Life Imitates Art
Isn’t it funny how, every time the Republican morons start accusing Democrats of heinous acts, it’s always them who end up getting investigated? Trump has spent 2 years screaming about massive Democratic voter fraud that ripped him off, but it’s AZ and MI GOP legislators who are under investigation for voter fraud over their alternate elector lists. And Trump’s own former Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, has had his name dropped from the North Carolina voting rolls, and is under state investigation for possible voter fraud.
Then you get mental defectives like Laborious MTG, Sugar Daddy Matt Gaetz, Madison Cawthorne, and Josh Hawley running around blaming liberal democrats for being groomers for pedophiles. And now you have a Capitol riot defense attorney accusing a Republican of years of grooming. And not just any Republican, but the Head Cheese, Trump himself.
On All In tonight, Chris Hayes chronicled a seemingly common Capitol riot miscreant. He was a total Trombie, answered the siren’s call of Traitor Tot, and went to DC on January 5th. He was caught on film entering the Capitol, going from office to office, and stealing a coat tree, which he posed next to for a selfie outside. The cops got him before he even got off of Capitol grounds.
Hayes had the attorney for the defendant on his program, and as much as I’ll say that I’m not sure his hook will land a fish, he blew me away. Not only did he blame Trump’s actions on January 6th for his client’s actions, his client saying he felt it necessary to follow Trump’s orders, we went way further. He said that his client was like so many other Trump supporters, not the best educated, feeling disenfranchised, and looking for someone to believe in. His point was that after 5 long years of white grievance, isolationism, hatred, distrust of government, and demands of blind loyalty, Trump had actually been grooming his followers for the possibility of just such an eventuality. And that started me thinking.
Does anybody here remember either the book or movie The Manchurian Candidate? basically, the plot line is a story about an American politician, who had been previously corrupted by a foreign government as a sleeper, a deep agent, given the education and opportunity to eventually run for President. The object being to have a loyal agent as President. Here’s why I immediately thought of that, and why it’s so topical now.
Cast your mind back to early 2017. Trump had been inaugurated, but had no real interest in actually doing the job, and God knows his voracious ego needed constant fluffing, so the first thing he did was to embark on a Thank You America rally tour. And I’ll never forget it, because I wrote about it at the time, but in one of his early rally speeches he said something like, Thank you so much! You guys are great, but I don’t need you anymore. Maybe I’ll need you in four years if I decide to run again, but I don’t need you anymore now. But I love you anyway! Which struck me as insane. Why tell your core base of constituents to go and fuck off for four years?
Here’s why. Trump announced the opening of his reelection campaign on the day after he got inaugurated.
And even though, with his stranglehold on the GOP, Trump was assured that he would run unopposed in the 2020 primaries, he spent 4 long years wasting taxpayer money on rally trips. Granted, with Trump’s term being a piss miserable failure, he needed the constant ego fulfillment. But he also wanted to be on stage regularly, in his strongholds, reinforcing their total and abject loyalty and fealty to him. And if that isn’t a textbook example of grooming, then I don’t know what is.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that His Lowness spent 4 years planning for an insurrection at the Capitol. But with his poll numbers tanking, and faced with the prospect of a challenger that could kick his ass around the block, I find it totally likely that Trump’s survival instincts had him wanting to keep as large of an army ot true believers loyal and motivated to try to pull off whatever hare brained scheme he may have to dream up to stay in power.
As I said at the top, I’m not sure whether this lawyer’s defense is going to work or not, after all, anyone not suffering from mental disability is responsible for their own actions. But I gotta tell ya, I’ll be goddamned if I don’t buy his theory.
Here’s how I see it with this goober and thousands of others who attacked the Capitol that day – Even if it didn’t work and stop the certification they were stupid enough, check that STOOPID enough to believe that Trump would issue a mass pardon and they’d be off the hook. That’s a very special kind of nasty hued orange Kool-Aid STOOPID but there you are. Trump was never going to issue a rash of pardons. Hell, he didn’t even bother doing so for some of his minions who crafted the whole Jan. 6 riot! That SHOULD be a major wake-up call to the rank & file MAGAts out there that Trump doesn’t give two shits about them, their lives or their problems. That to Trump their ONLY purpose in life is to regularly and publicly praise him and give him money. (Vlad and the oligarchs are feeling some real pressure these days and I figure Trump is actually getting some exercise for once in his life dodging their calls!)
And that may well be true Denis, but I get the feeling that it’s all going to come down to the judge…Traditional DC judges are slamming these guys, but a Trump appoined gorilla bought the story that the guy didn’t think he was trespassing because a cop at the door, with alarms blaring, didn’t stop him in fear for his life…
Here is something everyone might be forgetting: the supporters of ‘pube pols have been ignored after the ‘pubes get elected for better than 40 years. ‘Pube pols whip their followers into a frenzy, get elected, and then gift the wealthy with tax breaks all the while ignoring their voters. The people who are drooling trombies are used to being ignored by their ‘pube pols so why would they give two shits that former guy does the same thing? It is the one thing I have never understood about ‘pube voters: your candidates will dump you like a bag of steaming shit right after they’re elected so why in the fuck do you elect them?
The only thing that makes any sense is that the ‘pube base is made up of complete shit-for-brain morons.
IIRC, TFG had someone file the papers for his 2020 campaign committee by 1pm on 1/20/2017.
I saw that interview and it’s a disgusting tactic. The defendant, like all those defendants, is an adult, fully capable of knowing that what he was doing was wrong. Obviously, ‘grooming’ is the new all-purpose word to exploit for political ends.
And I’m going to bet this tRombie whose attorney is using the “grooming” defense, IF it works and the “innocent insurrectionist” gets acquitted, will go right back and vote for the Groomer In Chief all over again in 2024. Any judge who would let this guy off the hook for this lame excuse doesn’t deserve to sit on a bench except maybe one in a park with pigeon poop on it.