Donald Trump once said, “It would be nice to have an intelligent person as president,” and indeed it would be. That’s one of the few times he’s said something I’ve agreed with, the old “even the broken clock is right twice a day,” premise. Trump is not a man who reads or thinks, he’s a man who watches TV. And like a lot of people who only watch TV, he’s got a short attention span and an undeveloped intellect. He can critique Joe Biden’s mental acuity from now until the sun goes nova, but Biden is a well read, thoughtful and astute man. He has literally forgotten far more than Trump has ever learned or can ever learn about government.
So bearing that in mind, here’s the Wall Street Journal editorial which Donald wants everybody to read. The title is, “Trump Hasn’t Changed But The GOP” has and evidently, Trump read it as some paean to his ability as a leader, and not what it really is, which is a rueful, tongue in cheek assessment of how far off the GOP has fallen. Not to mention the fact that it’s out of date already, having been written two days before Joe Biden irrevocably changed the course of this race.
When I read it, it put me in mind of James Mattis’ resignation letter to Trump, which none other than Sean Hannity had to explain to him was not complimentary. Trump, remember, saw his generals as “pussies” and they saw him as completely unfit. Those were the days, my friend. May we never see them again.
Back to the Wall Street Journal editorial, I speculate that the phrase that caught Trump’s eye, (or that of his “human printer,” the gal who follows him around and prints off positive messaging in order to salve the emotions of her unstable employer) was
This time, the party belongs to him. Like Trump’s speech, the paeans to harmony were overlaid on a show of swaggering dominance. It was the unity of the conqueror, his foes all slain or subdued.
Oh, I’m sure he loved that. That caught his eye, bigly. Alas, this article was written on July 19. On Sunday, July 21, Joe Biden announced he was leaving the race and everything changed. But Donald didn’t read for that level of detail. He can’t be bothered with analysis, reasoning, or detail. He just wants a bottom line and hey, the Journal was giving him a pretty good one — on July 19, that is.
The old guard may not like it, but Trump is winning, and his luck keeps getting better. As the convention began on Monday, one of Trump’s lingering criminal indictments, the Florida-based federal case alleging he mishandled classified documents, was dismissed. Weeks earlier, the Supreme Court ruled him immune from some criminal prosecution, throwing his other indictments and perhaps even his 34-count Manhattan felony conviction into doubt.
Money, too, is rolling in, with the enigmatic tech baron Elon Musk pledging to spend $45 million a month through the election boosting Trump’s candidacy. The pro-Israel casino billionaire Miriam Adelson is also reportedly preparing to throw tens of millions into the pool. Meanwhile, donors have reportedly suspended $90 million in pledges to President Biden’s effort. The Trump campaign has yet to begin significant television advertising, while the Biden campaign has been flooding swing-state airwaves for months only to continue to slump in polling.
Again, you can fact check this as well as I can. This was written July 19 and in Election 2024, a few days can be an eternity. I’ve already aged about ten years just since June 27, the night of the Debate From Hell, which ended up taking this election in a completely different direction. Then there was the July 13 assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. I don’t know how many more surprises there will be between now and Election Day, November 5, I just hope my head doesn’t explode.
But Trumpty, true to form, is printing outdated and inapplicable praise from the Wall Street Journal, evidently not looking at the date and realizing that pre-July 21 and post-July 21 are two different worlds in this election year. Pre-July 21 he may have been sitting pretty. Now, he’s a candidate without a platform. He can’t attack Joe Biden’s age because Biden’s not his opponent anymore and his age is irrelevant. The new framing of Election 2024 is out with the Old Guard, in with the New, and the New Guard is Kamala Harris.
Trump ran as the new and improved product, the populist, the billionaire businessman who was going to drain the swamp, in 2016. That’s how he got elected, by being the unknown quantity, the man with all the answers. And he fell resoundingly on his ass in four years in office. So he’s the Old Guard, now, not the iconoclast, the guy with a better idea. He can’t run as the new kid in town, now. He could in 2016 but not now.
Trump flopped in 2020 because the nation wanted to heal and so they elected Joe Biden. Now Biden has passed the torch, beautifully and movingly, I might add, to the next generation and Kamala Harris is the order of the day.
I predict Trump will quietly delete this Wall Street Journal article. Maybe his old buddy Sean Hannity will translate it for him. Or, maybe Chris LaCivita will explain to him, “Um….Donald? A few things have changed since the 19th” and then duck the ketchup bottles. Maybe both.
Who let the air out of Trump’s bulbous head???
*smirk*
Oh what a difference a day makes!
Just like the song says, “24 little hours, brought the sun and the flowers, where there used to be rain.”
This ole jarhead loves your reminding me of Mattis. I’ll guarantee you the reason Trump picked him was that nickname “Mad Dog” which in fact Mattis always hated. He was a true warrior through and through and a Marine’s Marine. However he was also an intellectual and like too few people chose to be more than one thing. Instead of warrior or intellectual he didn’t choose one or the other. He asked himself “Why not both?” And used an intellect better than most people possess to learn about, understand and write about. Dense stuff that was often at a level only other experts could fully grasp. All Trump saw or cared about was a nickname Mattis hated.
It still brings a smile to my face that Trump didn’t get how massively Mattis’s send up of a resignation letter was. As you say, he embarrassed himself so much that Hannity had to tell him what the letter was actually telling Trump. Mattis basically gave him a far more, far more developed version of his economics professor back at Penn who called Trump ‘the dumbest goddam student I ever had.” Mattis expounded on the same thing and the best part is with the full knowledge Trump would wave that resignation around and BRAG about it. While people laughed and his team cringed. Too bad Hannity finally clued Trump in on how massively he’d been insulted.
The conservative “old guard” may detest DJT, but they will endorse him because they don’t see him as a threat to THEIR lifestyle and privileges. And, I suspect, they’re counting on the MAGA movement to dissolve once Trump is gone. But, hey, if voter suppression and the assault on women’s rights continue (thank the SCOTUS Six for that), conservatives are fine with that.
I would not hold my breath waiting the WSJ to update its praises/lack thereof for trump unless it is to sing the praises even louder. WSJ doesn’t want competent people in the w.h. Competent people get in the way of oligarchs & craporations doing whatever the f*ck they want to do at the expense of everyone else. This has been WSJ’s m.o. for…a very long time.
V.P. Harris becoming President Harris is a nightmare to WSJ and they will do everything in their power to make sure it doesn’t happen. IF there is an real journalism left at WSJ, it won’t be used to accurately describe anything V.P. Harris wants to do. It will be fux nuz in print form….That’s pretty much what it is anyway.
Yup – same ownership, same bias…
Now he is left attacking her for not being white or having dangly bits. Doesn’t make you look appealing to anyone but white male evangelical Christian Nationalists. And they aren’t the majority of Americans (and some of their wives will.secretly vote for Kamala).