The New York Times’s Wednesday night article headlined “I Have Seen the Enemy, and It Is Us’: Inside Team Trump’s Historic Collapse – How an unpopular president and an unpopular war provided an opening for Democrats to make sweeping gains in the midterms,” and containing the hype-y “This account of the Republican Party’s collapse is based on interviews with more than 70 people,” following the intro doesn’t quite live up to that implication of giddy hilarity one might’ve expected.
It’s well-reported and there is some funny shit, like Trump asking one of his minions “If we never went into Iran, what do you think would happen in the midterms?” and that, by waiting too long to book ads, MAGA Inc paid 11 times what Dems did for the cost of a local TV news commercial spot in Alaska. But overall it’s both just a tad too inside baseball-y and not comedic enough.
The opener, an in media res of a meeting between Trump’s top political chieftains Tony Fabrizio, Chris LaCivita, James Blair, and others is pretty goddamned funny though: Knowing they were fucked, Fabrizio joked “Maybe we could get asylum in Israel,” while Blair said “Look, it’s fine. I think we’ll just pull a Mike Lindell and demand a recount regardless of how many points we’re down.”