The soul of the Republican party is up for grabs, by all accounts, and a perfunctory glance would indicate that Satan is winning, if he hasn’t already won. The latest convert to the Dark Side of Trumpism is J.D. Vance. Vance was trailing in the polls, the Trump endorsement boosted him, and now he’s leading. Politico:
He was lagging in the polls. His cash was running low. With the state’s primary fast approaching, J.D. Vance’s chances of winning the Ohio GOP Senate nomination didn’t look promising.
But his fortunes have changed dramatically in just the last week since Donald Trump delivered his endorsement, an intervention that has upended one of the most contentious Republican primaries in the nation.
More than $5 million in new donations have poured into a pro-Vance super PAC — just weeks earlier, it had spent nearly all of its available funds. Vance, the author of the book “Hillbilly Elegy,” has taken the lead in polling for the first time since entering the crowded Republican primary in July.
“I would not have told you, you know, a week ago that we were in a position to win convincingly,” Vance said in an interview Wednesday. “I felt pretty good about the race a week ago, but now I feel very good about it.”
Vance’s opponents were begging Trump not to intervene but he pulled the trigger anyway — and the money started to flow. Such are the fruits of conversion to the Trump faith. Intelligencer:
Six years ago, J.D. Vance was a vocal Never Trumper, once going so far as suggesting Donald Trump could be “America’s Hitler” in a private Facebook message to a law school friend. This week he got Trump’s blessing in Ohio’s Republican primary for Senate, which he’ll receive in person during a rally on Saturday.
“I think there are so many reasons I was wrong about Trump, but I’m happy that I was wrong about Trump,” Vance said by phone on Thursday, while driving to a campaign town-hall meeting in Findlay, Ohio. His opponents have attacked him as a flip flopper and painted him as an opportunist and a secret RINO, but he brushed off the criticism by portraying himself as an honest convert compared to others in the party. “Something our voters respond to on the campaign trail is being told the truth,” he said. “‘Yeah I had one beef six years ago and I have a different view today, this is why it changed’ is a hell of lot better than trying to pretend that you didn’t say something you said.”
For all his past skepticism, Vance scorned those who he said praised Trump before the attack on the Capitol and condemned him afterwards. “It’s crazy how many of the people who were saying nice things about him on television a week before the election were basically accusing him of being a traitor a week after January 6 and then had to completely flip flop … because it was obvious our voters are still with him.”
“The one positive thing I could maybe say about Liz Cheney is that she’s consistent,” he said, adding if “Trump was willing to drop a hydrogen bomb on Moscow I’d guarantee she’d be his biggest fan.”
Isn’t that intriguing? Vance is saying, in essence, that anybody in the GOP can be bought for the right price, and that’s his opinion on what Cheney’s price is. In plain English, they’re all whores. We agree.
And the tragic part here is that the GOPers saw Trump for what he was at the beginning and they were right. Vance, Cruz, Graham, Rubio, the lot of them. The list is endless. But when Trump won, they abandoned all their values because they didn’t understand WHY he won.
Books have been written on that subject, why Donald Trump won, but I think it distills down to the fact that he was simply something that nobody had ever seen before. A lot of basically sane people, such as that Capitol police office, Michael Farone, voted for Trump because he naively bought into the idea that Trump, being different, could work all the miracles that he said he could. I think a lot of people thought that way and voted for Trump.
But the rank and file GOP didn’t play on this angle of Trump the freak, just passing through, and try to win over their base in other ways. They didn’t know how. So they went along with the freak show, they normalized the freak show and now the ugly part of the freak show is that it leads to fascism. I give you Ron DeSantis as Exhibit “A”.
Every election since 2016 has been a nail biter and it looks like 2022 may outclass them all in that department. To say that this is a definitive election is to make a dramatic understatement.
Comparing these desperate treason weasels to Satan is an insult to the latter. He prefers competent subordinates who know their place. None of this crowd do, as they suffer from the collective delusion that they deserve to be Top Dog…and none wish to be the more boring but necessary underlings. Wonder if Putin taught them leadership like this.
I wonder how fast he’d have been impeached if he’d even tried that. It’s all kinds of *not done* – just look at the world reaction to what’s going on in Ukraine. (Not that Vance will, of course.)