The Trump gum is stuck again on the Republican shoe. And whatever they say, no matter how they spin it, the politicians in the GOP are horrified.
This is not 2016, where the GOP will be able to insult Trump, expose him for what he really is, and then start lying about their opinions as soon as the twice-impeached former president wins the nomination. Or perhaps they will have no option if Trump - as expected - frightens off every other GOP contender for the White House because the party’s four (no, make that six) years of sycophancy has wed them to the hard-core base’s opinion that this warped, disturbed man is some sort of God King.
In this campaign, Trump can no longer use the words that he repeatedly blathered both in his 2016 run and while in the White House: “What have you got to lose?” We now know the answer to that question: A lot, starting with our democracy. The horrifying events where Trump demonstrated his craving for his own autocracy, praising and believing tyrants like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un over American intelligence agencies, will not be forgotten. And the blood on the hands of the party that cheered him on - regardless of what he did - cannot be washed away.
Trump’s biggest mistake was not conceding when he lost in 2020, which might have kept the door to 2024 a little more open. Instead, like an autocrat from a ruthless and corrupt banana republic, he engaged in every possible conspiracy and attack his apparatchiks could imagine, and now many of those people face criminal prosecution. And when all else failed, as the January 6 Commission has made clear, Trump championed and orchestrated an attack on the Capitol involving people he had been told were armed with deadly weapons. What have we got to lose? These are events whose videos will play on a loop in every advertisement across the country. Trump and every Republican will be asked, endlessly, and will not be able to escape it.
There will be video interviews of Capitol police officers who were attacked by the MAGA mob, who were hospitalized or permanently disabled, and later, when they wanted to discuss the events with members of Congress, the Republicans refused to meet with them. Interviews will be played in ads where Capitol police officers discuss their injuries and the GOP’s refusal to meet with them. And the video, with the image capture below, of a police officer screaming as he is crushed by Trump supporters craving the opportunity to murder members of Congress will appear over and over again. It will be ugly.
Oh, and we can’t forget former Vice President Pence, who has already said on tape that he does not think Trump should run. He has revealed a number of Trump statements made as the then-president was pressuring Pence to throw out the Electoral College votes on January 6, the last-ditch effort by Trump to overthrow the election.
Pence has quoted Trump as saying, after the then-president refused to overrule the election, “You’re too honest…Hundreds of thousands are gonna hate your guts. . . . People are gonna think you’re stupid…You’ll go down as a wimp. If you (accept the Electoral College vote), I made a big mistake five years ago!”
Then there is the quote that sums up Trump perfectly, uttered when Pence refused to back a ridiculous lawsuit filed by a pack of MAGA Congressmen seeking for a judge to rule that the Vice President could throw out the electoral vote on January 6. “If it gives you the power,’ Trump asked, ‘Why would you oppose it?’”
After it became clear that Pence was not going to end democracy - Trump invited his rioting MAGA cult to harm his Vice President. Trump had repeatedly condemned Pence for refusing to overturn the election, and in the middle of the insurrection, tweeted “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our country and our Constitution.”
The chanting of “Hang Mike Pence!” escalated following Trump’s tweet. And that was no surprise. Sarah Matthews, the former Deputy Press Secretary and Special Assistant to the President, told the January 6 Commission that the tweet gave Trump’s supporters permission to continue their assault on the Capitol, and threatened Pence’s safety. “It was essentially him giving the green light to these people,” she said, adding that Mr. Trump’s supporters “truly latch on to every tweet and every word he says.”
On top of all of that, I also have no doubt that there will be many political ads starring members of Trump’s Administration and Republican politicians laying out how dangerous, deranged, and ignorant the man is. And if they refuse to appear in ads, no matter: There are videos already filmed of almost all these people condemning Trump, or their photographs can be shown along with the words they have spoken publicly. Among the long list of Trump-advisors-turned-critics would be:
Former Attorney General Bill Barr.
Former Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen.
Former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis.
Former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper.
Former Secretary of Defense Chris Miller.
Former Navy Secretary Richard V. Spencer.
Former National Economic Council director Gary Cohn.
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Former White House counsel Ty Cobb.
Former Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue.
Former Assistant Attorney General Steve Engel.
Former Senior Advisor to the President Eric Herschmann.
Former Chief of Staff to the Vice President, Marc Short.
Former Counsel to Vice President Mike Pence Greg Jacob.
Former Adviser on Counterterrorism and Homeland Security to the Vice President Olivia Troye.
Former Special Assistant to the President and Aide to the Chief of Staff Cassidy Hutchinson.
Former Department of Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor.
Former DHS Assistant Secretary of Counterterrorism and Threat Prevention Elizabeth Neumann.
Former Deputy National Security Advisor Matthew Pottinger.
Former White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham
Former Deputy Press Secretary and Special Assistant to the President Sarah Matthews.
Former White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Deborah Birx
Former U.S. attorney in Atlanta Byung J. “BJay” Pak.
Former Republican Congressman Mo Brooks of Alabama.
Former campaign chairman for Trump in 2020, Bill Stepien
The biggest witness who can appear in advertisements against Trump is Trump himself. On the tapes of Trump interviews released by Bob Woodward, the-then president admits to intentionally and dishonestly downplaying the threats of COVID-19, his affection for authoritarian leaders, and reveals classified information to the reporter. And of course, who can forget the tape of Trump pressuring Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” 11,000 votes after Biden won the state’s vote in 2020.
There are items that don’t need Trump or members of his administration to reveal, because they are infamous. Under Trump’s orders, children and breast-feeding babies were ripped away from their parents to be dumped into detention cells for months and even years. And, as per usual, the Trump Administration was too incompetent or didn’t care enough to keep track of those children; hundreds were “missing” when Biden took office, and his Administration has been trying to find them all since 2021.
You would think this would be enough to push even MAGA cultists to at least reconsider their support of Trump. But if not, maybe they would respond to hearing about Trump’s relentless efforts to fleece them. Among many of those scams, there’s Election Defense Fund, supposedly intended to help finance Trump’s efforts to expose non-existent “voting fraud” in court. (That none of his cultists notice that the supposed billionaire always hits them up for the cash to finance his nonsense is incomprehensible to me.) The appeal works, with Trump’s supporters donating $100 million in the first week after the election. But no such fund existed; instead, all the money was diverted into a Super PAC, set up by Trump. That PAC then sent $1 million each to political groups run by several former staff members, including Stephen Miller, the architect of Mr. Trump’s grotesque immigration agenda.
And it’s not just Trump who reaches deep into the pocket of MAGA cultists - there are plenty of his hangers-on who are more than happy to join the racket. There was the fraudulent “Build the Wall” scam. There are people online who sell “Trump Bucks” that many of his supporters are actual cash. Even hardcore Trump media like Right Side Broadcasting Network, filling up their screens with ads from nobodies hawking Trump memorabilia. Here’s what the screen at RSBN looked like last night when Trump was announcing his candidacy.
How about Trump revealing classified information in a tweet, exposing America’s previously secret satellite image capability to the world?
Or of course, his stealing classified records, storing them in one of his golf resorts.
One of the more interesting developments in terms of the trouble Trump will have running for office this time is that he has lost some of his most deluded followers: Millions of QAnon cultists, who are Trump’s most rabid supporters, imagine that there is a democratic conspiracy to kidnap and eat children. They also believe that Trump will be reinstated by the military, leading to the rounding up and execution of hundreds of democrats in an event they call “The Storm” and “The Ten Days of Darkness.” Last week, Trump hyped his speech as “the most important speech in 100 years.” QAnon members were sure he would be announcing the beginning of The Storm. The excitement in their conversations online were palpable. But then when it was just his announcing he was running for the presidency in 2024, the shock and horror reverberated throughout the QAnon cult. Was he never going to announce the beginning of The Storm? Why would he run again given all the voting fraud in 2020 and 2024 that they have been convinced - by Trump - was rampant? What was the point of voting? These are from the primary QAnon website:
The more direct conversations on Telegram last night among members of the QAnon cult reflected even more depression, and the recognition among some of them that Trump is simply a narcissist.
Now, this doesn’t mean that a lot of the QAnon folk won’t come back - there are infamous for moving the goal posts or seeing secret codes in the way people stand or how a flag is positioned or how many letters are in a sentence. But no doubt, Trump’s failure to live up to the conspiracy theories will peel off a number of potential supporters who think there is no longer a reason to vote.
So that’s where we are. This is not 2016. The ammunition against Trump is almost endless. The “Gee, what kind of president will he be?” and “Will he grow into the presidency soon?” questions have been answered. He will also be the president who has never won the popular vote, who oversaw a GOP wipeout in 2018, who lost the presidency in 2020, and who was the driving force behind the GOP’s historically bad showing in the 2022 midterms.
Without the GOP figuring out a way to scrape Trump off its shoes, he almost certainly will be nominated. And then they will be wedded to everything he has done, every failure, every attempt to overthrow democracy.
Does that mean can’t return the White House and finish the destruction of our Constitutional system he tried to accomplish? No. Which is why the Democrats must be prepared to remind everyone about the nightmare of Trump and staple every GOP sycophant to his narcissistic incompetence and dishonesty.
i read, i'm even more sickened than i have been. i feel like i've been through hell for over 5 years all due to a freaking mentally sick narcissist who cannot believe he isn't adored & worshipped by the masses. even if he's "gone" whatever way that is, he has left a bevy of insane, sick followers who believe his BS & will act out on it. I feel we are hosed either way.
QAnon is a public menace, and I wish there was a way to effectively deal with it. Deluded believers have murdered people, and one of them attacked Speaker Pelosi’s husband when he found she was in Washington doing her job.