Full Retreat

What a difference a day makes. 24 little hours   Dinah Washington

Everything is falling apart all at once. Arizona Governor Doug Ducey has not only halted progress on the grand re-opening, he has back pedaled and re-closed the bars in response to the coronavirus surge his bone headed leadership helped to fuel.

Likewise in Texas, Governor Greg Abbott has also re-closed the bars, as well as dropping the capacity in restaurants back to 50% in response to his own coronavirus day of reckoning. What the hell Abbott thought he was doing in raising the capacity from 50% to 75% in three weeks, when it takes a minimum of 3 weeks for new cases to gestate is anybody’s guess. But this is one time when the phrase better late than never just doesn’t seem to apply.

And in Florida, while Trumpite  Ron DeSantis won’t close the bars, because God knows he needs a drink, he has gone ahead and re-closed Florida’s beaches in advance of the 4th of July holiday. And cities and counties in Florida are charging ahead with orders mandating mask wearing in public, despite howls of protest from misguided souls, most of them misguided by DeSantis and Trump.

I know this is Saturday, but do yourself a favor. Stop, relax, and just take a good long gander. Because this is what a rout looks like. A rout is defined as a panicked, disorganized retreat, and that’s exactly what you have here. DeSantis, Abbott and Ducey may all stand there in front of the cameras, spouting off bullshit excuses to shore up their failed leadership, but everybody underneath them has already turned tail, and is running full speed in the opposite direction, firing wildly over their shoulders.

And it only gets better. Because not only are the GOP Governors being routed, so are the White House and the Trump campaign. Next week, Vice President Mike Pence was scheduled to fly to Arizona and Florida, to meet with the Governors about the coronavirus, but also to hold political events geared towards Evangelical voters. But it was announced today that while Milquetoast Mike will still fly to Arizona and Florida to blow sunshine and pixie dust up the Governor’s asses, the political events for the Evangelicals had been postponed. And the campaign was forced to admit that the reason that the events were postponed was that the optics of packing a bunch or people into an enclosed space during a viral outbreak was a bridge too far, even for the Trump campaign. As I said, a complete rout.

Now, get ready for the back stabbing and Et tu, Brute’ing at the state level. Local and county leaders who were hamstrung by these Governors in putting their own protective measures in place are going to want their pound of flesh. And so are state functionaries who set up their own alarm bells on good faith, only to be silenced by the Governor’s offices. And the best part is that these three cowardly poltroons are going to have to stand there and take it. The last thing that they can afford to do is to whine about being misled by Trump. After all, they’re Governors for God’s sake, they were elected to successfully steer the ship of state, not to take orders from the Mango Messiah!

The most interesting thing to watch going forward is going to be the power dynamic inside the Trump campaign itself. Trump wants to hold these rallies, even if it means scaling back the size of the venues or returning to outdoor rallies such as in airplane hangers. He feels that this gins up his base that attends, and also gins up the television viewers. But as the Tulsa rally clearly showed, when given a choice between seeing Trump and a slow, painful death, the majority of his supporters will stay at home and turn on Netflix instead. And if Trump pulls rank and demands to hold the rallies, then the negative image he portrays of actually being a public health threat more than cancels out any advantage he gets from ginning up his base. A classic lose-lose.

Normally, the way a rout stops is when the fleeing army gains enough space to stop, take a breath, reconstitute their lines, and dig in to defend the new position. One question with this current rout is how far will the Trump campaign fall back before turning to fight again? But the even more pressing question is will we even know if they turn around to fight again. It seems to me that they’re running out of positions to defend.

To know the future, look to the past.before the insanity of the 2020 election, relive the insanity of the 2016 GOP primary campaign, and the general election, to see how we got to where we are. Copies of President Evil, and the sequel, President Evil II, A Clodwork Orange are available as e-books on Amazon, at the links above. Catch up before the upcoming release of the third book in the trilogy, President Evil III: All The Presidents Fen

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