You know the old expression, the more things change, the more they are the same. Get ready for a blast from the past. We all well remember how much the GOP was beside themselves with Obama beating McCain (although what surprise could that have been after eight years of Dubya?) And you well remember how we thought Dubya was as low as it could go, unless we had another Nixon? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!! OMG, how naive we were! What fools we were! But then again, in all fairness to the Democrats, who could have foreseen the rise of the game show host? In any event, Obama drove them mad. And they were stunned yet again in 2012. I thought Karl Rove would have a stroke on air that night when Obama beat Romney. So from that bygone era, heeeeeeere’s Newt!
— ChokedbyPatriarchy (@Mildyhilarious) October 1, 2025
There is wisdom in this statement that Obama broke their minds. When Trump was elected, Obama himself said a couple of revealing things: 1. He wondered how much the rise of Trump had to do with him, and 2. He said Trump was not the problem, he was the symptom of the problem.
Obama was ahead of his time in many ways. I remember on Election Night 2008, Jesse Jackson was openly weeping. He said, “I never thought I’d live to see a Black man elected president.” I thought, “You and me, both.”
It was a great thing for America when that happened. Obama was a great president in my view, then and now. BUT — and there is always a but when something monumental changes in society — the backlash against Obama and Democrats grew and festered that entire eight years. The extremist fringes of the GOP got further out there and the GOP was left leaderless and rudderless.
Ted Cruz? Oh, please, he was a joke then and he remains a joke. Marco Rubio? Lindsey Graham? Ben Carson? You remember the occupants of the 2016 klown kar as well as I do. There were 17 of them, initially, if memory serves.
And then Trump came down the escalator and his shock value eclipsed the weak sisters that he was running against and he ended up atop the GOP ticket. And the fringes of the GOP loved him. The religious loons, the white nationalist crazies, the women and gay bashers, all of them, simply loved what Trump represented.
And MAGA was born. A rock somewhere in Hell was rolled away from a cave door and voila, Hell emptied out and you see what we have to deal with today.
We did have the four-year intermission of Joe Biden, thank God, so maybe eight years of Trump chopped up in two pieces won’t be as lethal as eight years straight. We don’t know. We can only speculate.
And if you’re ready for some spectacular irony, even Gingrich didn’t like Trump. He said about Trump, post-election 2016, “He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.” That is such an encapsulation of Trump’s very essence that in all truth you could put it on his gravestone and it would say all about his life that one could possibly say, in just six words.
The entire GOP knows what a POS Trump is. Make no mistake about that. But he’s their ticket to ride and that’s all they care about. I’m sure that the smarter people in the party are wondering what happens to the MAGA cult after its charismatic leader croaks. I, for one, don’t see J.D. Vance becoming Trump incarnate or Trump II.
So we’ll jump off that bridge when we come to it. But for the moment, Trump is back and all Gingrich can do is mouth the same old platitudes. Obama was their incantation for eight years. If the crops failed or a cow died or Putin got crankier than usual, it was “Obama.” The all purpose answer for all that is wrong. Nine years after the man has been gone from power, it’s still their mantra.
I’m sure Obama feels as we do about this, he doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
If I ever called him a lizard person, I apologize. Newts are salamanders, which are amphibian.
Naaahh… Don’t apologize. Even though the the sobriquet, or nickname “Newt” is associated with a salamander, Newton always was, continues to and will always be a lizard person…..