Conservative commentator Jonah Goldberg this weekend said it would “take a heart of stone not to laugh at the situation” that the various factions of Donald Trump’s allies have gotten themselves into, just weeks before the president-elect returns to the White House.
Trump is currently “stuck in this hard place” and not “quite yet figured out” how to appease the various tribes of his support, the former Fox News pundit-turned-editor-in-chief of The Dispatch told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.
The recent split among Republicans over immigrant visas for skilled workers — which are backed by Elon Musk but opposed by the hardcore MAGA wing of the GOP ― is “one rift among a bunch that will probably come down the pike as we move forward,” Goldberg predicted.
“Trump is this classic, ‘What do I have to do put you in this condo today?’ kind of salesman and he makes promises” to all the groups that “cannot be reconciled with each other,” Goldberg explained.
One of the ironies, he added, is that all of Trump’s backers “rode this populist tide in claiming that establishment Republicans and the conservative establishment and the old Reaganite crowd, the old National Review crowd, ‘They don’t know anything and all the answers are super easy and we know exactly what to do.’”
“And then it turns out this stuff is really complicated,” he pointed out.
But the “serious people” have been ousted “in favor of all these populist yahoos” and “now they’re the dog that caught the car and they don’t know how to do any of this policy because they haven’t done any of the leg work on it,” he concluded.
Watch the discussion here: