A lament from U.S. allies

Asa Hutchinson, Janet Daley and Gerard Baker probably have never met, but should meet. Their sensibilities, trans-Atlantic, appear quite compatible.

Hutchinson, you know. Our former governor is challenging his successor’s former employer for the Republican presidential nomination, and the path the Arkansan is trying to carve sets him apart not only from Donald Trump but the other GOP competitors.

About Daley: She was born in the U.S. and, after studying philosophy at Berkeley, crossed the pond to earn more degrees before turning to journalism, these days at the London Telegraph. Guess her politics by the title of her storied essay, Up from Liberalism.

About Baker: His ideological trajectory, identical to Daley’s, led him to the editorship of the Wall Street Journal. Now at the Times of London, he is a self-described “rightwing curmudgeon.”

What prompted a sharing of views from abroad (valuable, always) is what prompted a dismayed Daley and Baker to decry, in their respective columns, the responses of MAGA devotees and many key Republicans to the sexual assault judgment against Trump. More, the pre-trial deposition in which he asserted that “stars” such as he had long been empowered to “grab women” by the genitals (he had employed a different noun). The plaintiff, Trump sneered, wasn’t his “type,” ergo he would not have assaulted her. But “stars” could do as they wished with women, he testified, “unfortunately … or fortunately.”

“Have you got that? It might be ‘fortunate’ that famous men could sexually assault women,” Daley seethed. “Can you imagine any American politician (let alone a presidential candidate) … saying that without his career being instantly vaporized?” Yet, as Daley continued: “Trump’s prospects seem to have been not just undamaged but actually enhanced.

“What the “... or fortunately” crack makes clear is that may be conducting a vendetta against foreign powers stealing American industries — and migrants taking jobs that might have gone to American voters — but he is also defying the left intelligentsia whose ‘believe all women’ credo is a threat to the sort of men who are inclined to support him and who regard all of this as part of the same conspiracy. It is really important to grasp that Trump is not gaining popularity in spite of his ugly rants. He is gaining popularity because of them.”

Her beloved America, Daley wrote, “which once thought itself unique, is falling into the old historical trap of turning to a demagogue out of confusion and despair.”

As devoted as is Daley to the U.S. as global leader and as discouraged as she at the MAGA response to the trial’s outcome, Baker let fly: “(I)t seems they long ago bought their end of the Faustian bargain by which he delivers them from the iniquities of modern America and they get their preening Mephistopheles. We haven’t yet got to the point of testing the literal truth of his famous claim that ‘I could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes,’ but you don’t have to be an alarmist to think we might be getting close.”

Indeed we may be, when one considers the views of Trump stalwarts such as Alabama’s Sen. Tommy Tuberville, who said the jury’s verdict “makes me want to vote for twice.” South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham faulted the New York legal system as “off the rails.” A similar assessment came from Florida’s Marco Rubio, who dismissed jury and judgment as “a joke.” His counterpart from Tennessee, Bill Hagerty, marveled at Trump’s resilience.

Like most every other big-name Republican, Nikki Haley, who was Trump’s U.N. ambassador and who wants the White House, was wary of alienating her ex-boss’s base. Isn’t it nice that every American can have a day in court? she said. And Mike Pence, the vice president whose safety, whose life, Trump’s mob endangered? The American people aren’t concerned with some trial, he said.

Alone among the GOP’s presidential aspirants, Hutchinson had declared early on that the trial itself was evidence sufficient of Trump’s unfitness for public office and the damage he could inflict on down-ballot candidates if renominated. The finding against Trump, Hutchinson said, underscored the character issue.

So who cares what a pair of overseas observers think about the current American political dynamic? One that, for the moment, favors a rematch of 2020? Sometimes, from a distance, comes a shrewd distillation. Here’s Baker’s: “The question must ask themselves is do they want a candidate who imperfectly captures their aspirations and anxieties but whose personal character they can at least feel is worthy of the office? Or are they happy to choose again a man who acknowledges and indeed embraces his own moral toxicity but stoops to deny only specific instantiations of it?”