Monday, January 30, 2023

Reality Is Out In The Hall Getting Shitfaced

Oh well, anyway, Trump gave a campaign speech this weekend, his first of the 2024 campaign. It sounds like it was a real snoozer. It was in a high school auditorium, for the state GOP convention. Only Newsmax, OAN, and Real America's Voice played it live. And bless his heart, but it sounds like he thinks windmills are making all the airplanes crash now.

That's right, they don't just create bird graveyards now. They “kill all the birds, destroy all the planes, and our beautiful oceans and seas and everything else.” The wind turbines are apparently escalating their murderous behavior.

The tweets with video of all this are at Wonkette.

Trump said "so many people" ask him for help becoming a US citizen, and he tells them "go to the southern border, just walk across the line." He said a rich guy he knows can't become a citizen, even though he's studied so hard, and Trump just told him to go to Mexico and walk across the border. All of this is real and it happened. 

A big, strong man, with tears in his eyes, who said "Sir" a lot. (Trump has absolutely no idea how citizenship works.  I'm pretty sure his most ardent followers don't, either.)

Note: at the beginning of that clip right there, Mr. Dictionary claims that he "came up with" the word "caravan." Wasn't that nice of him?

Other bits an pieces: He said the Taliban couldn't fight at night, because they didn't have the "binoculars" for that. Amidst some other incomprehensible babbling, he said the National Archives are "far left." 

But this is why I wanted to quote Wonkette:

The 2016 election was a unique event, and Donald Trump only "won" because of some extremely specific conditions that are unlikely to ever be precisely replicated. Historically unpopular candidates, FBI meddling in the political process, a Russian attack in support of Trump -- y'all remember. Russia tried to attack 2020 for Trump, but it wasn't enough.

Maybe he was never that special to begin with. He was just different in 2016, and that, combined with all those factors that helped him cheat his way into a "victory," was enough to creep him across the finish line. Didn't work in 2020.

Will the tired loser even make it out of the primaries this time? You know, assuming he isn't in prison?

Funny thing about prison (though):  it isn't a bar to a President taking office. 

Because qualifications for the Presidency are in the Constitution (art. II). And being in prison is not a bar to the office.  Even being an ex-felon is no bar. The "Founding Fathers" (I hate that term, but we're stuck with it) probably didn't imagine criminals and ex-cons would be elected to public office because they tried to reserve the vote to people like them.  That didn't last long, and the Jacksonian branch of American democracy struck a deep root (Jefferson never imagined the Jacksonian line of American democracy.  He was thinking of gentlemen farmers like himself.).  The history of America is littered with ex-cons being elected, or re-elected, to public office. The more interesting question is:  how will Trump campaign if he's being tried in New York and Georgia and possibly D.C. (federal charges)?  And maybe in Florida on federal charges over the documents, depending on how venue obtains (I would assume Florida, at this point).  He's already hurting his criminal defense(s) with his public statements (all admissable in court, at least presumptively so).  If his attorneys couldn't shut him up on the campaign trail (fat chance!), he'd guarantee himself one or more convictions.  And appealing those cases wouldn't automatically keep him out of jail while the appeals are pending.  Again, he could still run for office; he'd just be a lot less effective doing so from a jail cell, where his access to the outside world could be very constrained.

The rest of that analysis, however:  💯  Dead right.  The concatentation of circumstances that was the election of 2016, right down to the baggage Hillary Clinton rightly or wrongly carried, is not going to be repeated in 2024.  Trump actually did better in the popular vote in 2020 because he had the incumbency, and there is always an electoral tendency to stick with the devil you know than the devil you don't know.  Turnout was low in 2016, and that paved the way for Trump, via the electoral college.  4 years later the revulsion for Trump boosted turnout to near historic levels.  If Trump runs again in 2024, that boost in turnout could well happen again.  4 years is not long enough to forget.

Joe Biden was not Hillary Clinton, and he bested Trump fair and square.  Given the choice again in 2024, Trump will probably do poorer and Biden, the incumbent, even better.  Will Trump make it out of the primaries?  Probably, especially if the field is crowded once again.  DeSantis may defeat Trump outright among the GOP faithful, but Ron has no chance north of the Florida border.  In fact, Biden will beat any GOP candidate like a rented mule.

Whether, at his age, he should or not, is another question.

By the way, I heard some "man on the street" interviews with MAGAheads in South Carolina, because Trump was there and Nikki Haley is from there, and reporters gotta pundit about 2024.  One person insisted Trump was the best President since Ronald Reagan, which made me realize most people have no idea what Reagan did or even stood for.  As an example:
I mean, Reagan had Reykjavik, but he never praised Stalin. The true MAGAheads are living on their own planet; or at least in their own reality.
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1 comment:

  1. The Thought Criminal9:50 AM

    The friggin' founders (it helps if you say it that way) were such rank amateurs that they imagined the real danger of tyranny arose out of the House of Representatives, not from the executive. That's the idiotic Constitution that we've struggled to get something like equality and democracy from all along. It has given us some extremely narrow escapes, every time from a President or would-be president, starting with Burr and now anyone with an "R" after their name. I'm enough of a sucker for probability that I'd say our luck is running on fumes at this point.

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