This week has been seminal not only in Donald Trump’s life but in America’s as well. Quite a few things have happened, all in the space of four days. The common thread between all of them is that MAGA has been left looking impotent and stupid and its Mango Messiah has let that happen because he’s got bigger problems. First there was the blow back from the abortion ban. That’s still raging. That was followed by the ludicrous exhibition of the Articles Of Impeachment being walked from the House to the Senate, which was set to carnival music. The impeachment died an immediate death upon arrival. That displayed Chuck Schumer at his best because he not only had his caucus in line, he had GOP support as well. MAGA flopped.
Then there was the transformation of Mike Johnson from Trump puppet to statesman. That was quite the spectacle. The Age Of Miracles is not past, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Johnson rightly cited the Axis Of Evil which is China, Russia and Iran (don’t forget North Korea.) He said America needed to “do the right thing and give Ukraine ammo.” This was music to ears sore from listening to Marge’s shrill high decibel rants.
And then Trump came along to add his voice to the chorus of this shift in policy. Oh, yes. J.D. and Marge are going to lose it bigly when this sinks in. Let Rick Wilson explain it to you.
Read the Trump post below, cut out the bluster and self-fellation, and you’ve got a signal that Trump isn’t going to the mattresses for the Putin Caucus. He’s giving Mike Johnson and Mitch McConnell the green light and casting J.D. Vance, Marjorie Taylor-Greene, et al. over the side.
He’s not doing this because he cares about Ukraine; he’s doing this because the polls are shifting, and he needs fewer hassles.
He’s doing this because his professional team knows what we know; there are a lot of 1st and 2nd generation Eastern European voters in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, and because even with conservative Republicans, Putin’s approval rating is in the single digits.
This rare moment of bipartisanship doesn’t need to be the exception. It doesn’t need to be an outlier. One of the greatest legacies of breaking the MAGA movement on this issue is that no one loses in this deal; Ukraine gets weapons, Putin gets hammered, and Americans get jobs.
Trumpism (and its J.D. Vance-led American Bund-style Putinism) is a fundamentally pessimistic creed. “We’re the stupid ones,” as Trump likes to say. It’s a creed of decline, weakness, or inevitable forces of dark puissance always draining America of her power. We need to retreat, withdraw, hide, and let regional warlords like Putin reign over as much territory as they can seize.
Now what’s going to happen next? I think you can count on J.D. Vance to suddenly go amnesiac. What you’ll see is an open denial by him, should he be so ill advised to go on one of the Sunday political shows, that he never said anything about Ukraine aid and then embarrassing tapes will be played. J.D. is faced with a problem.
And what about Marge? Now this could get interesting. Marge is such an unreasoning fanatic that it’s hard to tell how she’ll take this new piece of information. This is going to fry her circuits something fierce. She can’t go against Trump because that’s the essence of being MAGA but Trump himself has now changed what the MAGA stance is. So does she attempt to parse Trump’s tea leaves in such a manner that she can save face? That would imply a level of intelligence and finesse that she has done everything to prove that she does not possess. Any capitulation that she does do to this new Trump stance is likely to look clumsy and stupid, because those are qualities she possesses in abundance.
And, more importantly, does she continue with her mad quest to off Mike Johnson politically? She got the support Friday morning of Paul Gosar in that doomed venture. Now you have a Greene/Massie/Gosar coalition and we presume Matt Gaetz will join in. But will that get the Putin caucus what it needs? Very unlikely.
Marge may just flame out spectacularly, meaning that she’s already despised and she may make herself a complete social pariah in the House. There is a very strong possibility of that.
You all remember the famous quote attributed to Lincoln, which has been found, in fact, to be a paraphrase of sentiments he expressed in one of his speeches. Here it is: “Public sentiment is everything. With it, nothing can fail. Against it, nothing can succeed.” Right now the tide of public sentiment has shifted away from MAGA idiocy and towards a traditional American stance. America is going to stand by her ally, Ukraine. This is as it should be.
What Greene, Massie and Gosar are doing is making themselves look like the fools that they are. The delinquent children can rage, the adults are running the lower chamber.
Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries vowed Friday the majority of Democrats will support Republicans’ Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and Gaza foreign aid legislation as Republican Speaker Mike Johnson lost support of another member of his conference to a faction determined to oust him.
“Democrats will provide a majority of our majority as it relates to funding Israel, humanitarian assistance, Ukraine, and our allies in the Indo Pacific,” Minority Leader Jeffries said. “It remains to be seen what Republicans will do in terms of meeting the national security needs of the American people, but it was important for House Democrats to ensure that the national security bills are going to be considered.”
Watching Marge Greene flame out will be amusing. As to J.D. Vance, he’s up for an embarrassing and humiliating passage in his life. You should have listened, J.D. Everything Trump Touches Dies.
A creed of decline and weakness is not an incorrect description of the U.S. Had we been strong and progressive, not only would the magats and trump gone without winning elections, but the tea-baggers and freedumb caucus would have been considered un-electable and would have been un-elected. This country has gone downhill over the past 40+ years (gee, thanks ronnie ramjet). Progressive leadership in the w.h., progressive super-majorities in the house and senate (which does not mean pols of the sinema/manchin mold), and a complete and utter revamp of our judiciary (ESPECIALLY the supreme court) might just set this country on the path back to forward momentum and strength. As things stand in this moment of time, we will soon be like the roman empire only we’ll be gone and pretty much forgotten. We certainly won’t be a blueprint for other societies to model themselves after. Because “strength” measured only in military might and repression of the citizenry is not really strength. Strength is the ability not only to last but to continually become greater, become a place people want to live in and something to emulate.
This country is a shit-show and con xtians put us here. Until they are tossed out like the garbage they are, we are f*cked.
You seem to be placing a great deal of importance of “progressive” but you’re leaving out the one “X-factor” (so to speak): The great mass of voters who turn on “progressive” causes when they don’t happen overnight.
That’s why the Teabaggers did so well in 2010–because too many “progressive” voters weren’t happy the country didn’t become UTOPIA during Obama’s first year in office. “Dammit all. We voted for ‘hope and change’ and what did we get? More of the same old same-old.”
That’s why Hillary lost in 2016. The “progressives” didn’t get Bernie (who, after all, was NOT a Democrat; he was an Independent when he announced his run for the White House, he remained an Independent through EVERY SINGLE PRIMARY AND CAUCUS, and, even after getting to become a “super delegate” to the Democratic Convention, he remained an Independent–all because he was “elected by the people of Vermont as an Independent” and he had to remain “faithful” to those voters) and too much media complicity in taking down Hillary and boosting Trump AND THE FECKING VOTERS bought into the lies. EVEN AFTER WARNINGS about the Supreme Court and how Roe v Wade (among other decisions) were at risk, given Trump’s backing by the far-right evangelical nuts, it didn’t matter enough to “progressives.” “Oh, no. The Court will never reverse Roe because it’s ‘settled law’.” (And then we saw exactly how “settled” that “settled law” really was when those “strict constructionists” and “absolute Constitutional originalists” felt about such silliness. Their Dobbs ruling went BEYOND the scope of what Mississippi was arguing. All that Mississippi brought into the case was changing from 20-22 weeks to 15 but the Court’s judicial activists decided to scrap Roe entirely. Of course, we also saw how “the people should have some say in a Supreme Court nominee” when a vacancy comes during an election year and there’s a GOP majority; in 2016, a seat remained vacant for a full year while an election year was in progress whereas in 2020, a seat became vacant in September and it was filled 10 days before the election.)
“Progressive” voters only seem to really turn out for the Cinderella election–the race for President. Oh, they’ll vote for the other offices and ballot issues while they’re there. But what about those highly important “mid-terms?” If there’s something that causes enough “progressive” outrage, they’ll turn up and vote for those lesser offices (though it doesn’t seem like the outrage manages to do much for state and local offices changing to more progressive officials)–and we have been fortunate enough that there’s been reason for progressive outrage in 2018 and in 2022 that they’ve turned up. But how many times can we count on that? *IF* we’re lucky enough to get a Democratic-controlled Congress and retain the White House, 2026 is unlikely to see any “progressive outrage” to push those voters back to their polling places and keep a Democratic Congress.
Some ‘progressives’ seem no smarter than the Maga crowd. Look how many didn’t vote in 2016 or voted for Jill Stein. The question is can we see the forest for the trees? The jury is out until November.
You nailed it Joseph. I’ve always considered myself as progressive but I’m also a pragmatist. I know that just because I want it now, lasting change takes time. I am so disappointed that “progressives” expect immediate results and then act like babies when they don’t get what they want when they want.
I knew all along Obama wouldn’t govern as progressively as I wanted. Still, I worked like hell to elect him. Phone banking, and even knocking on doors in ruby red West fucking Virginia! During the year long grind to pass the ACA I felt (and still believe) Obama was naïve to believe the GOP would actually compromise and that it would come down to forcing things. Which happened and we wound up with something that would take far longer to kick in and help than should have been the case. But over time it’s become not just established but popular.
Anyway, I can’t help but think of election night which was unseasonably warm in Chicago in 2008. As he stood in Grant Park addressing both that huge crowd but also the nation (not to mention the world) he did strike a positive and hopeful tone AND people were justified in feeling that way. However, he also tried and tried very hard to temper things with reality. If you were to go and watch a video you see him making the point that the real, hard work was just beginning. That it was going to take sustained effort for years to carry through the kinds of changes everyone had voted for when they voted for him, and other Democrats.
But people got pissy that everything didn’t just magically change. And too many petulantly disengaged by the time 2010 rolled around and the country and the world has been paying the price ever since because the Koch’s created and implemented a plan to not only take over Congress but also statehouses and start gerrymandering state after state to extremes. Many states including my own of NC are still suffering from that because the gerrymandering goes beyond Congressional districts. State legislative chambers in many states are hopelessly gerrymandered. Here in NC where I live voter registration is fairly evenly split between Democrats and Republicans and Independents too. Yet for much of the time since I moved here in 2014 the GOP has held legislative “super-majorities” or to put it another way veto proof ones. Having a Democratic Governor (who’s a good one but hardly progressive) doesn’t help when the legislature can (and has) stripped him of powers a Governor would normally have, or override any vetoes!
That’s what progressives, too many of them at least don’t get. Getting 80 or even 90 percent of what you’d like is awesome but like the Free-Dumb caucus crazies it’s all or nothing with them. So they sit home, or cast votes for Ralph Nader or Jill Stein and in enough numbers to swing Presidential elections. Roberts. Alito. Appointed to SCOTUS by Bush 43 because of fucking progressive petulance. Gorsuch, Kavanaugh. Coney-Barret. Appointed by Trump due to progressive petulance. Along with Thomas those six have been and will continue to legislate The Federalist Society’s wet dream.
All because too many progressives wanted, DEMANDED with the zealotry of the Puritans a Presidential candidate who would give the EVERYTHING they wanted and “right fucking now!” In the process it allowed a host of other conservatives to get elected at both the federal and state level.
I fear what might be coming this fall. As in the “Joe Biden is OLD” and while they might speak “reasons” (like with Hillary) that will be enough to keep them home. And not just the under 30 voters. Think about that folks.
Too true, Denis, but not a new phenomenon.
Example 1: My great aunt was a 60-plus senior sixty years ago, and had lots of partly-empty bottles of pills in her place because she didn’t feel better after a couple or three doses of the prescribed medication. The drugs didn’t work fast enough, so she stopped taking them.
Example 2: As a newly-promoted line manager in a Bell System company in the late 1980s, I attended a session on “quality”. The session leader detailed results of polls conducted of corporate executives around the world. The comment was that Japanese executives based actions on a 15-year time frame, while American execs looked 15 minutes ahead.
The question became “What have you done for me lately?” well before we came into this world, and the “lately” has become a miniscule time frame compared to what it once was, a result of our becoming a society of spoiled brats.
The GOP ignored the 2013 election post-mortem, and progressive Democrats abandoned HC three years later, both short-sighted electoral blunders. There’s another one coming, and while it could break our way, it’s not a lead-pipe cinch.
Oops lost my post (cell🤦🏻♂️). Militant moderates., pugilistic progressives, pragmatic liberals… would include democratic socialists but the squad has pooped the libel. Fire is good except when it is friendly fire or very unfriendly fire!