Welcome once again friends, to the Sandbox edition of American politics, starring the MAGA kids, out there on the playground being low lifes and beating each other up.
This missive from Donald Trump Jr. shows how loyalties in MAGA world can turn on a dime. Josh Mandel is out, J.D. Vance is in. We got that. What we didn’t know, and we’re sure Mandel didn’t, is that once he out of favor with Trump, he would be gutted and his bloody entrails would be left for the vultures.
Going straight below the belt is the bully of bullies, punk of punkies, murderer of trapped animals, Junior.
Wow. Nobody has worshipped at the altar of Trump more than OH Senate candidate Josh Mandel. Mandel is as MAGA as MAGA gets. And Junior just crushed him. This is what total loyalty to the Trump family gets you … pic.twitter.com/riH8swGeZO
— Ron Filipkowski ?? (@RonFilipkowski) April 21, 2022
Here’s a blast from the past. Here’s Trump endorsing Mitt Romney. That was in another lifetime.
His dad endorsed him too. https://t.co/Aw2qPdBLfe
— Jennifer Tammaro (@Jennanjack) April 21, 2022
This is an unbelievable image, too.
Squishy pic.twitter.com/yySLn483P8
— JP (@jpab9) April 21, 2022
Trump said many lovely things about Hillary back in the day, before he called her “crooked” and got the “Lock Her Up!” chants going.
Now get this in focus, friends: Josh Mandel slavered over Trump. Trump was his God. But Trump decided to dump Mandel and endorse J.D. Vance, a man who called him “America’s Hitler.”
The screenshot below is @JDVance1’s unfiltered explanation from 2016 of the breakdown in Republican politics that he now personally is trying to exploit.
The “America’s Hitler” bit is at the end.
The public deserves to know the magnitude of this guy’s bad faith. pic.twitter.com/79Z0qSWFWF
— Josh McLaurin (@JoshforGeorgia) April 18, 2022
Here’s the part that’s cut off, if you didn’t go to Twitter to see it.
Donald Trump is the “fruit of the party’s collective neglect.” And he’s spot on. But he’s got the endorsement that Mandel debased himself for and Mandel is out in the cold.
After Mandel was disinherited, he tweeted that he hoped to earn Trump’s endorsement before the primary. It is patently obvious that he should quite the race now. Or Junior will destroy him. This is Junior’s league, perfectly encapsulated. Go after a weak target, if you can’t have a caged animal to destroy, a rejected minor league politician will do just fine, and insult and bully the man beyond all decency.
I don’t know which is more pathetic. The image of the sycophantic Mandel grovelling before Trump after he endorsed Vance or the image of the degenerate Junior playing political hit man, a Lee Atwater, Roger Stone wanna be. Man, when those are the heights you aspire to, it’s time to slash your wrists.
Vance also got it right about R voters.
As for the former first family, they wallow in their own filth.
You know the saying (proverb?) – Everything Trump touches dies. (With a knife in the back and being thrown under a bus) All that public sucking up and ass kissing. Given the current dynamics I sort of get that these goobers feel they have no choice but to travel down to Mar A Lago and kiss the ring (the brown one around Trump’s ass actually) but the public groveling is something that will in time come back to haunt them. There are already signs that in different states and regions some are keeping a bit of distance – and leading in their primaries! I will be interesting to see how all this shakes out as primaries progress. And how many current Trump endorsees who are way the fuck behind a week out suddenly get their endorsement pulled only to see it go to a clear front-runner!
Wow. Vance showed us all that, even when he was condemning Trump, he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed.
“We are, whether we like it or not, the party of lower-income, lower-education white people, and I have been saying for a long time we need to offer those people something . . . or a demagogue would.”
Now, admittedly, that shows a great deal of insight and understanding of political reality. But where he went completely off the rails and into nutso territory was with his parenthetical “(and maybe even expand our appeal to working class black people in the process).” The very second that GOPers were to do anything that might “appeal to working class black people” is the very second that GOPers LOSE those “lower-income, lower-education white people.” The whole notion of the GOP’s “Southern Strategy” was to attract those “lower-income, lower-education white people” by blaming all their woes on all the stuff the government was doing to help raise black people (whether allowing Blacks to participate in the electoral process or trying to correct prejudice in hiring practices by establishing affirmative-action quotas). The GOP was playing politics as a “zero-sum” game–for every gain that Blacks got, then whites had to lose something. The GOP NEVER depicted it as a case of “leveling the playing field” (which is how the process was designed) but rather, “Watch out for the darkies; they’re going to take everything from you with help from the government/Democrats.”