You are welcome, as always, to call me crazy. But with a little bit of snooping around it’s possible to connect the dots and figure out what Donald Trump is up to. He’s not exactly a particle physicist, after all.
He’s run a very strange campaign so far, to say the least. This is nothing like the 2016 campaign. In 2015, as you may recall, he made his descent down the escalator from his gilded aery on the 66th floor, surrounded by cheering paid extras. Within 10 hours he was at a rally in Iowa and the next day he was in New Hampshire. That’s shooting out of the cannon.
And now? Now, it’s been three weeks since Trump’s tepid announcement of his third run for the presidency and he’s done squat, except have a disastrous dinner with the neo-Nazi set and the rest of the time he doesn’t leave his club except to go out on the golf course. This is starting to capture the eye of a lot of people, because one thing that a presidential campaign is not, is a set it and forget it proposition.
So what the hell is he up to? My opinion is that Trump is going to hold the GOP hostage, simple as that. He’s the anti-Solomon, he’s totally happy to chop the baby in two and the baby is the GOP and he doesn’t love it at all. He never has. It’s always been a means to an end and the institutional regard that we’ve seen from other Republican candidates over the years is not present in Trump.
So the Republicans are in a Faustian bargain and they know it. That’s why so many of them are silent as the tomb over the optics of Trump having dinner with Nick Fuentes and Kanye West. They don’t want to condemn him because they see what’s ahead.
This is what’s ahead: They either nominate Trump or he’ll start his own MAGA party and thereby cripple them by splitting the GOP in two. It’s as simple as that. “You put me on the Republican ticket, or I’ll put myself on the MAGA ticket. And if I go down in flames, I’ll take you with me.”
You know Trump thinks like that. Yes, there are some noteworthy Republican power brokers, Rupert Murdoch being foremost among them, who say that the party needs to move on. Editorials in both the New York Post and Wall Street Journal have lacerated Trump and also made the observation that the big money is not going to follow him.
Don’t be too sure. As much as I hate to say it, Trump is not out of the game yet and we have seen this pattern before. Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo says “don’t believe the GOP oligarch hype.”
I was reminded when putting together notes for the preceding posts that a number of the big Republican billionaire megadonors have announced they won’t be supporting Trump in 2024 — the Mercer family, Ronald Lauder, Stephen Schwarzman et al. This billionaire primary for Republican candidates is a whole issue in itself. But for now, I wouldn’t put much stock in these refusals. Back in 2016 most of the GOP megadonors were against Trump before they were for him. If he’s the nominee again they’ll certainly fall in line. And they may well do it even before he’s nominee.
Needless to say, none of this is about any distaste for Trump or opposition to his seditious and malevolent politics. If that was the case they would have jumped ship after Jan. 6 at the latest. They are pulling up stakes or rather threatening to do so because Trump looks like a loser and businessmen of all people don’t want to put money into a bad investment.
I don’t expect Trump to be thundering back to the dominant position in the GOP he had in 2016 or 2020. (Again, beginning of the end, not the end of the end.) He is still the leader of the GOP and likely 2024 nominee. We can tell that, if for nothing else, that were he not so GOP stakeholders would be using the anti-Semite hoedown and constitution elimination furors to write him out of the party definitively. What I think we’ll see is a more tangled and protracted process in which the GOP can’t quit Trump but is more sullen and raucous about being compelled to line up behind him. But these big money guys? They’ll get in line.
That sounds plausible to me. And Marshall is not alone. Not by a long shot. Michael Steele thinks so, too.
Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, said: “Show me the evidence where his grip on the party is breaking. The only thing we’ve heard from the party leadership is there’s no place for antisemitism in the Republican party. We haven’t heard anybody call for Donald Trump to be removed as a potential nominee of the party.
“Ron DeSantis has said nothing about the Mar-a-Lago dinner. He is absolutely silent, so the idea that he’s going to be a leader is a joke because that was the moment to lead and he quivered in the corner because he was afraid of getting smacked by Donald Trump.”
He added: “Trump still is the thing that animates and controls outcomes inside the Republican party for as long as the political leadership allows the tail to wag the dog. If you’re afraid of your own shadow, you’re not going to get out much.”
Ron DeSantis may be the anointed one at Fox News, but he is starting to prove in many ways that he can’t perform on the big political stage. Steele is right. This was DeSantis’ chance to lead and he blew it. Rick Wilson recently observed that DeSantis couldn’t even handle a simple question by Charlie Crist, about whether he could commit to four full years in the governor’s mansion.
“IT WAS NINE SECONDS OF THE GEARS MOVING IN HIS HEAD AND YOU COULD SEE THE AGONY ON HIS FACE, LIKE ‘I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO SAY.’ TRUMP NEVER HAS A DOUBT. HE MAY BE AN ASSHOLE BUT HE NEVER HAS A DOUBT. RON IS OVER-INTELLECTUALISING IT AND I’M TELLING YOU: THIS GUY HAS A GLASS JAW.”
DeSantis dropped the ball there and he dropped the ball — badly — when he didn’t take a stance on the neo-Nazi soiree at Mar-a-Lago. He can’t think on his feet and he can’t make strategic decisions when it’s necessary to do so. I agree with Rick Wilson. I think Trump is going to maul DeSantis when the time comes.
Wilson’s characterization of that was,
“IN A REPUBLICAN PRIMARY AGAINST TRUMP, EVEN TRUMP IN A WEAKENED STATE STILL HAS AN INNATE FERAL SENSE OF CRUELTY AND CUNNING THAT RON DESANTIS DOES NOT HAVE. HOW DOES TRUMP KNOW THAT? HE WATCHED THE DEBATE.”
Now go over to the Oklahoma GOP website. That’s where the MAGA countdown clock is rolling. As I write, it is “695 MAGA days, 12 MAGA hours, 29 MAGA minutes and 15 MAGA seconds” to the Second Coming Of Trump. The head of the Oklahoma Democratic Party says that, “We’re like the testing ground for their most radical right exercises, and once they perfect it here, they can take it to other states.”
Here’s a sentence you’ll love. “To understand the future of the Republican party, start with the army of increasingly radicalised foot soldiers who shape it at state level.”
That is the bottom line here: Trump’s become too toxic for the public approval of the top of the Republican party. So his gambit now is to keep his support at the state and county levels and maintain — and hopefully grow — his MAGA base. The goal is to gain the GOP nomination and failing that, to lead the MAGAs as their pied piper — and the GOP right over the cliff.
He’s a wounded animal from all of the lawsuits and the continuing DOJ investigation. He’s got one shot and one shot only and that is to get reelected and institute fascist rule. I don’t think he’ll do it, obviously, but I do think there’s going to be a hell of a bloodbath along the way.
Stay tuned. You’ve got a front row seat.
To paraphrase Yeats:
” And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Mar a Lago to be born?”
HAHA!! Good one!! Yes, this entire saga of Trump has always had Biblical and Shakespearean aspects to it. Let’s kick in Yeats to the mix as well.
I think he has to be the republican nominee, otherwise Joe Biden is too old, too moderate, too whatever to have a shot at reelection. Only against TFG does Biden win. TFG already controls too many state parties, not to mention the RNC, to lose the nomination. I just hope in 2024, more democrats tie TFG around the neck of every other republican candidate. With TFG on the ballot, this could be decisive for democrats. After holding our own this midterm, the Mango Messiah as nominee could be our golden ticket to a blue wave.
I agree with everything you’ve said. I just wonder what this is going to look like, day by day, the complete disintegration of the Republican party. We’ve seen it worsen in three election cycles. Are they seriously going for a fourth? I can see where Trump has the deck stacked that way, but man, you would think there would be an alternative to this.
I don’t give a rat’s ass, obviously, what happens to the GOP, but the truth is that you need two functioning political parties for a democracy. We could lose democracy if the GOP continues to self-destruct. We’ve seen that already. January 6 was the wake up call.
If they lose decisively in 2024, there won’t be just an autopsy, but a rebuilding. That would be 4 elections in a row that they lost. The sane republicans left would be forced to rid themselves of the MAGAts.
Unfortunately, this is what we’ve heard the past three elections. In 2018, Trump was clearly having a toxic effect. He got clobbered in 2020. Then he got clobbered again in 2022 — plus don’t forget two years of Georgia senate runoffs. Georgia is now a swing state because of Trump.
So WHAT does it take for them to cut him loose? That’s the part I can’t get.
GOP “autopsies” of what went wrong go back decades. There was considerable gnashing of teeth and rending of garments in both 1992 & 1996 over Clinton soundly defeating two different WWI veterans. (Remember how conservatives including the CHICKENHAWKS would get all ’emotional” with their “He Never Served A Single Day In Uniform” complete with a gasp & sob tossed in?) The point is that whatever the proverbial autopsy says, even when one contained useful recommendations the lesson that was taken and worse applied was that the GOP wasn’t conservative enough! Given that is it any surprise that they are steadily marching to turning our country into a dictatorship?
I take it you mean WWII. Look at how the GOP has fallen. Whatever I might have thought about George H.W. Bush or Bob Dole, they are princes among men compared to the game show host.
I’ll actually give H.W. a lot of credit, his concession speech to Bill Clinton was very classy. I gained a lot of respect for him that night. And wasn’t it H.W. who began the tradition of presidents leaving a letter for the new president? That was classy, too.
And Uncle Joe didn’t get shit from Trump, right? Maybe some left over dry cleaning tickets, something like that. :))
DeSantis has a Big D problem: Disney. If his overthrow of remedy district goes through, FL.There is a billion dollar tax falling on the state due to his “brilliant” dick.move. He is likely praying for Over to.make small.changes like the bit about building a nuclear power plant. That way, he can claim.he made Disney bow.
DeathSanta is every bit as cruel.and ebil.as Trump. He hates gays, transpeople, non-Christians except for wealthy Jewish retirees, public schools, libraries and intelligence. He is just better at sounding like he actually has a brain than the Orange Orc.
That bill had a delayed start date, so it can be convenient memory-holed without any real-world effect. It was clearly meant to be rescinded from the get go.