The Trumpists have gone full Nagasaki

You may not have had the pleasure of reading one Kurt Schlichter over the years. He’s a Trumpist blowhard columnist who writes popular dystopian novels about the looming red-blue civil war after a Democrat takeover, in a country where ‘all the sugary cereals that kids actually like’ are banned and ‘there is simply one deodorant, called “Deodorant”, which smells like wet cardboard and stains your shirt, blouse, or burqa’. He has replied to hostile tweets with the number ‘14’ – a white supremacist code for the 14 words: ‘We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.’ One column was simply titled: ‘Buy Ammo.’ I’ve read him for camp value most of the time, but also as a check-in with the truly culty right and their long, rather intense love affair with the former guy. Every time Trump said something truly grotesque, I’d see how Shlichter would react. Sure enough, every time without fail, from ‘pussy-grabbing’ to ‘Stop The Steal!’, it was unremitting, fellatial, cringe-inducing worship. But last week, something happened. His DMs and texts, he told us, ‘exploded’ – ‘I mean, they went the full Nagasaki’ – with fury at Trump for helping the Republicans bungle the midterms. And the anger came not from the usual ‘Never Trump sissies or establishment shills’, as he lovingly describes them, but from inside the house.

Not to worry: Schlichter still wants Trump to run for the nomination in 2024, and performed a few gymnastic stunts to defend him. But the bottom line was pretty simple and utterly new: ‘Some folks are a bit sensitive when the subject of the ex-president comes up. Get over it. He works for us. We owe Trump nothing. He’s a politician. He owes us.’ Then, just as his readers were gripping their iPhone with ever-whiter knuckles, he lowered the boom: ‘I do not see a clear path for Trump to get to 270 electoral votes in the general as of today.’