The Dispatch Warns Trump and GOP Have ‘Brought Our Country to the Verge of Something Awful and Unspeakable’

(AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

The Dispatch, a conservative publication founded by former Fox News contributors Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes, published a rare, unsparing editorial raking President Donald Trump and his “enablers” in the GOP over the coals on Wednesday.

Under the headline “The Cost of Silence,” The Dispatch‘s editors described a dismal state of affairs, pointing to the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, the manufactured crisis over Greenland, Canada’s cozying up to China, continued economic uncertainty, and the criminal investigation into Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell as examples of the chaos invited by the Trump administration.

“One of the ironies repeated throughout world political history is that autocrats rarely bring the order they are elected—or installed—to deliver, even the servile kind that can be imposed through state terror. No, more reliably, autocrats bring disorder,” they argued. “The disorder under which Americans are now suffering, the ramifications of which have only just begun to be realized, is what inevitably happens when an American president disregards the rule of law, insisting that he is limited only by his own sense of morality—a sense of morality that in this case does not quite seem to exist.”

The piece continued:

We are aware that Dispatch readers have read and heard us repeat these points a thousand times in articles and on podcasts, and we are equally aware that a Dispatch editorial, while rare, is not going to be the “J’accuse!” that forces the powers that be to rethink where they are and what has brought them there. But we will repeat ourselves nonetheless: Donald Trump is uniquely unqualified for the office of the presidency, himself a man with no sense of integrity or administrative acumen, and one who is lazy, vain, ignorant, and vulnerable to flattery — all of which make him easy to manipulate for figures such as Stephen Miller, whose ethnonationalist obsessions and sophomoric Nietzschean posturing have dominated the administration’s agenda for months and who is emblematic of the types of advisers with whom the president has surrounded himself this second go-round.

“But Trump is far from the only one at fault for the mess in which we find ourselves,” submitted The Dispatch, turning its attention briefly to former President Joe Biden, and then congressional Republicans.

“When the history of our time is written, congressional leaders—particularly Republican congressional leaders—will be remembered as more important, and much more culpable, than it seems at this moment. Describing their careers as inaction would be too charitable; they have been enablers not only of the particular crimes of the Trump administration but of the more general aggrandizement of the presidency and the subordination of the entire legislative branch—the branch created by Article I of our Constitution to make laws and exercise oversight of federal agencies,” it argued. “They are, in a very real sense, in gross violation of their oaths of office, and so too are the representatives and senators of both parties who have contributed over the years to the reduction of Congress to its current miserable state.”

After posing a hard-hitting question to Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) — “If you cannot act in the face of this—all this — why do you choose to remain in the Senate at all?” — the editorial concluded thusly:

Dante put his cowards and opportunists — those who refused to take a stand in life — in the vestibule of his inferno: It isn’t Hell proper, but you can see the rest of the underworld from there. The cowards and opportunists in the United States in 2026 stand at a precipice, too, and have brought our country to the verge of something awful and unspeakable. We got here one step at a time — let us hope that we remember the way back.

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