America’s potential, said Carly Fiorina, is being “crushed.” America’s military, said Marco Rubio, is being “eviscerated.” Working people, said Mike Huckabee, are “taking a gut punch.” The idea of America, said Bobby Jindal, is “slipping away.”

Donald Trump, as usual, went even further: “We don’t have a country.”

Last night’s Republican debate in the Reagan Library was not about Morning in America. It was more like Darkness at Noon. Jeb Bush did call for the party to embrace a Reaganesque sense of optimism, which he contrasted with “the Donald Trump approach of ‘Everything is bad, everything is coming to an end.” But with occasional exceptions, usually involving the softer-edged John Kasich, the Trump approach dominated. For five hours, the candidates stood in front of Reagan’s plane and described America as a declining nation in a dystopic world, as they pledged, to borrow a phrase, to Make America Great Again.

The big question of 2016 could well be whether Americans agree with the Republican portrait of Obama-era malaise. It was taken for granted last night that the national debt is out of control, the economy is deteriorating, the government is corrupt, and the world, as Lindsey Graham put it, is “on fire.” Rubio complained that “our left-wing government is undermining all the institutions that support the family.” Ted Cruz declared that the Iran nuclear deal would turn the Obama administration into the world’s largest financier of Islamic terror. Chris Christie said the middle class “is getting plowed over by Barack Obama.” The one thing the Republicans didn’t seem too concerned about was climate change, which they agreed was not a problem worthy of solutions that might increase utility bills at a time when average Americans, as Rick Santorum put it, “are losing ground.”

Obama provided an alternative view yesterday before the debate, making the case before the Business Roundtable that “America’s great right now.” He later tweeted some supporting evidence that wasn’t mentioned last night on CNN: U.S. businesses have added 13 million jobs over 66 straight months of employment growth, with the jobless rate dropping from 10% to 5%. The budget deficit has fallen from nearly 10% of GDP to less than 3% under Obama, while the uninsured rate has fallen from 15.4% to 9.2% under Obamacare. The U.S. auto industry, on the brink of extinction before Obama’s bailout, is on pace for its best year since 2001.

But last night wasn’t really about evidence, although several candidates did mention that wages are stagnant, and Bush noted the “labor participation rate” has been declining since 1977. There was a consensus on stage that illegal immigration is a national crisis—an “incredible problem,” said Ben Carson—even though the population of undocumented immigration has actually declined by about 1 million under Obama. Carson also bemoaned how little has been done to push oil independence; in fact, oil imports from the Middle East just hit a 28-year low. Listening to Graham, Rubio and Fiorina decrying the weakness of the military and the need for a much larger navy, a listener never would have guessed that the U.S. spends five times as much as any other country on defense.

There was some debate about the Iraq War, and Trump mentioned the financial cataclysm of 2008, but some of the candidates openly pined for the good old days of George W. Bush. It wasn’t just Jeb who credited his brother with keeping the country safe; Christie added that Obama had stripped away that safety, even though the September 11 attacks were on Bush’s watch, and nothing similar has happened since. Fiorina actually seemed to suggest the economy was better when Lehman Brothers was collapsing in September 2008, suggesting that “in seven short years the president has stolen our belief that our children will have a better future.”

The doom and gloom was especially intense around foreign affairs, with general agreement that, as Jeb Bush put it, “this administration has created insecurity the likes of which we never could have imagined.” Rubio threw around words like “apocalyptic” to describe the danger of Obama’s nuclear deal. There were numerous references to the danger that ISIS poses to the American homeland. Trump asked why no one seemed to be worrying about the North Korean threat.

“This world,” he summed up, “is a mess.”

In this woe-a-thon, it was interesting to hear Kasich talk about his desire to give people “a sense of hope, a sense of unity, a sense we can do it,” he said. He sounded more genuinely Reaganesque than Bush, who talks about running a joyful campaign the way unhappy people often telling their friends how happy they are.

But for now, the Republican Party is Trump’s party, and it was amusing to watch also-rans like Bobby Jindal try to play Trump on TV. Jindal described an America where illegal immigration is a national nightmare, where anti-Christian discrimination is a national epidemic, and the Republican Party—which has failed to defund Planned Parenthood or block the Iran Deal—is a national disgrace.

On that last point, at least, Obama probably agrees.

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