Seditious
conspirator and multi-indicted Donald Trump has now clinched the
Republican Party's nomination for president.That means that it's time
for the would-be contenders for Dear Leader's vice presidential slot to
prove that they can suck up to the would-be strongman more than even
Trump himself can handle.
Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina has been making a strong bid to be No. 1 Suck-Up, and on Fox News on Thursday, he sucked as hard as a sucker can suck. North Korean news broadcasters have nothing on this.
Well, let me tell you what. If there's anyone who's paying
attention to the details of 2024, it's Donald Trump. Who is now running,
co-running, the RNC? Lara Trump. Why? Because he understands that the
devil's in the details, so he puts his brilliant daughter-in-law in
charge of our RNC apparatus so that all that [former RNC chair] Reince
[Preibus] talked about, wise wise man that he is, will be taken care of.
OH COME ON NOW. There's sucking up and then there's sucking up; at this point EMTs need to be called out to remove Trump's whole upper torso from Scott's throat.
He put his "brilliant" daughter-in-law in charge of the party's
apparatus? Putting family members in charge of the party's cash
supplies is among the first things authoritarian crooks do upon seizing
command. And Dear Leader's personal kin are always described as
"brilliant" as Dear Leader himself, because if you don't say that, then
Dear Leader's family makes sure your future political career is buried
six feet under in an unmarked grave.
Lara Trump's "brilliant" career is thin enough that even her Wikipedia page can barely scrape up anything to say about her.
She worked as a tabloid news producer, married Eric Trump and his
family’s money, and parlayed it all into a year-and-a-half Fox News
career before devoting herself full-time to polishing her
father-in-law's copious golden turds while boosting the careers ofthe far right's weirdest weirdos. Sure, buddy. Everybody should be very
excited that the entire Republican Party is now in the hands of Trump
and the increasingly shrinking set of family members willing to be seen
with him.
You just know that Donald was pressing his daughter Ivanka to
take the RNC slot, having previously made her his White House "adviser."
The joke's on him, though: Son-in-law Jared Kushner was able to convert
his own White House foreign policy slot to a $2 billion investment from the Saudi royal pockets, so Ivanka can steer clear of her indicted daddy. She doesn't need to suck up to him for odd jobs anymore.
However, as Scott noted in his glowing assessment, “But at the
end of the day you want the ball in the hands of the best player on the
field. That player is Donald Trump.”
We'll only give him a B+ on that one, because if Scott was
really into that metaphor he would have found a way to wedge in comments
on Trump's bulging muscles and masculine athletic physique. Still a
good try, though.
There's been rampant speculation about Trump's vice presidential shortlist and how far Republican hopefuls will have to debase themselves to stay on it,
but Scott has spent considerably more time polishing his sycophantic
phrases than some of the other candidates. There's also been tedious
press speculation—fueled solely by Trump's own allies—as
to whether Trump will attempt to pick a running mate who can better
dance around the party's moves to criminalize abortion nationwide, which
would rule out Scott and in fact most of the current contenders.
You can discount those particular claims, because Trump cares about Trump first and foremost and will only
be deciding who his running mate will be based on the extent to which
they can flatter and extol him on his television screen. Trump has never
shown the slightest interest in policy matters, allowing himself to be
bent in whichever direction his most extreme advisers have wanted to bend him. He's not going to start now.
Uncle Tim is sucking "as hard as a sucker can suck."
Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich. (photo: Steve Russell/Toronto Star)
Robert Reich/Robert Reich's Substack
16 March 24
And why has his extraordinary stupidity fallen off the radar during his third run for the presidency?
Robert Reich/Robert Reich's Substack
16 March 24
My
definition of stupidity is continuing to do something that has so far
cost you a minimum of $91 million because you won’t stop doing it.
In
recent days, Trump has again publicly charged that E. Jean Carroll’s
allegation of sexual abuse, for which he has been found liable in court,
is “false.”
When a jury last year found Trump liable for
sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll, Trump responded at a CNN
town hall by defaming Carroll again.
So when it came time earlier
this year for another jury to decide what Trump owed Carroll in the
second defamation lawsuit, her attorneys asked jurors to make sure it
was enough to “make him stop.”
The
second jury awarded Carroll $83.3 million (which, with interest added
in, is $91 million). But it apparently is still not enough to make Trump
stop.
Trump has just renewed his attacks on Carroll in much the
same terms as before — claiming that she “made up” the story and that he
had “never heard” of her.
Unsurprisingly, Carroll’s attorney
now suggests there could be a third lawsuit, because the previous
verdict was obviously not enough to dissuade him from more defamation.
I have to wonder why the mainstream media isn’t discussing Trump’s extraordinary stupidity.
The
media continues to discuss Trump’s criminal indictments, and is —
finally! — noticing that Trump is becoming less and less coherent. But
why isn’t it reporting on something almost every lawmaker and journalist
in official Washington knows — that Trump is remarkably stupid?
I don’t mean just run-of-the-mill stupid. I mean extraordinarily, off-the-charts, stupifyingly stupid.
In
December, Trump said his comments about immigrants “poisoning the
blood” of America were not inspired by similar statements made by Adolf
Hitler about Jewish people, because Trump “didn’t know anything” about
Hitler.
In an interview
with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, Trump explained that “I’m not
a student of Hitler. I never read his works. They say that he said
something about blood, he didn’t say it the way I said it either, by the
way, it’s a very different kind of a statement.”
The media interpreted this as Trump trying to backpedal from his Hitler-ish remark. But what if Trump in fact doesn’t know anything about Adolf Hitler?
After all, he recently claimed that magnets don’t work in water, that the Civil War was unnecessary because it should have been “negotiated,” and that no one would know who Lincoln was if he hadn’t gone to war.
Still don’t believe Trump is stupid?
Consider
the views of the people who worked most closely with him during his
presidency. Anyone remember when Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called
Trump a “f—king moron?”
Or when National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster called him a “dope?”
And Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, former White House Chief of Staff
Reince Priebus, former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, and even
Rupert Murdoch all referred to Trump as an “idiot?” (Technically, Murdoch called him a “f—king idiot.”)
Trump’s chief economic adviser Gary Cohn described Trump as “dumb as sh-t,”
explaining that “Trump won’t read anything — not one-page memos, not
the brief policy papers; nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings
with world leaders because he is bored.”
When one of Trump’s
campaign aides tried to educate him about the Constitution, Trump
couldn’t focus. “I got as far as the Fourth Amendment,” the aide recalled, “before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head.”
Of
course, Trump doesn’t think he’s stupid. “Actually, throughout my life,
my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like,
really smart,” he tweeted. As he recounted, “I went to an Ivy League college … I did very well. I’m a very intelligent person.”
Trump
wasn’t exactly an academic star, however. One of his professors at the
University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business and Finance
purportedly called Trump “the dumbest goddamn student I ever had.”
Trump biographer Gwenda Blair wrote in 2001 that Trump was admitted to Wharton on a special favor from a “friendly” admissions officer who had known Trump’s older brother.
But
hold on. I ask myself: How could Trump have become president, and now
clinch the Republican nomination for the presidency for a third time, if
he doesn’t have something in the brain bank? Even if Trump doesn’t
read, can’t follow a logical argument, and has the attention span of a
fruit fly, I keep believing he must have some intelligence.
Well, it turns out there’s another form of intelligence, called “emotional intelligence.”
Emotional
intelligence is a concept developed by two psychologists, John Mayer of
the University of New Hampshire and Yale’s Peter Salovey, and
popularized by Dan Goleman in his 1996 book of the same name.
Mayer and Salovey define
emotional intelligence as the ability to do two things: “understand and
manage our own emotions,” and “recognize and influence the emotions of
others.”
True, Trump hasn’t displayed much capacity for the first. He’s thin-skinned, narcissistic, and vindictive. As dozens of Republican foreign policy experts have put it:
“He is unable or unwilling to separate truth from falsehood. He does
not encourage conflicting views. He lacks self-control and acts
impetuously. He cannot tolerate criticism."
Okay, but what about Mayer and Salovey’s second aspect of emotional intelligence — influencing the emotions of others?
This is
where Trump’s brain outperforms the brains of ordinary mortals. He
knows how to manipulate people. He has an uncanny ability to discover
their emotional vulnerabilities — their fears, anxieties, prejudices,
and darkest desires — and use them for his own purposes.
To put it another way, Trump is an extraordinarily talented conman.
I
believe he’s always been a conman. He conned hundreds of young people
and their parents into paying to attend his nearly worthless Trump
University. He conned banks into lending him more money even after he
repeatedly failed to pay them. He conned contractors to work for him
even with a well-deserved reputation for stiffing them.
He’s been an even greater political conman.
In
November 2016, he conned 62,979,879 Americans into voting for him,
getting them to believe his lies about Mexicans, Muslims, African
Americans, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and all the “wonderful,”
“beautiful” things he’d do for the people who’d support him.
And
now he’s conned most Republican voters into believing his utterly
baseless claim that he won the 2020 election. Political conning is
Trump’s genius.
This genius — combined with utter stupidity in every other dimension — poses the clearest and most terrifying danger to America and the world.
"He
knows how to manipulate people." Trump's people storm the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Donald
Trump graced the conspiracy-spouting Newsmax with his doughy rage on
Wednesday, and let's just say the interview won't be tamping down on
speculation that his wordsmithing abilities—which were always spotty to
begin with—are now crumbling before our very eyes.
Speaking with interviewer Greg Kelly, Trump waxed philosophic
about why Hillary Clinton, um, apparently set off a weapon of mass
destruction when "acid testing" her phones?
And the rest of the interview was just as bizarre.
What a masterful performance. From Kelly's ultrasycophantic "Is
it lonely at the top?" framing to Trump's incoherent,
barely-stream-of-consciousness answers, this really does capture the
full feel of living in an authoritarian country where nobody is allowed
to point out that Dear Leader fell off his rocker years ago and everyone
must nod enthusiastically, no matter what absurdities come out of his
word-hole.
There's the portion in which Trump claims he has been treated worse than any other president ever:
I don't care, Andrew Jackson or anybody else, nobody has
tr—when you think of the fake things, nobody's been treated like Trump,
in terms of badly. Russia Russia Russia, Ukraine Ukraine Ukraine,
everything was a scam.
Nobody's been treated like Trump in terms of badly, he says.
That's a bit too long to embroider onto a hat, but it would probably
make a decent bumper sticker slogan.
“Trump 2024: Nobody's Been Treated Like Him In Terms Of Badly."
We should note here that multiple presidents have been
assassinated while in office but that hardly counts as hardship compared
to the rudenesses Trump has endured, says Trump, in terms of Badly.
But things go completely off the rails after that masterful
turn of phrase. And you have to admire the resolute look plastered on
Kelly’s face as the host appears to slowly realize he's sitting next to
an absolute wackadoo who may or may not, at any point in the interview,
suddenly demand the right to flay him and eat his face.
But by the way, they released Hillary Clinton. She hammered
her phones. She used, uh, all sorts of acid testing on everything else,
they call it, uh, bleach bit, but it's essentially acid that will
destroy everything, you know, within 10 miles. I mean what she did was
unbelievable.
He's right—it is unbelievable. It's also complete gibberish.
Just off-the-wall bizarre, from "acid testing" to "hammered" to supposed
zones of destruction.
Nothing happens to her. Nothing happens to Bill Clinton, he
took it out in his socks, you know there was a famous socks case, which
he actually ended up winning.
Now, Donald Trump has never been an honest man, or a
particularly coherent one. His memory has always been selective and,
let's just say, wildly imaginative. But at some point we have to ask
ourselves whether his recent performances stretch into something measurably worse than what we've seen in previous years.
Those supercuts of Trump's recent gaffes were so humiliating
for Donald that he was quick to lie to his Truth Social fans that
"Artificial Intelligence was used by them against me in their videos of
me." Nope, those were all real, genuine Trump performances, according to an analysis by Gizmodo.
It's a mystery why Trump's fans still consider him a macho
strongman figure who’s smarter than anyone else on the planet, but maybe
this stuff sounds like genius-level oration to the average MAGA voter.
The rest of us, though? We're a bit worried about you, Donald. Your
ability to string coherent thoughts together appears to be doing not
well, in terms of badly.
"Nobody's been treated like Trump,
in terms of badly," sayeth the Donald.
Rep. Adam B. Schiff questions special counsel
Robert Hur on Tuesday, backed by a photograph of a bathroom at
Mar-a-Lago where Donald Trump kept boxes of classified documents after
he left the White House. (photo: Nathan Howard/AP)
For years now, the single most common complaint I’ve heard from Democrats is that their party doesn’t fight as hard, and never
dirty, like Republicans do — they don’t bring guns to a gunfight. Since
2016, I’ve heard that rap from Republicans too: Never-Trump types
express surprise and exasperation that their Democratic comrades in arms
against the former president don’t, well, take up arms politically.
Democratic pols will concede as much: They worry about how they might
come off to the poli-sci profs, pundits and civic-minded idealists.
Their good-government bent is commendable. But getting bested repeatedly
by the likes of Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell is not.
”One of us is playing with a rolling pin, and the other is fighting
with a gun,” an aide to Senate leaders once told me, frustrated that
Democrats were adhering to Marquess of Queensberry rules as Republicans
busted norms to pack the federal courts. “We always bring a butter knife
to a gunfight,” longtime Democratic strategist Brian Fallon similarly groused not long ago.
Fallon felt that so strongly that Democrats were wimping out that in
2017 he co-founded a liberal activist group, Demand Justice, to give the
left a more combative approach in judicial confirmation contests. He
recently left the group for a job in the Biden campaign,
as the communications director for Vice President Kamala Harris. That’s
good: Democrats need scrappers, lots of ’em, and the ever-cautious
Harris in particular needs communications firepower.
Even better signs of a more fired-up Democratic Party have emerged lately, just as Biden and Trump each secured their respective parties’ nominations Tuesday with wins in several states’ primary contests.
One sign was Biden’s plucky State of the Union address last week, in which he took a baker’s dozen shots at “my predecessor” and parried House Republicans’ taunts like a smiling Dark Brandon
come to life, shooting red lasers from his eyes. To hear Republicans
carp afterward that Biden was too partisan gave new meaning to the pot
calling the kettle black.
Another indication of an amped-up Democratic offense was news
of a big $30-million Biden campaign ad buy, along with the president’s
busy stumping schedule in battleground states and the campaign’s plans
to hire hundreds of aides. The first ad
was a good one, too, featuring a lively Biden poking fun at his age,
noting his achievements, drawing contrasts with Trump and,
appropriately, promising “to fight for you.”
And on Tuesday came some evidence that other Democrats will have
Biden’s back. Those on the House Judiciary Committee came loaded for
bear to the hearing that the majority Republicans held showcasing Robert
Hur, a Republican and the former special counsel whose recent report
on Biden’s handling of classified materials included damaging
commentary about the president’s age and alleged “diminished faculties.”
The committee’s Democrats, notably California Reps. Ted Lieu, Adam B. Schiff and Eric Swalwell,
appropriately focused less on Hur’s asides about mental lapses and more
on his report’s conclusions that “no criminal charges are warranted”
against Biden (compared to 41 felony counts
against Trump). And that despite Republicans’ claims to the contrary,
what Biden did with top-secret documents was in no way comparable to the
far more serious allegations against Trump for conspiracy and false
statements.
The committee Democrats didn’t ignore the issue of age and mental
acuity; they simply turned it against Trump. Several of them came, yes,
armed — with video montages of the former president’s verbal flubs,
slurred words and non sequiturs at recent MAGA rallies.
But Democrats’ more typical lack of fight explains why Hur, a former
Trump Justice Department official, was tapped as special counsel — by
Biden’s Atty. Gen. Merrick Garland — in the first place. Democrats,
wanting to be seen as fair, keep giving Republicans a virtual monopoly
on independent counsel jobs each time Washington decides it needs
another high-profile investigation. Whether the person being
investigated is a Democrat (Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton) or a
Republican (Donald Trump), Democrats have supported having a Republican
prosecutor.
Republicans don’t reciprocate.
David Brock, now a Democratic operative but notorious in the 1990s as
a ruthless, right-wing scourge of the Clintons, a few years ago
confessed to me his occasional irritation with his new party for its
punch-pulling, say, by rejecting a line of attack as somehow unfair.
“Now, that’s nothing that I ever experienced as a young conservative,” he told me. “There’s a different ethic.”
“Republicans just want the result, they just want to get there, they want the win,”
Brock added. Democrats, on the other hand, “do a lot of hand-wringing
about how to get there,” about whether they are being respectful of the
“process.”
And yet, ask most Republican voters and they’ll tell you that it’s
Democrats who are the dirty fighters, cheating in elections and
weaponizing the government against their foes, chiefly Trump. Because
that is what Trump tells them.
That’s Republicans’ dirtiest play of all. Lying to their own voters.
This election year will likely be as mean as any in memory. Here’s
hoping I’m correct that Biden and the Democrats have sheathed the butter
knives and shelved the rolling pins. It’s not like Trump hasn’t given
them the ammunition for a gunfight.
MSNBC's Rachel Maddow has never been afraid of a fight. Is the Democratic Party finally joining her in fighting fire with fire?
According to a popular meme, comedian Noel Casler (the guy who worked on The Apprentice and
outed Trump’s drug abuse and diaper wearing) asks, “How come everything
the Republican Party stands for involves other people dying?”
He then goes on to note GOP support for assault weapons,
opposition to masks and vaccines, opposition to saving the environment,
and their all-out war on Obamacare and Medicare-for-All.
Casler may have just been being glib, doing the written equivalent of
a standup routine, but his question deserves a serious answer, so let’s
look at the evidence.
It’s undeniably true that Republican-controlled “Red” states, almost across the board, have higher rates of:
But are all these things, along with widespread GOP support for
dictators like Putin, Orbán, and Xi, happening because Republicans hate
their citizens and worship poverty, death and disease?
Or is there something in the GOP’s core beliefs and strategies that just inevitably leads to these outcomes?
It turns out that’s very much the case: these terrible
outcomes are the direct result of policies promoting greed and racism
that the GOP has been using for forty+ years to get access to billions
of dollars and win elections.
Using racism as a political strategy while promoting and defending the greed of oligarchs always leads to widespread poverty, pollution, ignorance, and death regardless of the nation it’s done in.
We’ve seen it over and over again around the world: it’s happening
today in India, The Philippines, Brazil, Russia, and Hungary, for
example. And the GOP has spent the past 40+ years marinating itself in
both.
Here’s how it happened here in America:
The GOP first openly embraced racism in 1964 when the party’s
presidential candidate that year, Barry Goldwater, proudly refused to
support the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
It was a huge shift for the party of Lincoln, and when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law on July 2, 1964, the South did a collective “what the hell?!?”
As LBJ told Bill Moyers, “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican party for a long time to come.”
So the newly publicly proclaimed belief in white supremacy became an
official part of GOP ideology in the 1960s, leading directly to Richard
Nixon’s explicitly racist 1968 “Southern Strategy.”
It was later replicated by Reagan speaking about “states’ rights” at
his first campaign speech near the scene of the murder of 3 civil rights
workers, George HW Bush’s Willie Horton ad campaign, and Donald Trump’s
rants about Mexican rapists and people from what he called “shithole
countries.”
But racism alone can’t explain the entire list above. There had to be something else.
The second element embraced by the GOP that filled out the rest of
the list above happened in 1980 when they hooked up with religious
grifters and greedy, morbidly rich people.
Prior to that election year, George HW Bush and his wife
Barbara were big advocates for Planned Parenthood and a woman’s right to
choose an abortion. Ronald Reagan, as governor of California, had
signed the nation’s most liberal abortion law and was also an outspoken
supporter of Roe v Wade and Planned Parenthood.
Similarly, the white evangelical movement prior to 1980
was largely supportive of abortion rights. They were furious, however,
when the Supreme Court bannedpreacher-led school prayer and in the late 1970s Jimmy Carter pulled the tax exemptions of segregated schools run by white supremacist evangelicals.
Jerry Falwell had started his “Moral Majority” in 1978 and
uber-Christian Paul Weyrich (co-founder of The Heritage Foundation and
the guy who famously said, “I don’t want everybody to vote!”) signed up
for the Reagan campaign.
As Donne Levy writes for George Washington University’s History News Network:
“Weyrich and Falwell realized that the tax exemption issue based on
racial discrimination had limited value, but opposing abortion was a
moral issue cutting across racial and religious lines. That was their
thinking on the eve of the 1980 elections.”
The election that year saw the first major merger in American
history between a political party and a religious movement largely run
by grifters. Something that would have both shocked and horrified the
Founders of our country and the Framers of the Constitution.
Republicans started talking about God (the word appeared
in their platform for only the second time since the Party’s formation
in 1856), and preachers and televangelists began to openly push GOP
candidates from the pulpit in defiance of nonprofit law and the IRS.
The GOP also adopted Falwell’s call for a return to school
prayer, hostility to sex education, rejection of women’s rights,
reassertion of patriarchy, and open hatred of homosexuality.
Championing what today we’d call the “culture wars,” Republicans
fully embraced the anti-science perspective of Falwell and his
colleagues, questioning for the first time the theory of evolution,
ridiculing global warming, and scoffing at concerns about pollution
causing cancer and other diseases.
Within a decade they were even claiming, as Mike Pence wrote in a 2000 op-ed, “Despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn't kill.”
As the GOP went deeper down their religion-induced rabbit
hole, their hostility to science was logically accompanied by a
hostility to education and educated people. George HW Bush and Rush
Limbaugh began talking about “pointy-headed liberals in ivory towers,”
openly trashing higher education to bring blue-collar voters into the
party.
That was followed by a sustained Republican attack on public
education itself by pushing for-profit privatized “charter schools” and
vouchers, an ironic position in that Republican President Dwight
Eisenhower had probably done more to advance public education than any
president in the 20th century.
Thus was set up the GOP’s 2020 hostility to masks and Covid
quarantines, sex education and birth control, and their 2021 attacks on
vaccination. And their continuous denial of global warming.
The other big turning point for the GOP in 1980 was Reagan’s open embrace of America’s oligarchs.
Just four years earlier, in their Buckley v Valeo decision,
conservatives on the Supreme Court ruled that when a rich person
showered so much money on a politician that that politician pretty much
only voted the way the rich person wanted, that was no longer bribery
but, instead, First Amendment-protected “free speech.”
In 1978, in a Republican-appointee-only decision written by
Lewis Powell (of Powell Memo fame), the Court extended that right to buy
politicians to American corporations (it was extended to international
billionaires and corporations in 2010 by Citizens United.)
President Jimmy Carter had championed the average person and
the rights of working class people: he even walked from the Capitol to
the White House after his inauguration rather than take a limousine.
Reagan not only brought back the limousine, he turned his inaugural
balls into a high-dollar lavish celebration of wealth and economic
power.
The Democratic Party was still, at that time, mostly funded by labor
unions; the GOP, however, picked up the opportunity offered them by the
Supreme Court four and two years earlier and put up a “for sale” sign,
inviting into the party any wealthy person or corporation who’d put up
enough money for a Republican candidate to win an election.
The result of this whole sad history is that Red states have
been turned into sacrifice zones for Reagan’s racial and religious
bigotry and the neoliberal raise-up-the-rich and crap-on-unions economic
policies he inflicted on America.
In the years since the Reagan Revolution, TV preachers have become
multimillionaires with private jets, their parishioners have slid deeper
and deeper into poverty and addiction, and the unholy alliance of
church and state that Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton warned us about is
now arguably — behind great wealth — the second most powerful political
force in America.
Turns out Noel Casler was right, but the story is a bit more detailed
than the GOP just embracing death and disease. Those same policies
also make the morbidly rich — from oil barons to televangelists — vastly
richer, and those rich people and their businesses and churches return
the favor by pushing their followers and cycling part of their profits
back toward Republican politicians.
Now you know therest of the story.
What's
wrong with this picture? Only Trump should be in the hoosegow. He may
hide behind the flag, but it is not guilty by association.
The House Judiciary Committee, led by Republican embarrassment Rep. Jim Jordan, held its latest political-theater hearing on Tuesday.
Former special counsel Robert Hur is the newest star witness pranced in
front of the committee in Republicans’ hopes of creating bad-sounding
chaos around President Joe Biden that could hurt him for this November’s
election.
Like the rest of Jordan’s attempts at political theater, so far
the attempts to paint Biden as both a mentally incompetent leader and an organized-crime mastermind have failed spectacularly.
Rep. Jerry Nadler, the ranking Democrat on the committee, pulled out a
video supercut of Donald Trump at rallies, press conferences, and
depositions. Here are some of the highlights:
Trump’s constant reminders to everyone that he has a great memory or “one of the great memories of all time.”
Nadler put it best, saying at the end of the video, “That is a
man who is incapable of avoiding criminal liability. A man who is wholly
unfit for office, and a man who, at the very least, ought to think
twice before accusing others of cognitive decline.”
In
terms of intellectual capacity and recall, it turns out this caricature
of Donnie as a cave man is quite accurate. Bet you didn't know his
whole body is orange.
There's
something about a Republican response to the State of the Union address
that inevitably generates a field day for comedians. Whether it’s Marco
Rubio getting so very thirsty, or Bobby Jindal
going from darling of the party to has-been in 15 minutes flat, the
route between SOTU response and “Saturday Night” Live cold open is often
one short, straight line.
But on Thursday evening, those sticking around to hear Alabama
Sen. Katie Britt’s rebuttal might have been forgiven for believing that
the process had been streamlined, because Britt’s speech already seemed
like an “SNL” skit. From the faux kitchen setting, to the going all out for the lead in the seventh-grade production of “The Crucible” energy, to the garb that reminded many viewers of a character from “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Britt’s performance might be the response to end all responses.
And really, why not do that? Just end it. Despite an old Washington Post
headline proclaiming that the State of the Union response is “the worst
job in politics. But somebody has to do it” … the reality is that no one has to do it.
The SOTU response isn’t in the Constitution. There is no law. This is a
completely made-up thing designed as an excuse to give the opposing
party some free air time.
The biggest puzzle of the night might be why, when they keep
getting burned, Republicans insist on plopping their hands right back on
this hot stove.
On Thursday night, Republicans handed off the response duties
to their youngest female Senate member, apparently hoping for a stark
contrast with old Joe Biden. Maybe they had been listening to their own
statements about Biden being ancient, slow, and unable to deliver a good
speech for so long that they actually believed them. Maybe Britt just
found herself drawing the short straw in whatever arcane process
Republicans use to select the next sacrificial victim.
Whatever the reason, she was propped up in a kitchen set so
devoid of life it made an IKEA display seem warm, then left to wander
through a whispery, dystopian hellscape that sometimes seemed like a
test for whether it’s possible to combine a political speech with ASMR.
It was so awful that, as Rolling Stone reports, Republican commentators were burning down Britt’s performance in real time.
All of it becomes infinitely funnier if you are privy to the document
that was circulated by Britt’s office before she spoke. That document
gave tips on how pundits might describe her follow-up to Biden.
It suggested that reporters might say things such as, “She came
off like America’s mom—she gets it.” Or, “She’s one of us. That’ll be
families’ takeaway watching this.”
But to show that Britt wasn’t entirely manufactured in Stepford, there were also some more serious suggestions.
“The conclusion of her border section was a real ‘Mr.
Gorbachev, tear down this wall,’ moment,” read one proposed talking
point. If that wasn’t enough of the Gipper,
the document also suggested that reporters might say the speech was
“reminiscent of Reagan’s message of that Shining City on a Hill.”
Only Britt’s speech was more “Silent Hill” than shining city. How far into cosmic horror did Britt’s uplifting speech wander? About this far.
On one hand, everything about this speech seems to be either
horrifying or hilarious. It’s like watching a car crash after slipping
on a banana peel, with narration provided by a soap opera-reject.
On the other hand, maybe putting Britt on stage and instructing her to emote
through a description of a fallen America was a genius move. After all,
the thousands of instant memes that followed are taking up oxygen that
would otherwise be spent lavishing praise on Biden’s forceful and energetic speech.
And now America can discuss how best to export this unexpected meme surplus.
The GOP has such a wonderful sense of humor, and it starts at the very tip top with the clown they are running for president.
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