Interesting Times
How many criminal convictions on Trump's platter by November 2024? I'm guessing at least two. And he'll still be the nominee.
Republican Clown Car, 2015, by Donkey Hotey (via Wikimedia Commons).
As Steve M is saying, Republicans seem to be doing everything they can to force themselves to renominate Trump next summer, particularly the ones who are most ostensibly anxious not to, calling up an implausibly crowded carful of non-Trump nonentities, like it’s 2015 all over again. Which it will be, at this rate.
Ron DeSantis has now entered the campaign, or almost. He’s signed the special Run Ron Run bill overturning the Florida law that requires governors running for president to resign from the governorship, It’s been announced that he’s filed the paperwork, and eventually today, as my friend @Snowmanomics says,
The news clips about DeSantis' entry into the race will feature grainy audio from a Twitter space of him telling Musk he's running. He could have had video from a nicely staged launch event but instead he chose this. As a political junkie, I'm offended at how stupid this is.
(Update: apparently it was a lot worse than that) and close to the top of the coverage is an exuberant premonitory response Trump may possibly have written himself:
Ron DeSanctus can’t win the General Election (or get the Nomination) because he VOTED TO OBLITERATE SOCIAL SECURITY, EVEN WANTING TO RAISE THE MINIMUM AGE TO 70 (or more!), VOTED TO BADLY WOUND MEDICARE, AND FOUGHT HARD AND VOTED FOR A 23% “TAX ON EVERYTHING” SALES TAX. He was, and is, a disciple of horrible RINO Paul Ryan, and others too many to mention. Also, he desperately needs a personality transplant and, to the best of my knowledge, they are not medically available yet. A disloyal person!
I’m of the opinion that this job, burying DeSantis, is one job Trump can actually do right. For one thing, DeSantis is even less strong than he seems, in spite of his Florida landslide last year (assisted by a historically low turnout prompted, to a large extent, by his overt efforts to discourage nonwhite voters, with police persecution under a new law), which won’t be replicated in other states, where Florida Man doesn’t live in large numbers. While his line of trash talk, especially against reporters, can sting, in spite of the awful whine of his voice, he’s been avoiding contact with reporters in recent months as if he was afraid of them, and he seems afraid to do trash talking in any context against Trump. I can’t imagine how he’ll sustain a primary debate with Trump without looking like a whipped dog. And his instincts are unbelievably bad, I guess from his unfamiliarity with people in general, and this takes a toll:
As Dexter Filkins put it in a New Yorker profile last June,
People who work closely with him describe a man so aloof that he sometimes finds it difficult to carry on a conversation. “He’s not comfortable engaging other people,” a political leader who sees him often told me. “He walks into the meeting and doesn’t acknowledge the rest of us. There’s no eye contact and little or no interaction. The moment I start to ask him a question, his head twitches. You can tell he doesn’t want to be there.” (DeSantis’s office declined requests for comment.)
Nearly everyone I talked to who knew DeSantis commented on his affect: his lack of curiosity about others, his indifferent table manners, his aversion to the political rituals of dispensing handshakes and questions about the kids. One former associate told me that his demeanor stems from a conviction that others have advantages that were denied to him. “The anger comes more easily to him because he has a chip on his shoulder,” she said.
Like a white Clarence Thomas, another high-achieving Yale graduate with an impostor syndrome, but really all-round nasty:
Some recalled that DeSantis was so intensely focussed that he wasn’t much of a teammate. “Ron is the most selfish person I have ever interacted with,” another [Yale baseball] teammate told me. “He has always loved embarrassing and humiliating people. I’m speaking for others—he was the biggest dick we knew.” But the same teammate praised DeSantis’s intellect. “This is the frustrating part. He’s so fucking smart and so creative,” he said.
Trump is weird, and mean to those he feels entitled to kick, which is practically everybody, but he’s that ebullient kind of psychopath who really believes in being “nice” to those who are “nice” to him. DeSantis is completely contemptuous of that kind of reciprocity, and it constantly shows whenever he’s on camera. I think DeSantis loses as long as Trump is in the race, making the contrast between the two, even in Florida, where there hasn’t been a whole lot of polling for the primary, but he seems to have acquired a pretty substantial lead:
According to the poll, Trump would win over DeSantis by a significant margin if the primary were held when the poll was completed between April 13-14. When the same group of voters was asked about their choice for the upcoming Republican presidential primary, approximately 6 out of 10 (59 percent) chose Trump, while about 3 out of 10 (31 percent) chose DeSantis.
“Former President Trump continues to be a strong candidate for the Republican nomination and his support appears durable and consistent,” said Kevin Wagner, Ph.D., professor of political science at FAU.
The big question is how long Trump will stay in the race; he could drop out as soon as the next indictment comes—the one in Fulton County, Georgia for criminal interference with election authorities from Governor Kemp down to Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss will be in August, they’re saying, and Special Counsel Smith is supposed to be pretty much done collecting evidence in the federal case on the stolen federal documents at Mar-a-Lago, so that could be ready to charge in the summer as well, possibly even sooner.
In the January Insurrection case, now that the last Proud Boy defendants are convicted, a lot of interviews with higher-ups remain to be conducted—Mark Meadows (who, new speculation says, may be a target—or a cooperating witness), John Ratcliffe, former national security adviser Robert O'Brien, top aides Stephen Miller, Dan Scavino, Nick Luna, and John McEntee, along with the former Senior Official Performing the Duties of Secretary of Homeland Security Ken Cuccinelli. I have no idea when that indictment is coming down. The first criminal trial, over the structuring and laundering of the hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, is scheduled to start in March 2024, by which time the primary season should be basically over.
I guess the safe betting would be that he won’t drop out at all unless under some very heavy pressure that’s hardly likely to come from the congressional Republicans or the RNC, and I don’t know where else it would come from, especially after March, when the convention planning will be under full steam. If he’s convicted in the Stormy Daniels case he’ll just file an appeal, and it certainly won’t stop him from running. It’s unlikely, but not impossible, that he could be fighting up to three or four criminal convictions by the time the convention takes place, as well as the dissolution of the Trump Organization in New York State, in the $250-million civil fraud lawsuit filed by Letitia James (I’m afraid this one will more likely take years, though; but the complaint could come out much sooner and it’s going to be wild).
I would just like everybody to contemplate what that’s going to be like, because I’m not hearing enough about it. What the Republicans’ TV convention is going to look like, and the rallies. (I know there won’t be any debates.) At some point the newscasters are going to have to start talking about it. Members of Congress will be fleeing reporters in the middle of their own re-election campaigns. Proud Boy and Oath Keeper and Threeper organizations (which still exist, in spite of the January 6 convictions) will be in the streets looking for fights, wherever there’s a Women’s March or Black Lives Matter appearance to protest this insane situation. It’s incumbent on the Republican Party to stop this by finding an alternative candidate, and they can’t do it; Pudding Fingers won’t cut it.
Interesting Times
Whee doggies, as Joe McCarthy used to say. You.call DeSantis a white Clarence Thomas, but the guy you describe strikes this Boomer as the 2nd coming of Richard Nixon, without the charm or intellectual curiosity. Say what you will about Tricky Dick, he actually cared about foreign policy. I'm struggling to see what DeSantis cares about beyond the greater glory of Ron DeSantis, a trait shared with Trump. I can't believe I'm saying this, but Trump might have a healthier personality than DeSantis.
But Trump will not drop out short of death. His DNR probably says he's still running until he's declared legally dead, which would be illegal and so wouldn't count. I'd bet many quatloos that he thinks he's untouchable as long as he's running, and if he wins the very first thing he does after the swearing in is issuing himself a blanket pardon. The donations will pay the white shoe law firms to throw as many monkey wrenches a wealthy white man can buy.
And to finish where you started, the Republican Party is doing everything it can to recreate the 2016 primaries. The scattered mutterings about the Party not wanting Trump might have been true, but those people apparantly have as much pull in the Party as I do. Along side those mutterings i occasionally saw stories on how positions in the RNC had been slowly filled with Trump supporters, and i think those were more pertinent. DeSantis has convinced himself the base wants Kristallnacht (I had to look up the spelling) but that won't take down Trump, or even inconvenience him. If DeSantis had Trump's brownshirt Proud Boys lined up, I'd be a lot more worried, but I don't see that happening (so far). Unlike Trump, DeSantis would not hesitate to pull the trigger if he thought he had a chance to be Maximum Leader for Life.