrible wokeness is,” Dreher said at the conference. “Orbán actually does something about it.”

Trump’s devastation of the old order produced a grand struggle on the right to build a new one on Trumpian populist lines.

They are wrong, too, to think there is a wokeist Anschluss taking over all the institutions of American life.

Furthermore, if Hazony thinks America is about to return to Christian dominance, he’s living in 1956.

there is something extremely off-putting about the NatCon public pose. In person, as I say, I find many of them charming, warm, and friendly. But their public posture is dominated by the psychology of threat and menace. If there was one expression of sympathy, kindness, or grace uttered from the podium in Orlando, I did not hear it. But I did hear callousness, invocations of combat, and whiffs of brutality.

One big thing the NatCons are right about is that in the Information Age, the cultural and corporate elites have merged.

Right-wing parties around the world are gradually becoming working-class parties that stand against the economic interests and cultural preferences of the highly educated.

Left-wing parties are now rooted in the rich metro areas and are more and more becoming an unsteady alliance between young AOC left-populists and Google.

NatCons are also probably right that conservatism is going to get a lot more statist.

Marco Rubio countered by, in effect, arguing that you can’t rally cultural populists if you are not also going to do something for them economically. Cultural populism leads to economic populism.

Over the past few decades there have been various efforts to replace the Reagan Paradigm: the national-greatness conservatism of John McCain; the compassionate conservatism of George W. Bush; the Reformicon conservatism of the D.C. think tanks in the 21st century

the Trumpian onslaught succeeded where these movements have so far fizzled because Trump understood better than they did the coalescence of the new American cultural/corporate elite and the potency of populist anger against it.

the alarming future of the American right: the fusing of the culture war and the class war into one epic Marxist Götterdämmerung.

the disconcerting reality is that America’s rarified NatCon World is just one piece of a larger illiberal populist revolt that is strong and rising.

Mr. Gutfeld has said he initially connected with network executives through his friendship with Andrew Breitbart, a fellow Californian and an early contributor to The Huffington Post. Mr. Gutfeld had been writing there as he moved beyond magazines, embracing the rollicking venom of the nascent blogosphere and tormenting the in-house liberals.

“He’s like America’s latchkey kid, grown up,” said Nick Gillespie, an editor at large at Reason, the libertarian magazine, and a “Red Eye” regular. “You are constantly searching out new things to pass the day when the adults aren’t around.”

What he did not know was that Fox was looking for someone like him — or at least someone unusual enough to advance an unusual new venture: proving that the right knew how to laugh.

“In every situation there’s that polarity where the Republicans are Dean Wormer in ‘Animal House,’” Mr. Gutfeld said, naming the film’s antagonist. And Democrats, he continued, came off as “the fun, Jon Stewart, ‘let’s have a great time and make fun of Dean Wormer.’ And I said that my goal was to flip that.”

“He was using a lot of all-caps,” Arianna Huffington recalled, mostly warmly.

Like media personalities before and since — including Joe Rogan and a constellation of other podcaster-comedians — Mr. Gutfeld took care to convey a vital quality to his audience: that he was getting away with something, saying what should not be said. He names Norm Macdonald, David Letterman and Tim Dillon as favored comedy minds.

Matt Sienkiewicz, a Boston College professor and Mr. Marx’s co-author of “That’s Not Funny,” said Mr. Gutfeld’s emergence was a signal accomplishment for the right: “somehow claiming conservativism or right-wing-ness as being against the squares.”

Around this period, he also often did something that feels disorienting to rewatch, given the host’s present disdain for those who moralize about Mr. Trump: He moralized about Mr. Trump.

“I’ve heard people defend him about making fun of a disability, making fun of John McCain, making fun of women,” he said on “The Five” in December 2015, accusing a Fox colleague of “Trumpsplaining” away his behavior. “No one will ever stop defending the crass stuff he says.”

“He is a salesman,” Mr. Gutfeld said, cradling his French bulldog, Gus, on his lap in the home the host shares with his wife, Elena Moussa. “Once you understand that, the derangement just kind of washes away.”

While Mr. Gutfeld mostly agrees with other Fox personalities in the lineup of Republican-friendly hours — that progressives are nuts, that Mr. Trump is unduly targeted, that President Biden is a doddering mess — “Gutfeld!” does land differently, with a host who seems adamant that his exclamation point is in on the joke.

“He’s today’s Don Rickles,” Candace Caine, a devotee from Birmingham, Ala., said after a recent taping — her third visit to see Mr. Gutfeld — where she leaned over a railing to shout “I love you!” during a commercial break.

After three bloody months, Russia finally took Mariupol in mid-May, potentially creating a land bridge from the Russian-controlled Crimean Peninsula to the south.

As Russia struggles to move forward, Ukraine has also suffered setbacks.

So now Ukrainians are threatening to cut off Russian lines of supply and pushing their forces to the rear.”

Cutting off Russian supply lines east of Kharkiv would put Russian troops in the same situation they were in after their advance on Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, at the beginning of the war, officials said

In Ukraine, he established a more streamlined process. Russian pilots began coordinating with troops on the ground toward a similar objective in the eastern region of Donbas, and Russian units were talking to one another about shared goals.

“There are some deep flaws in the Russian army that they could not have repaired in the last few weeks even if they had tried. The flaws are deep and fundamental.”

Though most of the city’s civilian population has fled in the past few weeks, 12,000 people, many of them elderly, are said to be trapped there in appalling conditions.

European Union members finally reached an agreement on a Russian oil embargo and new sanctions against Russia.

It was the second guilty verdict handed down by Ukrainian courts for war crimes since the invasion began.

The Ukrainians, after seven years of training alongside troops from the United States and other NATO countries, follow the more Western method and have proved particularly agile at adapting to circumstances, American military officials said.

But, General Breedlove added: “Even our army would be hard-pressed to refit, refurbish and reorganize in two weeks after having received such a sound whipping.

“We keep hearing accounts of Putin getting more involved,” said Ms. Farkas, who is now executive director of the McCain Institute. “We know that if you have presidents meddling in targeting and operational military decisions, it’s a recipe for disaster.”