I never believed it from the start, and said so. And every day that goes by only reinforces my feelings. From where I’m sitting, the only thing that Traitort Tot is going to be running for in the next 22 months is the Bolivian border as the indictments from Letitia James, Alvin Bragg, Fani Willis, and Jack Smith come crashing down around his head.
Look, due to his voracious greed, as well as his overarching ego, as both a politician as well as a con man, His Lowness is nothing if not predictable, especially if you’ve had to watch him for a living like I did. And from the day that the Mango Messiah trapped his alleged friends and supporters in that ballroom in Mar-A-Lago, nothing makes any sense, especially when it comes to his habits and patterns.
I wrote within weeks of his sham announcement that something was wrong. Trump is and always has been a prodigious fund raiser. When he formally filed his election papers, he walked away from some $100 million in his Leadership PAC. But that’s easy enough to fix simply by changing the link in your digital advertising over to the general election campaign fund. But have you noticed what’s missing?
Trump. In almost everything. Sweet Jesus, for the last seven years there is nothing that Hair Twitler loved more than bragging publicly about how much money he’s raised. But since his faux campaign announcement?*Crickets* Could it be the wheels are falling off of his vaunted fundraising bus? We’ll know soon enough. As a declared candidate for office, Trump will have to file his quarterly statement to the FEC in the 1st two weeks in April.
But he’s missing everywhere else too. Hell, this is an egomaniac who announced the opening of his 2024 reelection bid the day after inauguration day! And followed that up with a ego fulfilling month long Thank You America! tour to fluff his ego by bragging about his win in front of his abject slaves. Yet since his public announcement trump has yet to make a ingle campaign rally appearance for his run. Wazzup with dat?
I wrote the week after his announcement that if the Cheeto Prophet were smart, he would already be getting out on the road at least once every two weeks, if not weekly. For two reasons. First, the mondo crowds would help to sooth his battered snowflake fee-fees burdened with all his legal troubles. Second, it would allow him to spew his venom, and start branding any and all of his potential rivals before they get a chance to get out on the road and start branding themselves. That seems to me to be simple Politics 101.
But in the current circumstances there are two other, even more important reasons for El Pendejo Presidente to start hitting the trail as often as possible.
For one thing, money. There’s a reason that candidates campaign. Because nothing rakes in the cash like live rallies. People buy branded campaign shit at the rallies, and make cash or check donations into the drop boxes at the rally. And nothing motivates a Trimbie to go online and make a tithing like an hour and a half of screaming bigotry racism, and homophobia. And that’s all shekels the campaign can bank for the long road ahead, and you can recharge it at any time with more appearances.
The second reason is I believe even more important. Quick, What is Trump’s current base in the GOP? You don’t know, and at this point, neither do I. For the Trump years, his rock solid base was generally estimated at a solid 24-32% of GOP voters. But since Trump left the White House, and bunkered down in his McResort, there really isn’t a way to track them anymore, especially since Glorious Bleater is radio silent.
I have often referred to FrankenTrump as a cult leader, and his drooling Trumpkins as cult followers. And there’s a reason why self destructive fools follow demagogues like Jim Jones, David Koresh, and Reverend Moon into communes. They need constant support and approval from their chosen deity. And since Trump left office, and especially since he got booted from social media, other than pissy Trumper Tantrums on his Bullshit Social platform, these poor shambling sycophants aren’t getting their fix. Could that be a reason why donations are down, Trump’s self enforced silence has finally started his base moving on?
One last thing. You know what else cult followers need? They. Need. Each. Other. I have often compared attending a Trump rally to attending a midnight screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It’s a cultural bonding experience. For Rocky Horror fans, it’s purely entertainment. But for Trumpaholics, being surrounded by each other is the only time they have to feel like superhuman winners that Trump portrays them as, and not as the third rate losers they secretly know everybody else views them as. And Trump is denying them of that fuel.
There you have it. Trump has cocked this thing up from the start. When you look at 2015-2021, the Orange shitgibbon was an omnipresent force on the scene. But since January of 2021, trump has become little more than a memory. Even if he runs, it will be interesting to see what is early rally crowd sizes look like. Like a singer who gets lazy, after two years of nothing more than radio Greatest Hits, has Trump’s laziness relegated him to showrooms now rather than the main stage when he tours? Don’t touch that dial.
The recent mystifying activity from FrankenTrump isn’t really puzzling: he’s never made any sense…
I’ve been thinking about the lack of rallies. Let’s face it – Trump is usually his own worst enemy as in the more he runs his mouth the more legal trouble he’s been creating for himself. Now, we all know that second to the fact he’s got a long history of stiffing his lawyers on their fees another huge reason the kind of quality lawyers he needs know he blows off good legal advice. Even a dumbass ambulance chaser or Regent Law School grad (or even student for that matter) would advise him to keep his fat fucking mouth shut and his fingers/thumbs off the keyboard! Trump’s ignored such advice over and over.
BUT, he’s actually had to sit for depositions in the past and despite his best efforts sometimes they come out and watching him on camera, where it’s clear he’s cornered, understands he’s under oath & the penalty for perjury he’s like a deer in the headlights trying to weasel out from questions. But when pinned down by a good lawyer fesses up. He’d counted on SCOTUS and other courts, stacked with his own appointees to shield him but both civil and criminal cases are moving along. If not as fast as we’d like they are moving forward and he’s in a cold sweat about all the depositons he’s facing.
And here’s where we get to it – he figures he’s clever enough to spew bullshit on Truth Social where he’s got a chance to look at what he wrote before hitting post – assuming HE of course can give himself the best legal advice and hasn’t written anything that will come back to bite him in the ass. He’s of course been wrong about that as we know.
However, when it comes to rallies and that “soul food” both he and the goobers who attend them want is when it’s one long riff. Unscripted, free-association word salad mixing different topics in with each other! When he gets in THAT mode he says whatever he thinks will fire the crowd up and can’t help but bragging about how immune he is from trouble. He’s Trump! He’s Invincible! And he CAN’T keep himself from bragging about the shit he’s gotten away with and intends to get away with in the future.
You pointed out he’s a con man. And such people do sometimes sit down and take a hard look at whatever con they’re in the middle of and assess how to keep it going AND more importantly make sure they leave themselves an escape hatch. For Trump, such reflections mean admitting, if only to himself that while running his fat mouth like he’s done at so many rallies in the past is handing ammo to prosecutors and plaintiff’s (in civil cases) lawyers! Unfortunately that’s exactly what the goobers expect and if he doesn’t give it to them attendance will dry up like a dropped cup of water on asphalt in Death Valley in the summertime.
He CAN”T get out there and do the kinds of rallies his fans/cult members want and he knows it. He’s in a hellua fix. One of his own making and I for one rather enjoy him squirming.
I think the crowds are tired of his 90-minute-long free-association rants. He hasn’t been drawing the huge crowds, and they even start leaving while he’s still getting warmed up. Heck, when he “announced”, they had to bar people from leaving!
I think he has a rally scheduled for Columbia, South Carolina soon. We shall see what kind of crowd he can command. I suspect it will be smaller than the ones he had in 2021.