The Dispatch‘s national correspondent, Kevin D. Williamson, wants to ask Republicans a question.

He points to the $270 it takes to fill up the tank of a Ford Super Duty truck in his neighborhood — 48 gallons at $5.60 a gallon for diesel — and asks, “Do you feel smart?”

Citing a column by The New York Times’ Bret Stephens, Williamson weighs the pros and cons of voters electing candidates to achieve results over voters choosing “paragons of moral rectitude.”

“There is something to be said for that approach,” writes Williamson. “One of the problems with our politics is that politicians—especially presidents—are treated as embodiments of the nation, the people, and our values, to such an extent that members of a party feel alienated and humiliated when the other party’s leader occupies the White House.”

He concludes that for partisans, “inconvenient facts necessitate a kind of rhetorical two-step.”

“There are proud Trump cultists and there are embarrassed Trump cultists, and, if you press one of the latter on Trump’s viciousness—his dishonesty, his infidelity, his venality, his susceptibility to flattery, his inconstancy—he often will retreat into comfortable pragmatism,” Williamson writes.

They will say they like Trump’s “policies,” which, Williamson charges, “mainly indicates the economic conditions coincident with Trump’s first term in office, pre-COVID, which were only to a very minor degree the result of any Trump policy.”

But press the embarrassed Trump cultist further — like on the $270 tank fill-up — and they will “retreat into moralism, albeit a negative kind of moralism based in the perceived deficiencies of the Democrats rather than in any of Trump’s particular moral virtues, which, it is plain, simply do not exist.”

When Republicans insist Americans “think of the policies,” Williamson says he wonders “what those beneficial policies are.”

“The illegally initiated and incompetently executed war in Iran that is the proximate cause of that $270 diesel bill? The obviously criminal massacres of civilians on the high seas? The gross self-dealing and corruption? The elevation of wildly unqualified yes-men such as Bill Pulte to high office? The deepening debt? The rising inflation?”

Williamson says that they like the policies, “Except for the inflation, and the trade chaos, and the war, and the corruption, and the enshrinement of utter incompetence.”

He says that you “can two-step around reality any way you like, but the fact is that right now Republicans are offering both Ken Paxton and $5.60 diesel. And so I repeat the question to my Republican friends: ‘Do you feel smart?'”

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Port Charlotte, Florida, is part of Charlotte County — which voted for President Donald Trump by a solid two-to-one margin in 2024. It was named one of the top ten places to retire in 2012.

Still seen as a deeply red state, Democrats are making inroads into the Sunshine State. Ahead of the August primary, in the race for governor, Republican Byron Donalds often polls ahead of Democrat David Jolly but only by single digits, according to data from The New York Times. Donald Trump won the state by 13 points in 2024.

A letter to the editor highly critical of President Donald Trump and his MAGA base in a Port Charlotte news outlet could be seen as surprising.

“MAGA crowd, Trump are all about winning,” reads the headline.

“Donald Trump and the MAGA movement have turned American politics into a fan-based team sport,” writes its author, Gayle Yarnall.

“Governing has become an us versus them rivalry regardless of the consequences. It is all about winning,” she laments.

“The 2024 election is long over. Yet, there are Trump signs, banners, and flags still posted around. It is akin to displaying the flag of your favorite teams like the Patriots or the Buckeyes. What is the purpose except to express that, ‘I’m on a winning team’?” Yarnall asks.

Prominent conservative talk radio host Erick Erickson has a new label for President Donald Trump: “clown.”

On his Substack newsletter, Erickson slams the president over his approach to the Iran war, for which, he notes, Trump has at least 39 times in the last 65 days “declared the United States and Iran were close to a deal only to have the Iranians openly mock him and deny it.”

He notes too that Trump on Thursday morning told “Fox & Friends” that the bombing of Iran would resume. That changed quickly.

“By the afternoon, he declared bombings would cease because a deal was close,” Erickson writes. “He claimed buy-in from the Egyptians, the Emirates, the Saudis, the Kuwaitis, the Israelis, the Iranians, and more.”

Both Egypt and Israel said they had no knowledge of a deal.

“The President, the other days, said Iran was playing us,” says Erickson. “The only one being played is President Trump. A state of war exists between Iran and its neighbors. The ceasefire is a farce. The President has turned into a clown.”

Erickson is no moderate — he was once the editor-in-chief of the right-wing website RedState and was a Fox News contributor. His bio on Spotify says his podcast “cuts through the chaos with bold clarity and biblical conviction.”

Erickson goes on to call it “Obamaesque” to think that any negotiation with a “terrorist regime that is premised on bringing about the apocalypse” is possible.

He says Trump chose to “engage” Iran and criticizes him for dealing “a serious blow” but not a “knockout” one. And he criticizes Trump for ordering Israel “to pull its punches.”

“We have now harmed our relationships with our Middle Eastern allies who depend on us for protection,” writes Erickson. “The situation is now more unstable than before the war began and it is all because of a single person who swears he’ll get a deal any day now.”

“The President should be embarrassed,” Erickson charges. “Instead, he’ll be mad at everyone except the man in his mirror.”

Image via Reuters