The day that the January 6 Committee announced a criminal referral to the DOJ for Donald Trump, Jamie Raskin said, “Ours is not a system of justice where foot soldiers go to jail and the masterminds and ringleaders get a free pass.” Certainly we would hope not. But the fact is, Trump has skated through life consequence free for so long, that it’s a bit difficult to believe that he’s finally going to get his comeuppance.
But good news: Mary Trump thinks that 2023 might be the year that things change. She penned an op/ed in the New Republic entitled, “Why 2023 May Be The Year That Fate Finally Catches Up With Donald Trump.”
First, Mary Trump gives her assessment of what’s going on in the darkest part of the Sunshine State, namely Mar-a-Lago. She found the digital trading cards grift and all the superhero hoopla leading up to it, to be utterly ridiculous. As did we all.
It’s not that I thought Donald was incapable of stooping that low—there never is any bottom for him—but I wondered, not for the first time, “Is there not one person in Donald’s inner circle who cares for him?” Perhaps this is what happens when a man with serious and untreated mental illness is not only surrounded by yes-men but is also vulnerable because his out-of-control ego and shamelessness are being used by those who are willing to manipulate him in order to make a buck, no matter how ridiculous he looks in the process.
On Twitter, a user named Kilgore Trout tweeted to his 78,000 followers, “This is starting to feel the tiniest bit like elder abuse.” And so it is.
Don’t misunderstand me. I am not asking anybody to feel pity for him. But watching somebody decompensate so publicly should unnerve all of us, especially when you consider that less than two years ago he was the most powerful person on the planet, the leader of the free world. He continues to be the leader of the Republican Party and is currently its only candidate for the 2024 presidential election, which makes him one of the most powerful people in America.
With all of that power, his closest advisers are telling him that the best use of his time is to start another grift a month after he announced his run.
As I looked through the poorly photoshopped images, each one more delusional than the next, representative of a deeply broken man-child who believes he is the center not only of his own universe but everybody else’s as well, it suddenly hit me—these are digital trading cards. The fucking things don’t even exist in the real world!
Which is the cherry on the absurdity sundae. Trump doesn’t exist in the real world, either. He’s just the simulacrum of a being that he created in his head and put on the TV screen to impress everybody with how boorishness and toxic masculinity are really good things.
Trump has so run out of moves, that some obscure NFT scam was the best way he could think to survive — and he did brag about how they all sold out in a matter of hours. More’s the pity that he used unattributed and copyrighted images from all over the internet. He might have to pay the piper on that score.
Mary Trump then goes on to predict where the GOP will go with Uncle Donald.
From the time the Republican Party accepted the inevitability of Donald’s nomination in 2016, the danger has remained the same—that by failing to push back against even his most egregious behaviors, Republicans have allowed them to become normalized.
None of this even takes into account the GOP’s silence in the face of Donald’s massive breaches of norms and protocols during the transition, including the corruption of the Department of Defense at the highest level, the intelligence failures leading up to January 6 riot, and law enforcement missteps and miscommunications during the insurrection.
As mind-scrambling as all of this is—the man, after all, still roams free not only to pursue his latest grift but to lead the Republican Party as its candidate for the 2024 presidential election—the question remains: “Will any of it make a difference?”
What the last few weeks have reminded us is that the pattern repeats: The grift keeps him afloat, at least in the short-term, while keeping all eyes on the shiny object; the revelations about Donald’s misrepresentations (most recently his tax returns) actually strengthen the sense among his followers that he is being unfairly persecuted; and continuing to get away with all of the transgressions increases his sense of invulnerability. […]
Every single new grift or lawsuit or criminal charge involving Donald over the last few weeks is a Republican Party off-ramp away from a man it desperately wants to be done with, not because of the crimes or the fascism—it is crucial to note—but because he has become electoral poison. There have been many such off-ramps before but as long as Republican leadership, the Republican rank and file, and Republican candidates found Donald useful, necessary, or both, he has had their support.
If the party chooses to take one of those off-ramps now, it will be because it has finally come to the conclusion that, although it may not be able to win elections without Donald, it definitely can’t win any with him. It will reject him while continuing the policies he rubber-stamped on its behalf. The Republican Party is a party of autocrats and fascists. Jettisoning Donald won’t change that. Our job is to tie him around its neck like the albatross he is while reminding anybody who will pay attention that, either explicitly or tacitly, it supported his cruelty, his misogyny, his racism, his antisemitism, his destruction of norms, his flouting of tradition, his mendacity, his stealing of highly classified top-secret documents, his refusal to concede his loss, his incitement of an insurrection, and his role in the deaths of over a million Americans. It went along with all of this because it has served the party.
That’s Trumpty, hopping mad. The same man is even more hopping mad, in his club in Florida, only nobody cares. And the fact is, nobody ever really cared what he thought about anything. Trump held an office that people care about. The attention was on that office. The attention will always be on that office and its current occupant.
But Trump didn’t see it that way. It was all about him, not the office, not the institution of government, not the political party that put him there, none of it. It was all about him. That’s how he did himself in.
Narcissus, the Greek mythological character after which the malady narcissism is named, became transfixed with his own reflection in a pool, spent his life staring at it, then fell in and drowned. Trump is a classic narcissist. His self-fixation will be his doom. We are seeing it take place.
Let’s hope he doesn’t drag us all down with him.
The GOP (well, McConnell and other leaders) thought they were getting a yes man, who would not only rubber stamp judges and Justices but also whatever else they put on his desk. They figured the tradeoff was some outrageous tweets which they figured they could live with. And, while on the judiciary thing it worked out it turns out they BADLY miscalculated. THEY became HIS rubber stamp. And the more he realized HE had THEM exactly where he wanted them, strapped to some BDSM device the more he hit them with the whip. And worse. He got his rocks off humiliating them by showing the entire American public, hell the whole world how submissive the GOP was to him!
Even now, they are his “subs” despite some of them making noises about moving on and the talk of “Trumpism without Trump.” If he’s their nominee they will crawl over shit covered glass shards and swim a moat filled with Russian hooker piss to beg his forgiveness and to be allowed to sing his praises on the campaign trail!
I don’t believe for a minute that any of these fuckwads believe in the Jesus they claim to worship but if I’m wrong I’ll guaran-goddamn-tee you they pray every single day for Democrats to crush Trump and send his ass to prison!
Thank you for my new word of the day— simulacrum! What a perfect description!
I don’t know how to contact Mary Trump, so could you kindly tell her that Kilgore Trout was the name of Kurt Vonnegut’s fictional sci-fi writer in Slaughterhouse 5. He’d be delighted to find that he had 78,000 fans anywhere, even on Twitter.
It’s the handle of a Twitter-user, and one who is fairly well-known.