MAGA’s Best And Brightest

 I’m old enough to remember when John Lindsay was Mayor of NYC. And Bill DeBlasio; when Rudy Giuliani was “America’s Mayor.” And Michael Bloomberg was going to turn his mayoralty into the Presidency.

More than a few Republicans are celebrating Zohran Mamdani’s victory, seeing the 34-year-old democratic socialist as a political gift and an albatross for the Democratic Party.

The point being, nobody outside the BosWash punditocracy gives a flying fuck who the mayor of NYC is. I never knew anybody who so much as called Giuliani “America’s Mayor.” And how much good did that do him, anyway? Giuliani, by rights, should be a GOP albatross; but the truth is, we don’t get to choose what another person’s shibboleth will be.

Donald Trump is proof of that.

Bannon makes the class argument:

This is not Karen Bass. This is not the guy in Chicago. You’re going to see a whole new group of Mamdanis in these major urban cities because they’re just flooded with immigrants, right? That’s where his vote came from, principally, and the progressive left, these kids have come up through the public school system. This is the flower of what the progressive left has delivered over the last 40 or 50 years. You saw it tonight and people, we’re going to have a fight on our hands.

By a classless man. And a man who sees things very rigidly, and from only one perspective:

His speech tonight could not have been nastier or more aggressive. He mocked Cuomo. That is one of the first families of the Democratic Party, particularly in the state of New York.

And then with Trump, it was a direct throwdown to Trump, unlike any politician’s ever done. He tried to call President Trump out, and President Trump responded.

Has he ever heard Trump talk about anyone who wasn’t fellating Trump? Or scaring him?

Bannon is unworthy of consideration; and certainly not worth the time of Politico. He’s also just as ignorant of the law as Trump is:

think tomorrow — and I’ve argued from the beginning — this guy’s citizenship should be checked immediately. To me, it ought to be addressed. It ought to be addressed by the State Department, DHS and the Justice Department, to go through all this. If the guy lied on his naturalization papers, he ought to be deported out of the country immediately and put on a plane to Uganda.

Government agencies can do all they want, but Mamdani still has due process rights; and that means court. Which isn’t likely to rescind citizenship because Bannon doesn’t like his politics.

These are not people to be taken seriously. His political analysis sure ain’t worth shit:

One thing I think that is pretty evident tonight is that the structures of the two parties — Democrat and Republican — don’t really matter. The energy is in the populist right, Trump, and what Mamdani is, what I would call the neo-Marxist left. The Democratic Party was basically worthless here. The Republican Party, as a party, was worthless.

He's right about the GOP: outside Trump, the GOP doesn’t exist. But the “worthless” Democratic Party just ran the table, from school board elections to referenda to gubernatorial elections. The nation had its first chance to repudiate Trump and all his works, and they took it. I think they liked the taste of it , and it only gets worse next November.

And Trump’s voter intimidation tactics? How’d that work for him? In a world of mail in ballots and early voting, monitoring a few precincts in a few cities on Election Day is useless. Trump would need a small army in 2026. Actually, he’d need a very large one. And even then, it can’t be done.

You double and triple down with Trump. If you’re not prepared to do that, you’re going to get smoked, because you’re not going to see Trump voters come out, like in Virginia, just like in New Jersey.

Pretty sure Trump is what smoked the GOP last night. And how do you do that? How do you triple down with Trump?

I think it’s going to be very simple: You’re either with MAGA or you’re not. The Republican Party has no following. It has a bunch of donors, and it has the Fox TV network, and it has Karl Rove and all these worn-out ideas you see in the House and the Senate. It’s just embarrassing. The Republican Party is just a husk. When Trump is engaged, when Trump’s on the ballot, when Trump’s team can get out there and get low-propensity voters — because that’s the difference now in modern politics — when they can do it, they win. When he doesn’t do it, they don’t.

The fly in his ointment is that Trump can never be on the ballot again. This election was the sea change Bannon can’t wrap his head around, can’t accept actually happened.

 To that point though, President Trump is getting some of his lowest approval ratings ever right now. Why do you think that is?

First, I’m not so sure. They could never properly gauge President Trump — we’ve talked about this for a long time. But that being said, I think people need to feel that the economy is working for them. I don’t think there’s any doubt about it. The program is the right program. It just needs to be executed. And I think people need to feel that it’s being executed.

So Trump is not the only one who denies reality. The irony is, that’s exactly the argument Biden relied on. Hell,  I even made that argument myself. How’d that work out? 

And Bannon seems to be the smartest guy on their side.