Sore Winners

The Sore Winners Can’t Move On.By Jonah Goldberg, The Goldberg File

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Well, now Donald Trump is going to be president. His supporters are understandably ecstatic. But that ecstasy hasn’t prevented some of them from being very sore winners, which is a much uglier thing than being a sore loser. (And I must say, Trump deserves praise for resisting the urge to rub it in when he won. I’m told that was not the approach some on his staff wanted). Newt Gingrich, for example, is railing against Republicans who didn’t rally to Trump as “whiny, sniveling negative cowards.” He wants the Never Trump crowd to “drift off into the ashbin of history while we go ahead and work with Donald Trump and with the House and Senate Republicans to create a dramatically new future.” I find this both sad and hilarious coming from Newt. Gingrich’s revolt against George H. W. Bush was instrumental in making him a one-term president. Now, I agreed with Newt on the substance of his disagreement, but I find his passion about partisan loyalty to be awfully selective. The same holds for his almost surgical moral outrage at sexual impropriety. He spent much of the closing months of the election arguing that Donald Trump’s sexual misdeeds were trivialities but the sexual misdeeds of Bill Clinton (the man he helped impeach largely over sexual misdeeds) disqualified his wife for the job of president. Feel free to diagram that argument in your free time. But, this isn’t all that startling. By Newt’s own account, he’s always seen himself as a revolutionary, and when revolutionaries win, their first recourse is to purge ideological allies who refused to be partisan allies. The first to go under the Bolsheviks (other than the aristocracy) were the Mensheviks.