Trump’s Hourglass: Less Than 50 Days, His Base Is Leaking And A Second Assassin Tried To Kill Him

The insane last gasp of White Privilege targets Trump again

Less than 50 days.

They’re losing.  They’re losing and they can feel it.

The White voters who made up the middle class in America have been steadily shrinking.  The Party they support has been deflating in lock-step with them.  Opportunities to grow their numbers by economic programs has been ignored.  The trick of just motivating them by hatred is too easy; there have been opportunities for growth but they would have involved positive pathways, and that was never a preference.  Work is never an option for a guy who spends most of his time on the golf course or watching TV.

Trump’s sands are not just running out; they are blasting his image. 

Law enforcement officers have just arrested white Republican Ryan Routh for attempted assassination.

Republicans can’t do anything right. 

He evidently waited 12 hours in the bushes of Trump’s golf club in Florida.  I’ve hung around in the bushes down there…freaking fire ants will kill you if the bullets don’t.  He has faced more than 100 criminal counts in North Carolina.

He is not Haitian.

He bought his gun in Florida because there are no background checks. 

He voted for Trump in 2016 and is historically a Republican but is in favor of Ukraine – the Ukrainians turned down his application to join their army because they doubted his sanity - and is currently leaning toward Kamala.

As they increase in virulence, members of Trump’s White working class like Routh have decreased in absolute numbers and in population share steadily in recent decades.  Their well-being collapsed at same time, relative to the overall population. Not surprisingly, their shares of all income and wealth owned fell even faster. 

The decline in Trump’s voting base is due to the evaporation of the advantages they once had; more precisely – and I hate to be this blunt – but due to the fact that they did not work to earn progress.  Even without college degrees, non-white families achieved improvements that gave them a higher likelihood of being a homeowner, of being married or cohabiting and of reporting good or excellent health.

The Haitian families in Springfield, for example – targets of Trump’s latest publicity attempts – are valued by the community because they add wealth.  Not only do they not eat cats and dogs, but the slight-of-hand publicity that Trump is using even has an appropriate name:

The Haitians have been in high demand to clean and package farm produce and for automotive machining – places desperate for workers due to the Covid labor shortage.  They came into the country legally.  They are entrepreneurs and they want to innovate.  The town is thriving again, thanks partly to their presence.  The townsfolk welcome them.

It's that kind of success that drives Trump’s White Privilege crowd nuts.

Now, nation-wide, non-white working families have higher high-school graduation rates.  This gives those non-whites access to higher-paying jobs, and more freedom from workplace discrimination.

There are five sand-traps that the Republican Party keeps landing its ball in, says a book by Thoman Patterson. Avoiding any of those traps could have been done if the party had provided solid help to the Whites who were suffering in education and income.

The first sand trap was to keep hitting to the Right, which was not a game-plan preferred by the bulk of Americans. It prevented the Republicans from grasping the social tools that could have been used to advance educational opportunities for disadvantaged Whites.  It would have meant government help.  Gasp!

The second sand trap is demographic change: they are stuck with older people as the  younger population prefers the action agenda of the more Left-Wing Democratic Party.  A drift to the Right is hard to stop.

The third sand trap is the embrace of Right-Wing media.  They praise the traps themselves, while spinning a delusional dream of an alternate America that had nothing to do with improving the lot of the mainstream Republican voters: the poorly-educated Whites. The Right-Wing media also hindered the party’s ability to attract new voters.  Elon Musk even tweeted a line about “Why is no one even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala?”  This is the kind of statement that warrants a visit from the Security Service…unless you’re  a billionaire.  BTW, Elon Musk is an acronym for Leon Skum.  In case you were looking for one.

The fourth trap has been the ongoing efforts to give tax breaks to the very wealthy.  That’s a sand trap with very steep walls.  Giving that wealth to the rich has created an expectations gap with the middle class. 

The fifth trap has been its acceptance of measures that destroy democracy, such as attack on the Capitol.  Most Americans are appalled by this treason, but the uneducated Whites sinking in the sand cannot understand this.

The cowardice of the Republican party to check its fall into any of these traps has led to a situation where they are in danger of dissolving the foundations of US politics.

As usual with Trump, it was less a considered strategy than a series of aggressive impulses, carried out with a certain crude determination.

There had never been a pretense that Trump was a leader for all Americans, or that the White House saw no distinction between red states and blue states. He was the leader of his own coalition: a largely White, largely rural, largely working-class voting base that relished Trump’s reactionary cultural politics, supported by a largely white and wealthy conservative donor base.

Trump had never managed to show empathy during his presidency, and even in this crisis, he still did not summon compassion for others. In Trump’s book, apologizing was a sin, an admission of weakness.

But that kind of rigidity is deadly for his cause.  This is not a replay of 2016, when voters did not know Trump and many people voted for him as an experiment in new leadership.

In 2016 some 40% of eligible voters did not bother voting.  On their heads be it.

In 2020 people knew about Trump, and were horrified.  Two-thirds of the eligible voters turned out  - the highest rate since any national election since 1900.  You don’t have to tell an American anything twice.  Biden won by 7 million votes…though with the amusing Electoral College system in place, he only won the presidency by 45,000 votes in three key states.

So America teetered  -  but at the last minute, it pulled back. It rejected Trump by a sand-slide.  It saw into the apocalypse enough to turn to a worthier option.

It just takes once in a lifetime for the hand of Justice to rise up; for hope and history to merge.

So we come to the present.

Trump is still the arrogant worm who cannot see reality.  He has no sense of self value, and degrades the value of everyone around him.  His father Fred Trump was the same way, and contributed to Trump’s artificial rise amid unacknowledged blunders and business failures. 

The media are in a bubble talking to themselves.  Negative news about Kamala sells better than negative news about Trump…because what else do you expect?

I say this not to boast, but to set up the value of my next claim.  I was one of the few who said – ahead of time - that Trump would win in 2016. The garbage he spouted was appalling, but it kept the camera on him.  It was, as we say. “unearned media”.

Once again we are treated to the sight of a turnip with no sense of proportion or pride or shame reaching for the top.  He will charge down the valley into the cannons…because he has to.

Only the extremists among Trump’s supporters will follow him now.

No one turned out to support him during his ‘hush money’ trial. 

And approximately half of the Republican voters say they will not accept the results of the election if Trump loses.

But they have to face the fact that – as former lieutenant governor of Georgia Geoffrey Duncan noted on Amanpour & Company - Trump had done less for rural voters than any other president in modern history.

Yes, Trump has friends in high places.  Justices like Alito aer sympathetic to the people who violently tried to overthrow the government; someone like that, BTW, should absolutely be nowhere near the federal bench, let alone the Supreme Court.

Steve Bannon said, ‘We’re taking this country apart state by state, city by city, village by village.’ And they have been successful in doing so. 

The election isn’t really about Biden vs. Trump; it’s a referendum on whether the effort to finally realize the promise of a truly democratic, pluralistic, multiracial society should be continued or abolished altogether. Those are the stakes.  it is difficult to convey to people who don’t pay much attention to politics how much the power centers of conservative politics have been taken over by anti-democratic extremism.

“Project 2025” would transform America into a much nastier, much more dangerous, much more hostile place for anyone who dares to deviate

“Project 2025” is their declaration of war on multiracial pluralism. There is, in this worldview, no more room for compromise, no justification for restraint: “Time is running short. If we fail, the fight for the very idea of America may be lost.” “Project 2025” is their declaration of war on multiracial pluralism. There is, in this worldview, no more room for compromise, no justification for restraint: “Time is running short. If we fail, the fight for the very idea of America may be lost.”

“Project 2025” is to expand presidential power, establish total control over the government, weaponize some parts of the executive while dismantling others.  “Project 2025” is evidence that the American Right has concrete plans and a detailed strategy of how to take over and transform American government into a machine that serves only two purposes: autocratic revenge against the “woke” enemy, and the imposition of a reactionary vision for society against the will of the majority.

Impose a reactionary White Christian patriarchal order on American society. Public health, for instance, is seen purely as a tool to uphold a traditionalist, conservative Christian understanding of gender, family, and motherhood. Labor Policy? A tool to create more room to legally discriminate in the workplace.  “Project 2025” openly demands, for example, that the president “Rescind regulations prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics.”

The rise of Trump is best understood not as the cause, but as a manifestation of this uneducated White back-sliding that has accelerated significantly in the twenty-first century. Modern conservatism as a political project arose in the middle decades of the twentieth century as an alliance between different strands and factions that all saw egalitarian, pluralistic democracy as the enemy. They staunchly opposed any leveling of traditional hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth, which they regarded as the natural and/or divinely ordained order.

Today’s leading reactionaries are not animated by a vision of “small government,” they don’t fear the authoritarian state: They want to mobilize it against their enemies.

Another presidential election loss will not return them to the democratic fold; if anything, it is bound to escalate the feeling of being under siege.

What divides the Republican Party of 2024 is not any one policy or ideology. It is not whether to support Donald Trump. The most important fault line in the party now is democracy itself. Today’s Republican insurgents believe democracy has been stolen, and they don’t trust the ability of democratic processes to restore it.

But many Republicans are still going with democracy.

This time, the percentage of voters registered with the Republican Party has decreased to 23.93% from 35% - a dozen points -  since the beginning of 2022.  The share of poor uneducated Whites – their base – is dropping fast. The number of Republicans who support Trump is falling fast – in fact, only 20% of them would support Trump is he were convicted of a crime.

Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska summed it up well: “If that is the face of the Republican party, if that’s the contest, Republicans are doomed.”

Against this slide the salient fact is that Democrats won the popular vote in the latest four elections by the following margins: 9.5 million, 5.0 million, 2.9 million, 7.1 million. Trump’s losing margin increased by over 4 million in 2020. America’s biggest threat is not Donald Trump, it is its own Electoral College system.

In the current contest, though, Trump against Harris, not even the wing-nut Electoral College system can save Donald.

He could conceivably go down by 100 million votes.

Here’s how:

A really important number is that only 30% of Republicans consider themselves as “Always Trumpers”  -  people who would vote for Trump above any other Republican.

Typical of the converts from that hard line is the reaction from a former Trump supporter: “He’s done some things that are borderline stupid. I don’t think that kind of thing is going to help unite the country,” said the respondent, citing the classified documents recently found in Trump’s home and the former president’s rally on Jan. 6.

That means that with 23.9% voting for Republicans, and 30% of that vote going to Trump, Trump is pulling in 7% of the overall vote.

Using the 2020 election as the yard-stick, there was a total vote of 155-million; 25% of that would be 39-million; 30% of that would be 11.6 million. 

That has drifted south a bit from Trump’s previous total of 74 million…which BTW was still short of victory by 7 million.

This time, he could be short of victory by 100-143 million.

He was not disciplined or clever enough to make a plan. To the end, the Trump campaign had no idea what was going on.  His campaigns’ numbers and overall information management systems chaotic.

In the first election, he created an accidental empire.  It was not unanticipated.  I was one of those who could see his win over Hillary coming.  But that was partly because I was miffed that she had stolen the nomination from Bernie.  The polls at that time said that Bernie would have beaten Donald, but Hillary would lose. 

Sure, don’t listen to me.  Don’t vote for Bernie Sanders.  Voila.

One of Trump’s first actions as president — just hours after he was inaugurated on January 20 , 2017 — was to file paperwork for his re-election.

Instead of a presidential plan, Donald just kept punching.  If he got hit, he punched back . As long as he still stood, he was still punching . He never admitted fault, never apologized, never backed down. It was precisely the absence of intent and, instead, the swings of irrationality and mania that managed, even as his government collapsed, to hold so many people in thrall…and keep some of them in his corner to this day. The sands of hate are his specialty.

Trump believed that he could make his own truth. Covid was no worse than the flu and the virus would go away on its own. He raged at the pandemic not because it was taking lives, but because it was unfairly striking close to the election. He ranted against testing, because the disease would not exist if we didn’t look for it. And the Russians weren’t helping him, it was all a hoax. Voting by mail was a fraud. The danger of domestic terrorism came not from white nationalists who supported him, but from antifa radicals who did not.

All of Trump’s falsehoods would play a role in his most desperate deception of all the rigged election. That lie was built upon a scaffold of sand.

It was not even a very good lie.  He resisted the logic of others in seeing through the rigged election lie. One advisor asked, “ Mr. President, how do we add all these seats in the House [if] the election was being stolen? You tell me they just stole it from you? They allowed the votes to go through for the Republicans in the House?” “Yes,” Trump said.

He once wondered out loud: “How did Biden and Harris beat me?”  He knew he lost.  The rigged election is the lie for fools.

And when all the other options to hold onto power had run out, we come to January 6^th.

Planning, targeting and coordination were visible in the insurrection.  The police could sense a level of preparation on the part of the protesters. Some of the men leading the first charge and snaking their way up the hill were barking into walkie-talkies in their hands. Many wore backpacks , and some had on battle helmets and bulletproof vests.

As rioters marauded through the Capitol , it was clear who they were looking for. Some of them shouted “Hang Mike Pence!”  Trump egged them on.  He tweeted, “ Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution. ”

At no time that Wednesday since the Capitol siege began did these government and military leaders hear from the president. Not even the vice president heard from Trump.

In the aftermath of the riots, chillingly, Trump’s efforts kept on. One hundred twenty-one House members, nearly two thirds of the Republican conference, voted against counting Arizona’s Electoral votes, and even more, 138, voted against counting Pennsylvania’s. They showed a cavalier disregard for America, sticking instead to the proto-dictator.

As usual with Trump, it was less a considered strategy than a series of aggressive impulses, carried out with a certain crude determination.

There had never been a pretense that Trump was a leader for all Americans, or that the White House saw no distinction between red states and blue states. He was the leader of his own coalition: a largely white, largely rural, largely working-class voting base that relished Trump’s reactionary cultural politics, supported by a largely white and wealthy conservative donor base.

Trump had never managed to show empathy during his presidency, and even in this crisis, he still did not summon compassion for others. In Trump’s book, apologizing was a sin, an admission of weakness.

So we come to the present.

We can see how a man with no sense of proportion or pride or shame can reach once more for the top.  He will charge down the valley into the cannons…because he has to.

But he is hitting the wall of Women’s Rights.  The freedom to control your own body is still the most important issue in American politics today.  The pollsters do not seem to be asking the right questions.  They are men, of course.  Republicans seem to be slowly awakening to the reality of abortion, as hospitals in their areas close.

Harris, in the recent debate, was strongest when she was supporting Women’s Rights to control their bodies. 

So although it may seem incredible that Trump would not rise above 23.9%, it is understandable. He does not stand tall. We’re burning a lot of speculative energy on nothing.

And looming over it all, these days, is Laura.

Laura Loomer is Trump’s “free spirit” – read: unhinged idiot  -  who would probably end up in his administration on Day 1. 

Here is a top note for former Trump supporters.  Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, hid in bushes and pointed an AR-style rifle with a scope at Trump, who was about 400 yards away.

In a tweet, Routh said that Trump was his choice in 2016.

In the pouring sand that is draining Trump’s hourglass, the former supporters are the ones who are trying to kill him.

The ones without the energy or ambition to do anything except wait for White Privilege to kick in and elevate them. 

The ones who Trump will continue to disappoint, because he encourages a warped picture of a “special” White America.

This time, they are going to get a nasty shock.  Harris will crush Trump by 100 million votes, and the sand trap denizens may finally realize the depths of their strangeness…and have to re-calibrate.  No matter what Trump does from his prison cell after the election, no one will build a party on his sand-piles again.

Recently more than a dozen former high-level staffers in former President Ronald Reagan’s administration voiced their support for Harris.  They invoked Reagan’s famous ‘Time For Choosing’ speech: “The time for choosing we face today is a choice between integrity and demagoguery, and the choice must be Harris-Walz.”

Out of all of the sand pits, a new Republican party may emerge…or at least one where the rags of Donald Trump are brushed off and buried. 

Unless another Republican shoots him first, of course. 

It would be much better, though, if he just got buried in the sand.

He hasn’t even got an “if pigs could fly” chance of winning.

Taking bets.