The Josh Hammer Report

Josh Hammer

Newsweek Opinion Editor And Host,
"The Josh Hammer Show"

This week, my column highlighted some of the various perfidies Senate and House Republican leadership seem intent on forcing upon the American people, defying their own party rank-and-file in the process. GOP leadership's scorn for its own voting base is nothing new, tragically, but it does seem like the trend lines have exacerbated of late. In this week's podcast (you can listen on Apple or Spotify), I was joined by Ryan James Girdusky, a conservative activist, popular Substack writer, and founder of the school board-focused 1776 Project PAC. We discussed the rise of the New Right, whether national populism is here to stay, and the future of Donald Trump's standing in the GOP.

This was also a big week for me, media appearance-wise. Most notably, I made my maiden appearance on FOX News' "Tucker Carlson Tonight," the highest-rated show on cable news. I pulled no punches in lambasting the Anti-Defamation League's Jonathan Greenblatt for his transformation of the once-venerable civil rights organization into a bastion of progressivism and wokeism. I also appeared on Newsmax's "Rob Schmitt Tonight," OANN's "Tipping Point," Seth Leibsohn's Phoenix-based radio program, the weekly "NatCon Squad" podcast I co-host, and elsewhere. Finally, I also played an outsize role in this lengthy Politico essay about recent jurisprudential debates that have roiled the legal Right.

Our highlighted right-leaning Newsweek op-eds this week: Gordon G. Chang on Xi Jinping's recent visit to Saudi Arabia, Mark Davis on Donald Trump's current standing in the GOP, Jonathan Tobin on Volodymyr Zelensky's flaws as a purported "defender of liberalism," Jon Schweppe on what House Republicans should now do after the "Twitter Files" revelations, and Nicole Russell on the all-important 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis free speech case at the U.S. Supreme Court.

A quick programming note: I leave this Sunday for a 2.5-week international trip. I will be in Israel for 10 days, followed by the United Arab Emirates for three days and Egypt for three days. (Aside: I am particularly looking forward to the Tel Aviv–Dubai flight, which was of course only made possible by the 2020 Abraham Accords peace deals brokered by the Trump White House.) I am particularly excited to celebrate Chanukah in Jerusalem, and to ring in the new year in Dubai.

Thanks for subscribing and wishing everyone a merry Christmas, a joyous Chanukah, and a very Happy New Year. See you in 2023!

Spotlight

Brett Carlsen/Getty Images

Why Does the GOP Elite Hate Its Base?

It is one of the most bitter and tragic ironies of our contemporary politics that the leadership of one of America's two major political parties, the Republican Party, utterly despises that party's very own voting base.

The GOP elite's scorn for its own voters has, at this point, been a long time in the making. The trend accelerated during the 2009-2011 rise of the Tea Party, a grassroots movement fueled by both constitutionalism and populism. The crustier elements of the Republican establishment ran as far away as possible from the Tea Party, and the 2012 presidential coronation of private equity plutocrat Mitt Romney effectively killed the movement. Four years later, the Republican establishment fought tooth-and-nail against presidential candidates Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), the two candidates who most vociferously condemned the establishment's myriad shortcomings; as an unsurprising corollary, Trump and Cruz fetched the most primary votes that cycle from actual rank-and-file Republican voters.

The Trump presidency saw the continuation of the same basic dynamic. Republican voters, by nominating a loudmouth non-politician like Trump, were clamoring for something new. Those voters were sick of the same-old Republican pablum: willful complicity in globalization and all the harms wrought by reckless immigration compromises and myopic supply chain outsourcing, and the ideologically driven pursuit of various right-liberal economic and foreign policy dogmas more generally—even when those dogmas came at the expense of the median American's tangible interests. Nonetheless, with precious few exceptions, the conservative intelligentsia refused to treat Trump's deviations from previous decades' failed orthodoxies as anything other than a blip on the radar, to be conveniently discarded at a time when the GOP's "dead consensus" might rise anew.

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