Mona Charen

Right after October 7th, you had celebrations of the Hamas attack, and you saw campuses around the country, you know, leftist groups on campuses celebrating that attack.

So—

So it very much depends on whether this war is perceived as successful.

If the war is unsuccessful, then what Trump will have succeeded in doing, and Netanyahu as well, is they will have given a huge gift to

to Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, Joe Kent, that whole wing of the Republican Party.

The conspiracists.

The conspiracists, the anti-Semites, who are more than happy.

First of all, they already think that Israel killed Charlie Kirk and that Israel was responsible for the Iraq War, for which there is absolutely no evidence.

And now they can

With Rubio's stupid comment, they can even claim that Israel dragged us into this war.

And so they will be empowered tremendously if the war goes badly.

Speaking of if we lived in a normal world, part of what makes our world abnormal now is that we live in an era of this personalized politics, and it has been vastly exacerbated by our system of partisan primaries.

And it is the case now.

Our elections are determined by a tiny slice of voters who turn out in primaries.

And so, you know, the primary is the only race that matters.

The general election is a given which party will win.

And as long as the Republican Party officials or Republican politicians fear their primary electorate, which is the only thing that they have to fear in most cases, they are not going to depart from Trump no matter what.

And we will see how that turns out for them in the generals this time, because they're

the cratering of his support among independents does not bode well for the general election this time.

That's exactly right.