Desperate Delusions: Republicans Support A Man Behind A Curtain
There was a classic moment in the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy peeked behind a curtain and was shocked to see a little man with a microphone pulling levers and projecting the image of a wizard.
What does it take to get Republicans to look behind the curtain and see the dwarf they have been supporting? How much ‘reality’ does it take to break through a delusion?
Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is typical of those who have a blindness that borders on desperate; they put heavy blinkers on their eyes so their dreamworld will not be shattered by the sun-shards of the world we live in.
In fact, it is worse than that, because McCarthy and his ilk take reality and deliberately and knowingly manufacture an alternate reality that comforts their followers and keeps them donating to the church of lies.
But there are signs that the donations are drying up – so we should investigate how the MAGA church is failing to keep the sunlight out.
After Trump’s fourth indictment – the one in Georgia - McCarthy offered his take on the dynamic: “A radical [district attorney] in Georgia is following Biden’s lead by attacking President Trump and using it to fundraise her political career. Americans see through this desperate sham.”
To McCarthy, some evil person is obviously taking advantage of our innocent Trump to fund-raise.
It’s not like Trump is pushing $60 bibles (four times what you would expect to pay), $400 gold sneakers ($25 elsewhere), or trading cards (once sold for $90 each, now worth $1.04).
The desperate Democratic sham that McCarthy wants everyone to see through is hiding the obvious (to Republicans) picture of a faultless man who has blamelessly blundered into a tar pit covered with 91 criminal charges, from hush-money payments for an adult film star to subversion of a federal election.
The denizens of Republican-world are certain that Biden has weaponized government against Trump.
In fact, Biden does not really care who the Republicans run – I am sure he knows of the forecast that no Republican has a chance of wining. The wizard who has accurately predicted every US presidential contest over the past 40 years, Alan Lichtman, a professor at American University, says Biden will win; in fact his 13-key system warns that the democrats will lose if they run any other candidate.
And most Americans do not believe in Trump’s big conspiracy theory. They rather sensibly believe this instead:
Podcaster Brian Cohen sums up reality pretty well if Kevin McCarthy wants to look.
So Kevin, which Americans do you think are going to “see through” it?
An April poll did show that nearly 70% of Republicans supported Trump.
After the first indictment, though, that dropped to 50%.
After the second indictment it plunged to to 41%.
I think from the way the tide is going out steadily for The Trumpster, that we can say, for the sake of ease of arithmetic, that each indictment costs Trump 10% of his believers (from 70% to 40% over three indictments).
The fourth indictment could therefore plunge his numbers down to 30% support among Republicans alone.
Among the general public – and some of the polls have a great way of labelling their charts “Republicans v.s. Adults” -- Trump's favourability rating has already fallen to just 25%, down 10 points since the presidential election.
Let’s further assume that, before the election in 2024, he is actually convicted in one of these four cases. Statistically, the odds are there. Maybe even more than one case, but let’s be generous to him. And let’s assume that a conviction knocks the confidence of another 10%.
Down now to 15% of the Republican voters.
And this is all before the Main Event of the election – the supporters of women’s reproductive rights – get into the fray.
I personally think the latest indictment will shake a few Republicans to the core. It is a “gangster” indictment, under the same general category as racketeering. This is normally the realm of extortion and blackmail; it is reserved for such citizens as The Hells Angels, the Mafia and the Police.
Trump has been accused of being the ringleader in a whole election subversion conspiracy to overturn Georgia's presidential election results. He’s in the same league as mob bosses like John Gotti and Vincent Gigante.
The state of Georgia is required to show that a criminal "enterprise" exists and to detail a pattern of racketeering that rests on at least two qualifying crimes.
"There were so many different bad actors in Georgia working to undermine the election and to overthrow the vote count, explains Anthony Michael Kreis, a Georgia State University law professor. “Donald Trump is at the centre of it, but he was working in a broader orbit."
Trump and his colleagues could get 20 years each.
His circle has people with the spine of a chocolate éclair, so a lot of them will blame the others and blame the boss.
Here’s who Donald has on his side:
I can’t help noting that in this collection, Giuliani was the person who passed the racketeering laws which his is now being charged with. Didn’t see that coming, eh, Rudy?
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is the one who secured a 41-count racketeering indictment Monday against Trump and 18 others, including former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, attorney John Eastman, and former senior Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark.
The indictment spells out how Trump and his conspirators made false statements to state lawmakers and election officials, created false documents to submit to the Electoral College, harassed election workers and breached election equipment in Georgia and elsewhere.
An interesting bird in the bag is Mark Meadows. The former White House chief of staff was involved with Trump’s operations after he lost the 2020 election. Meadows is charged now with racketeering in that he is alleged “in furtherance of the conspiracy” to connect Trump with the leader of the Pennsylvania state legislature.
On top of charging 19 defendants in this indictment, the 98-page document noted there are an additional 30 co-conspirators who are not being indicted at this time. Collectively, these 49 individuals comprise a “criminal organization,” the indictment claims.
This indictment also differs from the third indictment. Jack Smith is prosecuting Trump's efforts to stay in power after he lost the 2020 election, saying that the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol was "fueled by lies." Smith has tried to be like a sniper’s rifle in his indictments, whereas the Georgia case is more like a cluster bomb.
A final unique hook in the fourth indictment is that it is a state, not federal, charge. Even if Trump gets to be President he won’t be able to pardon himself. And I hear those Georgia jails are tough.
Dahlia Lithwick of the publication Slate is noticing a tone change when it comes to how people are reacting to Donald Trump’s indictments: “It’s not funny. It’s deathly serious. It’s existential.”
She said that there were no funny memes appearing about this one.
She was wrong, but only because I am a meme-haunter and was able to find one.
As what kind of party would select and run this man as the icon of their beliefs, we come to the realization that the Republicans are no longer a Party. They are a cult.
They are led by a man who has no loyalty to the Party. On his final day as president, Donald Trump told the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee he was leaving the GOP and creating his own political party -- and that he didn't care if the move would destroy the Republican Party. He only backed down when he was told that the move would cost him millions in donations.
Trump is now costing Republicans millions in donations anyway. Donations to the Republican Party are being used to pay his legal bills. Trump’s last big-donor fundraiser did not pay the Republican National Committee but a political action committee that has been paying his legal bills.
The façade is crumbling around the myth that Trump is wealthy-beyond-measure: he has had trouble getting money for the bond needed in his New York civil fraud case; the amount was lowered from $454-million to $175-million so he could post it.
Trump also does not inspire grass-roots support anymore from donors, no matter how many MAGA trucks drive around. President Biden gets about half of his donations from large donations (above $200 each), while Trump gets two-thirds of his donations from the wealthy.
The bigger problem for Trump is that ALL donations have slowed down. The wealthy do not want to be seen with him. In some periods, Biden raises almost as much in one day as Trump raises in a month.
Having Mike Johnson as the Republican House Speaker has not exactly been a banner-waving change for the party either.
Their funding is dropping for state as well as federal politics.
As I noted earlier, In at least four key states, the state Republican parties are collapsing. Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, and Minnesota are desperate:
The Arizona Republican Party is so short of supporters it is running out of money. In Colorado the leaders are attacking each other over a proposal to raise the debt ceiling. Minnesota’s Republican Party is financially struggling, with barely $54 cash on hand. At least four county parties in Michigan have been at open war with each other.
Best of all, the Georgia GOP spent more than $340,000 to defend the fake electors who were targets in the indictment. Three Republican lawyers, several Republican politicians and assorted Republican business-people are under the spotlight.
A defector in Georgia highlights the erosion in support for Trump. The former Lieutenant Governor of Georgia, Geoff Duncan, got headlines for his comment: “I earned Trump’s wrath for refusing to go along with his cockamamie schemes to overturn the election he lost because of his own lack of effort…Now, that bill is coming due — not just for Trump and the 18 others who received indictments Monday night, but for Republicans everywhere…This term is more often associated with crime shows such as “The Sopranos” than presidential politics…Under Trump’s self-centered stewardship, we squandered control of the House in 2018, the White House in 2020 and the Senate in 2021.”
But as it turns out, Trump has promised to prove everything!
He had a CONLCUSIVE Report that will prove that the election was rigged. Interestingly, this will be a first in a Trump filing for fraud; Trump only filed 7 post-election lawsuits and none of them alleged fraud. The other 50-odd lawsuits were various state GOP actions, and none of them alleged fraud either. And given a choice of four different courts to present evidence to in order to keep out of prison, he chose…a press conference.
This may have more to do with money than morality: Trump’s political action committee, which began last year with $105 million, now has less than $4 million left in its account after paying tens of millions of dollars in legal fees.
And to Trump that fact that the courts took 2.5 years to get their evidence together is a clear sign of corruption and lies, but him waiting 2.5 years and 60 lost court cases to bring evidence forward is fine.
This is the morality of the man we are dealing with: here is his former wife’s grave – on his GOLFCOURSE – overrun by weeds.
Ivanka Trump’s grave on Donald’s golf course.
This is the group that Kevin McCarthy said would ‘see through this desperate sham’.
The only desperate people are the Republicans.
They have no policies.
They have few funders.
They have nothing positive to say.
Their state organizations are disintegrating.
And they are running against Bidenomics, the most successful economic program since FDR in the 1930’s.
How can these people be the leaders of a political party without realizing that they are trapped in the political equivalent of the La Brea Tar Pits?
I made this image myself; commissions welcome.
Can’t they see the numbers? Did they not observe what happened in Ohio? The pro-abortion people walked all over the Republican cave-dwellers.
In a previous article I forecast that Trump will lose in 2024 by 100 million votes.
It will be the worst Presidential massacre of all time.
Can you imagine what Trump is going to do with that number? The conspiracy theories? The appeal to the crowds to get out in the streets?
On the other hand, he might be campaigning from a jail in Georgia, so right after he loses the election his communications could be cut off.
Gives new meaning to the phrase “President For Life”.
But I have a present ready to send to Trump once he is in his prison cell.
It is a framed, gift-wrapped picture of Hillary Clinton.
And would the caption is…. (drum roll)….
“Lock ‘im up”.
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