The signs are there if you know where to look. Just take a close look at somebody’s current behavior, and then compare it with their previous behavior. And while His Lowness may still be the power in the GOP, it starts to appear that it might not be quite as absolute as Traitor Tot likes to pretend. See;
- Kreepy Kevin McCarthy can move to Mar-A-Lago and fluff like a porn star full time, but none of that can erase his own words directly blaming Trump for the Capitol Riot. It can’t erase him actually discussing the 25th Amendment on a leadership conference call. And he’s not likely to get Lauren Boebert’s vote for Speaker when she hears him wish aloud that her Twitter account would be revoked.
- How many times does The Trumpster Fire have to hear Lindsey Graham hold him responsible for 1/6, and threaten to invoke the 25th Amendment if Trump didn’t stop the violence. And oh, how it must have warmed Trump’s heart to hear Graham say that Biden was the perfect man to clean up Trump’s mess.
- It is still rumored without confirmation that the GOP dominated North Carolina legislature purposely redrew their redistricting maps to erase Madman Maddy Cawthorn’s district, and make his attempt to get reelected much more difficult
- In blood red Tennessee, the GOP dominated legislature actually went into session to pass a bill removing a totally batshit crazy Trombie from the GOP primary ballot. A court ruled the bill invalid, so the legislature went right back in, fine tuned it, and passed it again. I don’t understand what the court has to do with it anyway, since a primary is a party function, and not a regular election
- In Nebraska on Tuesday night, GOP voters handed Trump his first high profile endorsement loss of the season, choosing a sane candidate for Governor that could actually tie his own shoes, and keep his hands to himself over Trump’s endorsed serial groper
- In Pennsylvania, something like 8 GOP gubernatorial candidates are desperately meeting to figure out which one is most electable, so the other 7 can drop out of the race and back the survivor, in order to beat the Trombie seditionist candidate who was actually at the Capitol building when it was breached, and has selfies to prove it. He also coordinated with Trump seditionist lawyer John Eastman
- The Florida Supreme Court stepped in and shit all over Governor Ron Deathsantis’s personally drawn redistricting map for trying to strip the entire middle of the state of minority representation in congress
Look, throw out McCarthy and Graham, those were surreptitiously taped gotchas!, and throw out Nebraska, since that was just voters who actually had 12 functioning brain cells. But the rest of those are examples of actual, voluntary strategic decisions, made by politicians. And take my word for it, die hard politicians don’t take a shit without the polls telling them it’s OK.
And I can only imagine that the polls are telling them something I’ve been preaching for months now. While Trump may still be the dominant personality in the national party, when it comes down to districts, and the people that these representatives need to get reelected, And what they’re seeing is that when it gets down to the granular level, Trump has limited influence, and a limited shelf life. They wouldn’t be doing this shit otherwise. They don’t want to see their state majorities disappear because of an orange howler monkey.
Fortuitously enough, it is in the states that former GOP DHS advisor Miles Taylor’s group can do the most damage. Taylor is harnessing grassroots operations and targeted advertising to get normally lethargic moderate GOP voters out to the polls for the primaries to beat Trump’s acolytes there, so they never get to the general election. And from what’s already going on in red states, he might meet with some success.
The national GOP is locked in, there’s nothing they can realistically do. Trump is the whole ballgame. But that’s the national party. If state legislators are taking it to the streets, trashing Trombie acolytes for state and national seats to their constituents, to maintain some semblance of sanity, then Trump and the national GOP may have some unpleasant surprises throughout these primaries. Don’t touch that dial.
I’m not going to be on the GOP voters developing functioning brains this year.
LMFAO!!! Or any other year either…
All goes back to what I already knew about this crowd: no one is actually in charge, not even Donald-mon The Orange. Over and over, I hear the cries of doom on how the R base will fall in line when election time rolls around. I have two rejounders to this: 1) how many will bother if the MAGA grievances against the adults get worse? 2) A more morbid question: how many will still be alive by November? COVID is still around and these people are still likely to get killed behind it.
“I don’t understand what the court has to do with it anyway, since a primary is a party function, and not a regular election”
It probably depends on what exactly the court was ruling on. Back in 1986, a court had to step in to the Alabama Democratic primary. In a very tight run-off between then-Lt Governor Bill Baxley and then-Attorney General Charlie Graddick, Graddick prevailed by some 10,000 votes but the Party alleged that Graddick’s victory had come as the result of crossover voting by Republicans who’d voted in the GOP primary then voted in the Democratic runoff so the Party refused to accept Graddick as the nominee. Graddick took the Party to court on the issue and the Court ruled that either a new election be held or the Party determine the crossover vote which was technically illegal in the state at the time but never enforced at the state was essentially a one-party state (since then, both parties have enhanced their rules to prevent crossover voting–no one is allowed to “switch” parties by voting in one party’s primary then voting in the other party’s run-off; you have to declare which party’s primary you intend to vote and that record is retained until after the run-off). As the Party didn’t want to pay for another primary run-off, it opted to declare Baxley the winner in a Party meeting. (As a result, Guy Hunt was elected, becoming the first GOP governor elected in Alabama since Reconstruction. Fob James would be elected as a Republican in the 90s after having been elected as a Democrat in 1978.)