We’ve certainly come a long long ways away from Dragnet’s Joe Friday, who used to intone, “Just the fact’s ma’am.” We don’t live in that kind of a world anymore. We live in a world where Donald Trump sues the most venerated news show on television 60 Minutes, for what he claimed was a pro-Kamala Harris version of an interview. And that case may settle. The Paramount/Skydance merger is coming up and since Trump can throw a monkey wrench into that at will, the CEO of Paramount may decide to cave to Trump, rather than risk the bottom line. In fact, you’ll find more people of that opinion than you’ll find people willing to bank on Paramount standing firm for the First Amendment and the rule of law.
So that’s the atmosphere that we live in nowadays. Reality is what Trump says that it is, the words mean what he wants them to mean and despite mountain ranges of evidence that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, Trump keeps insisting that he won it. Nobody is sure why this is. The best speculation is that there is something deep in Trump’s psychic makeup that simply will not allow him to admit that he was passed over in 2020, rejected, so he has to revise history. He did so again today and here’s the clip that was omitted from the final cut today of Meet The Press.
This is going to become a problem. Trump will not let it go. Fox News is not going to get involved with this because they already bit the bullet to the tune of $787M. Newsmax went out of its way to broadcast disclaimers and state that it supported the results of the 2020 election.
Maybe, in some perverse manner, it’s a blessing that Trump won in 2024. I hate to say that. I can see NOTHING but bad coming out of his return to Washington. But look at it this way: if Trump was not in power right now he would be polluting the airwaves 24/7 with conspiracy theory about how both the 2020 and 2024 elections were stolen from him and he would be doing grave damage to the elections process.
At least his focus only goes to his rigged election nonsense periodically. He’s not perpetually undermining the cornerstone of democracy, which is what a free and fair election is.
Trump is a tumor on the body politic. He has always been such. Maybe we actually got the better end of the deal by getting him back in office, where he continues to wreck our standing on the world stage and undermine what was a booming economy a few short months ago.
It’s possible that since America is divided down the middle and the world knows it, that we will be able to regain some face in the future. And we, as Democrats, will fix the economy. This won’t be our first or our last time to that rodeo. My point is that maybe it’s easier to fix those problems than to fix the destruction Trump might have wrought if he had lost again in 2024 (because 2024 for some magical reason was “too big to rig” but 2020 was not) and kept bashing away at election integrity non stop. Think of it, elections officials might have gotten killed, at the very least a toxic environment where people feared to work on elections would have been created. At least with a Trump 2024 win, we escaped with our elections bedrock intact and maybe that is actually the best way this deal could have worked out.
Like all things Trumpian, the fact that we’re even having this sick conversation says it all. What you just saw on tape was the real Donald, meandering, making no sense, and insisting that his own cobbled-together Big Lie is truth. This is who he is at Mar-a-Lago, wandering the parapets of his own personal Elsinore, claiming he won in 2020. And all his sycophants agree with him because it is career death to not do so.
“He’s not perpetually undermining the cornerstone of democracy, which is what a free and fair election is.” Uh-Oh! Complacency. Can you be sure MAGA minions aren’t working away in the undergrowth laying all sorts of little tripwires that cumulatively suppress the vote? The time to be awake and active is NOW, not when the votes are cast in Nov 26/28
If Kamala had won I think she would have crucified him and had him in prison where he belongs. I don’t think she would have let him get away with his crap.
Other side is that he’s achieve martyrdom and become a saint to the Evangelicals. I don’t like the thought but, just maybe, it was better to let him/them have their day and, as we are seeing, reap the consequences. Problem is the volume of damage done in the interim, including squeezing the vote.
I see something of this kind but a bit different: During the Biden period, it was clear that Trump would try to run again, and for much of that time Trump was actually campaigning. Because of this, the courts and the Biden administration were much more cautious and legally deferential than they should have been, because it was too easy (although total bullshit) to accuse them of carrying out a political “witch hunt”. Democrats did not want to be seen as aggressive because they were afraid it might cost them votes.But since Trump won reelection as a lame duck, and on top of that is behaving like a would-be dictator and making himself extremely unpopular, it seems to me the plaintiffs and the courts are less inhibited, and besides, the executive lawbreaking is so over the top that what they are doing is a matter of sheer necessity. Also it’s not Biden’s DOJ that’s prosecuting Trump, it’s Trump and often his new pseudo DOJ that are being prosecuted — on behalf of individuals and all sorts of corporate bodies, public and private, including state and local governments, public interest groups, etc, etc. Trump, the “strong man” president can whine that everybody;s picking on him but it just doesn’t have the same ring as it had during the Biden time. All in all these may be better grounds to fight on. Trump appears to be more powerful in office than out of office, but his power plays are screwing up so badly and so often that it provides a target-rich environment, making him not as powerful as he thinks he is.