If frontrunner Donald Trump or currently surging Ted Cruz gets the 2016 Republican presidential nod, it may have a strange sort of bipartisan effect, according to Tomasky, who in a Wednesday column asserted that GOP bigwigs “despise” both Cruz and Trump to the extent that they’d “actually prefer” presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton to win the general election.

“No one’s ever going to say that publicly,” acknowledged Tomasky. “But half a lifetime of covering these people has taught me a few things about how they think…Intra-party personal hatred is much more visceral than inter-party personal hatred. The prospect of someone they hate in their own party having more power than they have is like the bitterest, foulest bowl of hemlock these people can drink.”

Though Michael Tomasky is not a psychiatrist or a psychologist, he has a (liberal) layman’s curiosity about the workings of the human brain and mind which causes him to wonder how Ben Carson can be a “brilliant” surgeon but “an across-the-board nincompoop” when it comes to politics.

In a Monday column, Tomasky wrote, “Usually, if a man (or woman) is a good and knowledgeable and sure-footed doctor, or lawyer or department chair or any other position that could have been attained only through repeated displays of excellence and probity…[h]e or she might be right wing or left wing…but [he or she] won’t be an idiot…But Carson is a political idiot…From science to foreign policy to the Constitution to virtually any political or historical or policy topic on which he chooses to speak, he says something that has no basis in real-world fact.”

Speaking with fill-in host Alex Wagner on the Friday edition of MSNBC’s All In, Hardball host Chris Matthews and Daily Beast columnist Michael Tomasky continued the liberal media’s narrative of sudden respect for the soon-to-be resigning House Speaker John Boehner, lamenting that the “revolutionary” wing of the Republican Party had carried out a “mutiny” against “a rock-ribbed conservative.”

The debate rages on as to whether Donald Trump represents the essence of the Republican party. Very broadly speaking, conservatives say he doesn’t and liberals say he does. One liberal, Michael Tomasky, claims that Trump, despite his left-of-center positions on several fiscal and economic issues, nonetheless embodies the “two qualities more than any others [that] have driven conservatism in our time.”

The first quality, wrote Tomasky in the September 24 issue of The New York Review of Books, “is cultural and racial resentment…The second is what we might call spectacle—the unrelenting push toward a rhetorical style ever more gladiatorial and ever more outraged…Trump is conservative resentment and spectacle made flesh.”

Conservatives are accustomed to admiring the work and deploring the politics of artists like Bruce Springsteen and Stephen King. Michael Tomasky wrote Thursday that some liberals have had roughly similar feelings about Antonin Scalia, but that’s over now because of Scalia’s dissent in King v. Burwell, which was devoid of the justice’s usual “writerly flair and intellectual acumen.”

“It long ago became a kind of fetish, the anticipation of reading Scalia’s opinions,” remarked Tomasky. “There was always an excess of intellectual and moral certitude, to be sure, but there was also wit and a kind of joyfulness of battle whether he was on the winning or losing side…But that was then. This decision is something else again. Here, there is no wit. There is just bile. As you read along you can veritably see his carotid artery pulsing, growing; smell the sweat flopping out of the pores...The law lives, and he is livid.”