Let’s see Donald Trump wiggle out of this one. Unfortunately for him, there’s a video and or a tweet for everything and it’s hard to cover your tracks. Trump would have been better off in an age before TV, when so many things weren’t recorded like they are now. On the other hand, Trump’s only asset in politics is that he knows how to manipulate TV, so he would never have gotten as far as he has on sheer bluster and B.S. Here’s what Trump said a few weeks ago.
That’s definitive. Right here in black and white Trump says he is not, we repeat, not “running to terminate the ACA.” That is Biden “misinformating” again, we are told. Unfortunately, there is this.
MSNBC plays montage of Donald Trump promising to terminate the Affordable Care Act pic.twitter.com/qDAMEHvUSJ
— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) April 13, 2024
You see how inconvenient that is. Add to that quandary the fact that abortion is an incredibly volatile and unpopular topic and Trump made a stupid stupid choice when he decided to kick the can into the states’ rights cul de sac. In a lifetime of stupid decisions, this may have been Trump’s stupidest.
It’s been pathetic over these recent years to watch people impute certain skills to Donald Trump. Oh, he’s very smart politically. He’s charismatic. It’s all nonsense. It’s political commentators trying to assess him in normal political terms, which only ends up presenting him as a normal politician, which he decidedly is not.
He isn’t smart. In fact, about politics, he’s quite dumb. He has precisely one skill: He knows how to sniff out people’s worst qualities—weakness, envy, anger—and bring them to the fore. That’s it. I’ll grant that this skill got him elected president once and may again. But that doesn’t make it admirable, and it doesn’t mean we should ascribe to him qualities he doesn’t remotely have.
He proved again this week how dumb he is about politics with his new abortion rights position. Earlier this week, I published a column based on the assumption that he was going to back a national 15-week ban. I wrote it on Sunday. It posted Monday at 6 a.m. Then, at around 7:20 a.m., he released his video that made my column moot: no 15-week ban from Trump, but an announcement that it should be up to the states.
Backing a 15-week ban would have been smart politics. He could have sold that as a “moderate” position, even though it isn’t. But fifteen weeks polls well. A February survey showed 48 percent of people backing a 16-week ban, with only 36 percent opposed. And more generally, of course, about two-thirds of Americans in poll after poll say abortion should be generally available with some restrictions.
The embrace of a 15- or 16-week ban would have left plenty of space between Trump and his party’s anti-abortion extremists. It would have enabled him to say, when some deep-red state passed some draconian ban, “No, I don’t agree with that at all; here’s my position, 15 weeks.”
But now? I remember thinking Monday morning that hypothetically, his new “states’ rights” position meant that any extremist position adopted by any state could now be hung around his neck.
The gods sure have a sense of drama because barely 24 hours passed before we went from hypothetical to all too real, when the Arizona state Supreme Court turned the clock back to General Sherman’s march to Atlanta. The decision, reinstating a near-total abortion ban passed in 1864, nearly a half-century before Arizona became a state, was politically shocking and morally repulsive to millions of Americans and Arizonans.
It immediately went to hell. Once out of Trump’s mouth the worse case scenario was indeed realized in Arizona. This is what the GOP wanted. Now they own it.
— Sassy #MeidasSeniorFanClub 🇺🇦🇺🇲🌻🌹 (@jabsandkisses) April 13, 2024
So now the question becomes: How do Trump and the Republicans manage to win by attacking both the ACA and this draconian abortion stance? Good question. I daresay that there are any number of Republicans and Republican political strategists ripping their hair out right now, trying to figure out that exact thing.
This is backpedal and whitewash time. This is gaslight time. Let’s see what the new rhetoric is that comes out to cover this up because these are two horrifically bad moves, one right after the other.
Knowing your feelings about the guy (who has also pissed me off, and sometimes did back in the old says) I won’t mention his name but a certain late-night comedy host would do many a routine with the tag line “haven’t these assholes ever heard of videotape?” Then again, we too often seem to be living a real life version of Orwell and people accepting the instruction to ignore the evidence see by their own eyes.
What I found interesting was some of the (admittedly mostly anecdotal) reaction to Trump saying AZ had gone too far was a “That’s it. I’m done with him” reaction from anti-abortion zealots. They compromised every other moral they had to put Trump in power SPECIFICALLY for the kind of thing that’s just happened in Arizona. And then Trump, being savvy enough to realized how deep and toxic the shitpit he’d created was and that it was about to swallow HIM went on camera and said in effect he didn’t mean for something like THAT, a total abortion ban to happen. The zealots saw it and are major pissed off. It will be interesting to see if Trump can somehow pull the wool back over their eyes.
I find the depth of intelligence among Republican members of our House, to be LESS than ZERO, it’s true, some math problems done by newcomers to the Republicans can actually generate negative results … To scrape the bottom of their barrels of threats, wasted and useless oversite committees and their homemade disaster claims against Biden and his son, to challenge Democrats at every turn, make for a result of zero progress … Clinging to the fake value of Trump’s claim to superior intelligence, billions of his own invisible cash …
The Trump Dynasty was always a false front for his actual stupidity and massive business fails … The time for GOP’s Final Fall has arrived … It has been explained to Trump, using markers and stick people, that He just stepped on a land mine and the click he heard means he is toast if he continues with his arrogant rants against Judges and DA’s …
They are already pissed enough at Trump to give him 20-30 years to learn how to keep his mouth shut at certain times, like when the grease monkeys down in the auto shop come up to his cell with a wad of axle grease to make his hair stand up into an interesting single line fan blade across the middle of his cue ball head …
‘disinformate’ and ‘misinformate’?????
Would someone please tell me what language that’s in (it certainly isn’t English of either variety)