History may not repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme
I am so glad to have heard that the J6 committee will be back, with a vengeance in September to keep dumping shit all over Trump’s and the GOP’s heads. Because they’re most definitely having the desired effect, an the closer to election day we get, the better.
Nielsen says that about 18 million people tuned in for the season finale of The Apprentice: Insurrection Island last night. Even the daytime sessions averaged between 10-13 million viewers. And that doesn’t count people who tuned in by streaming or social platform services.
And more importantly, there is now polling evidence that shows that people are watching. A recent poll showed that an aggregate of 63% of Americans are either sure, or find it highly likely that Trump was responsible, and intentionally led an insurrection on the Capitol. Helpful hint, that’s way more than the total number of Democrats in the country.
And it’s even worse when it comes to Trump. Before the J6 committee hearings commenced, Trump was the prohibitive favorite to win nomination in 2024 for the presidency. But a poll released today said that only 46% of registered Republican voters think that Trump should run again in 2024. Their two most common kvetches? He’s too universally hated, and he has too much baggage to win.
But hey!, this is Traitor Tot, so of course there’s more. In polling GOP and independent voters, whether they’re watching the hearings or not, there’s one common thread running through their angst. They’re sick or it! All of it. They’re heartsick over the Capitol riot, they’re sick of the GOP gamesmanship, and they’re sick to death of Trump.
Those of you who are long time readers should know what’s coming next, since I wrote about it repeatedly in both 2018 and 2020. The now proven phenomenon known as Trump Fatigue. In 2018 I wrote that independents and soft GOP voters were telling pollsters they were fed up with the slow rolling train wreck that was the Trump administration. They were tired of waking up every morning to see what new national scandal a Trump tweet had created. And the Democrats flipped 40 House seats.
It was even worse in 2020. Not only were soft GOP voters and independents sick of Trump’s shit, now even moderate GOP voters, who tend to faithfully vote the GOP ticket, were telling pollsters that they were literally exhausted by Trump’s shenanigans. They just wanted a return to normalcy. And Biden won the White House by 7 million votes, with the same electoral landslide Trump claimed in 2016.
And now it’s 2022, and here we go again. Trump isn’t even on the ballot, but of course Trump is on the ballot, because he’s Trump. First, Trump is sticking his short, fat fingers into every legislative race he can find by backing only the most batshit crazy candidate he can find. And second, The Republican Party is now officially known as the Trump GOP. It’s his personal plaything. And as you’ve read above, it isn’t going so well for the GOP or Hair Twitler.
Friday Night Bonus! Here’s one more metric you can use to see how things are going, and it isn’t as ephemeral as polling. It’s simple, hard numbers, called the FEC Quarterly Filings. And the results are both gratifying, but also surprising.
Basically, the Democrats are crucifying the GOP in fundraising. Not just in small money donations, hell, the Democrats have been doing that for years. The Democrats are also killing the GOP in large money donations as well. And most telling, while the Democrats fundraising is ascendent, Trump’s personal fundraising has taken a noticeable dip. Is the sucker valve finally closing?
This fundraising boon is literally pennies from Heaven for the Democrats. Not just for advertising, although that never hurts. But a healthy war chest allows the DNC to get seed money to battleground states for things like knock-on-doors, voter registration, carpools to get people like me who don’t leave the house without their seeing eye human to the polls, and community education on the new, more restrictive vote-by-mail laws, so they can participate.
Trump Fatigue was there in 2018, it was there again in 2020, and now it looks like it’s here again in 2022. But here’s the nightmare scenario for the GOP. Remember one simple thing. The Democrats don’t have to convince GOP voters to vote for Democrats, they just have to convince them to stay home! And it’s starting to look like that’s what may be happening. Keep those hearings coming!
Trump fatigue?
It’s more like exhaustion.
Well, for the REST of us–you know, the SANE people who knew Trump was, well, who he was and is. But for the others, the ones who thought they could “control” Trump and “put in people to rein in his impulses” after he became president, I think THOSE are the ones starting to suffer the “fatigue.” As we’ve seen in some GOP primaries, we’re really going to need a large number of “not-batshit-crazy” Republican voters to either vote for the Democrat or vote third-party; many of the primaries (which, unfortunately, tend to attract the hard-core, die-hard party “faithful” instead of the overwhelming majority who turn out only for the general election) have seen Trump-backed crazies winning their races. (Granted, Trump hasn’t really been as much of a kingmaker as he’d hoped since he hasn’t batted 1000 in all the primaries; unfortunately, with Trump, even getting one hit in twenty games is still too high a batting average. If Trump were a major league player, the latter average would lead to a pretty quick trade or being sent back to the minors.)
Or stroke,,as in heat stroke.
Or maybe an anxiety attacks when his name is mentioned.
In the spirit of history rhyming, allow me to assert that Trump is the “Jimmy Carter” of the Reagan Coalition.
Now, before ANY of you out there get your shorts in a twist over that comparison, hear me out. Jimmy got in in 1976 as a Washington outsider like Trump. He was supposed to be the return of what had been the long-term political paradigm defining coalition (the New Deal/New Frontier/Great Society coalition, in Jimmy’s case). But in both Jimmy and Trump’s case, a) both of them wound up at odds with the party they were attached to and b) both were proved to be walking anachronisms to the rising fortunes of those who came after. That served to make them last gasps of a dying political paradigm, thrown aside in the wake of what came after.
There are differences, of course, not least of which was J6. But none change the overall cycle and both men’s role in such.
When a spoiled, racist toddler steals the election with the aid of our enemy & the cultural laziness of our country, and then destroys everything he touches since 2016, well…it’s about Goddamn time we wake up. As you point out, we don’t have to outrun the bear…we just have to outrun these assholes.