Trump’s Sweet Vengeance
Democrats are getting it wrong again. After Trump’s 11th-hour endorsement of Texas attorney general and all-in Trump sycophant Ken Paxton, who was impeached for multiple charges of abuse of office, investigated on felony security charges, and dogged by adulterous sexual imbroglios, the slippery MAGA sleazebag still went on to pulverize Senate old-timer John Cornyn in the Republican primary on Tuesday. And yet, liberal cableheads deconstructing the results keep recycling the point that, somehow this was good news. Millions of dollars, they chortled, will now have to be diverted from other imperiled Republicans to defend a Senate seat that, for four terms, had been occupied by the beloved party elder Cornyn and now will be in play against the Democrats’ latest Texan mirage and Colbert candidate James Talarico. When has Trump ever found it difficult to raise millions of dollars, especially against a Senate candidate who tweeted in 2021 that his office was “the first in the history of the (Texas) Capitol to put pronouns on their business cards?” Paxton was already on a roll in his victory speech, immediately branding his Presbyterian seminarian opponent “James Talafreako,” “Six-Gender Jimmy,” and “Tofu Talarico” (“Soy boy!” yelled out an inventive Paxton supporter in the crowd).
Of course, as all the pundits tell us, Trump’s base loves him but, in using that term, I suspect they still subliminally conjure dated images of a Viking-horned, bare-chested QAnon shaman storming the Capitol. Today, that same lawless horde is now not only pardoned, but about to have access to Trump’s new $1,776 billion “Anti-Weaponization” slush fund. The fact that the comatose turtle, former Senate leader Mitch McConnell, has finally emerged from political hiding to denounce the outrage of a cop-bashing mob getting a financial pay-out is no threat to Trump. McConnell can exhume some principles because he isn’t running again. Trump’s resident House weenie Speaker Mike Johnson, with his own re-election looming, was so fearful of losing the slush fund vote that he sent lawmakers home early for a week’s recess to avoid it.
Don’t expect House members to return emboldened when Trump has just gone four for four in the primaries, whacking, not just Cornyn, but his Epstein Files Transparency Act foe Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Georgia GOP gubernatorial candidate Brad Raffensperger, who committed the ultimate crime of failing to “find” 11,780 more Trump votes in Georgia in the 2020 election. Sorry, not sorry about Senator Bill Cassidy from Louisiana also hitting the bricks. He’s the physician who oversaw a nationally-recognized vaccine campaign in his home state, but later revealed his inner worm by casting the deciding vote to confirm RFK Jr. as HHS Secretary. Trump punished him anyway for having voted in 2021 for his second impeachment. So long, mofo.
Mr. Untouchable
Every liberal commentator now bangs on about an assured mid-term shellacking for the POTUS party over rising gas prices, thanks to the Trump-created catastrophe of the Strait of Hormuz closure and the universally unpopular Iran war. I suspect they and the polls are wrong again. It’s not just the creeping success of Republican redistricting creating more seats than Democratic efforts to do the same. Trump has found a diabolical way to separate his personal charisma from the destruction he perpetrates and the corruption he normalizes. He’s the angel of sabotage, freed from the shackles of his own malign deeds by the Supreme Court, the GOP’s moral turpitude, and the universal glint of greed from the Wall Street honchos, Silicon Valley bros, and Palm Beach plutocrats who see that the presidency is open for business. As last week’s Brennan Center newsletter put it, “There is a zone of lawlessness around the Oval Office.” In Trump’s first term, he was restrained by the need for a second, and by advisers schooled in the now-quaint ethos of governing by accepted norms. But then, he learned something transformative. Speaking to the NYT in January about prohibiting his family from profiteering overseas from proximity to official business in his first term, Trump said that, “he got no credit for it.” He then added a killer kicker that made less news at the time but has stayed with me as a rare moment of truth: “I found out that nobody cared.”
If there is any message that crystalizes the 250th anniversary of the U.S., it is not that America has changed but that Trump has changed America. There will be no snapback when he’s gone. Even as his approval ratings tank and the country is hurting, it feels as if his base has become wider and deeper and represents a new national state of mind. Tuned out on our phones, mesmerized by money porn, high on the idolatry of the big flashy win, we are getting used to the erosion of the rule of law, the threats to free speech, the banishment of government watchdogs, and the chasm of inequality. After ten years of Trump bludgeoning the first principles of the American experiment (ten because I don’t count the disappearing ink of Biden’s lame tenure when every headline was a new Trump indictment, scandal, or toxic blast from exile in Mar-a-Lago), Trump has refashioned the country in his image.
This is brilliant but off on one point, I think: When one moves the rock to free the vermin, it is not the vermin who are new. They were always there. Lying in wait, perhaps, but there nonetheless. Toqueville wrote that the American experiment would fail because the untrammelled accumulation of wealth would undermine the better angels of democratic liberalism -- a scathing and bitter indictment.
Trump didn't change America; he's just a mirror image of it. He is the voice, the heart, the soul, the mind, the complete embodiment of what this country has become. And after he brings on its gotterdamerung most of his MAGA base will suddenly develop amnesia and claim they never supported him (just as no Nazi's could be found in Germany after its WW2 defeat)