GOP Does Same Thing, Expects Different Result

People are born with certain basic primal fears. Fear of falling is one of them, fear of the dark is another. Fear of public speaking is also a primal instinct that some people have, although not all. There are certain primal fears in politics as well. Fear of not being reelected is the most powerful one. That guides all politicians, minor and great, because the name of the game is staying in the game. If you’re not in the game to begin with, not a player, then you have no hope. You’re done. This being as commonly understood as it is, why is it that Donald Trump is actively destroying the Republican party and nobody protests, they all just go along silently?

This is not an original observation. In fact, this is pretty much a repetitive theme and you hear a new spin on it each time the same issue is pounded home, again and again, which is that Trump is setting the GOP up for a massive loss in November, yet nobody will do anything? Why?

Because, as Arthur Conan Doyle opined, in the aggregate man is a predictable animal. You can estimate with great accuracy how many murders per thousand people there will be in the population in any given year. But man is an enigma on an individual level. Or, to put things more plainly, while there is strength in numbers and people will say or do one thing in an anonymous vote, what they are willing to be publicly accountable for is something entirely different.

Everybody in the GOP is scared shitless of Donald Trump because he controls the crazies. The 30 – 35% of the GOP that comprises MAGA, the lunatic fringe people, all united under the MAGA umbrella, are all that is left of the (perhaps once) Grand Old Party. The GOP that the yous and mes grew up with is dead. It is no more. There is no conservative party in America in 2024. There is MAGA and there are the elected officials in both chambers of Congress, who have R’s behind their names, and they don’t know what they are anymore.

That is a large part of the problem. Some of them identify as MAGA, yes. Elise Stefanik has gone out of her way to identify as Ultra MAGA. She evidently believes that Trump’s way is here to stay. I think she’s wrong, but she needs to find that out for herself, apparently.

The rest of the Republicans give a certain amount of lip service to MAGA and for the ones that this becomes impossible for, the Ken Bucks of the world, they just up and resign. And who can blame them? Who wants to be a sane person in a lunatic asylum? So the “real” Republicans have been deserting in droves for quite some time.

As the commentator here said, there has been a lot of self inflicted carnage in the GOP. The only reason Trump is, once again, the standard bearer, is because there isn’t enough of a base behind anybody else except Trump. Ron DeSantis was a miserable flop. Nikki Haley did put together a somewhat impressive following, all things considered. Mike Pence, Tim Scott, everybody else who participated were all under achievers. Chris Christie achieved what he set out to do which was to show up and make an anti-Trump statement. He did that and he was heard. End of story.

So yes, again, as this commentator said, Trump has set the GOP up to fail massively in the fall. And they know it. But they feel they can’t do anything about it. It’s each man for himself. They’re just trying to survive, just trying to squeak through another election, House or Senate. They all know, to the man and to the woman, that if they piss off Trump that that’s as good as a death sentence, so they humor him. They go along to get along.

And here’s the sublime irony, tragic as it is: the Republicans with some actual leadership ability are the ones who are leaving. All of them. It may have started with Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, but the ranks have swollen as one Republican after another decides to throw in the towel.

The only people who are left are the yes people. You saw that in vivid display Friday in Florida. Mike Johnson flew down to kiss Trump’s ring and to do Trump’s bidding. Trump wanted a bill which would make it illegal for non citizens to vote in elections (which it already is) but never mind that. Trump wants it so we’re all going to play act like it’s a great idea.

Mike Johnson, who has been described as “slight, polished and bespeckled, a man who looks and sounds like an accountant,” got up and gave lip service to Trump’s idiocy as Trump stood behind him and glowered.

It was like a production of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, with Trump playing Big Daddy and Johnson playing Goober, except Big Daddy was never nuts. Big Daddy got to be Big Daddy because he was a man of substance, not just the biggest jackass in the room, like Trump.

The GOP, what’s left of it, is a dysfunctional family. Each and every one of them is devoted to humoring their crazy Uncle Donald. But what will happen in November, when he takes them down to rubble? That could happen. Trump could lose the House majority and possibly increase the Democratic Senate majority. Trump’s chances of regaining the White House as he rolls through his legal shenanigans in public, is not very high.

What will the GOP do then? Good question. We won’t know until we live it. If you saw Trump in Pennsylvania last night you know that he gave the Big Lie another outing. That is going to be a main theme going forward. Without evidence, it has become a legend in this country that the 2020 election was stolen and now Trump is setting up the Big Lie to encompass 2024. This is Trump’s most pernicious legacy to date, undermining peoples’ faith in our elections. Yet he does it at every rally. Hopefully history will record things as they actually took place, that a mentally unstable man, who could not accept defeat, chose instead to cobble together a Big Lie about the election(s) he lost.