Sabotaging two Georgia senate seats is only the first depth charge
Elections, once a decent unifier, are now dividing partisans already deeply distrustful of the other side. The post-election mayhem also looks to damage the future of the Republican Party Trump claims to own. And unlike more recent, complex disasters, this calamity answers to a single cause—the Trump disease that infects the Republican Party. Attacking legitimate elections without a stitch of proof because one lost is beyond the pale, unsustainable for a national party. It wouldn’t surprise me if this Trump plague outlasts the current viral menace. It’s a stretch to imagine what simple “vaccine” could resolve such huge party contradictions.
What the firmly minority Republican Party, having won the national popular vote only once since 1992, didn’t need was a jackass divider smashing the brand—or spilling his brew of malicious attacks, insipid conspiracies, jaw-dropping lying, and outright political malpractice. I cite as evidence the full weight of intra-party sabotage of the January Georgia Senate election.
Not only does a lame duck president attack his own party’s local, honorable election officials, but his lunatic fringe urges the base to boycott this manifestly “rigged election” – tainted by the horrors of U.S. made tabulation machines! That, plus direct presidential assaults on a solidly-Trumpian governor, can only further divide the bruised base, first mortified by losing to Sleepy Joe Biden, then by Trump’s utterly vacuous election challenges.
Further, the two rightwing Senate candidates still won’t admit Trump is toast, fearful a Twitter temper tantrum will offend the base (beyond those oldsters dreading contagion). Finally, Trump is not channeling cash to these two besieged candidates from his $250 million slush fund scam to save America (from fair elections!). Who knows if more Trumpian marches through Georgia will help or hurt the GOP hacks? Trump’s infamy follows his every move like a comet’s tail across the dark, night sky.
On top of all that, Democrats are far more motivated to vote and get out the vote because they have nothing ot lose. If unsuccessful, Moscow Mitch stays put and Dems fight other battles. But if the GOP duo is blasted, Dems dominate everything in Washington—then they’d be doubly obligated to help all the people. Of course, both Republican candidates are second rate, void of charisma, and tainted by suspiciously-timed, highly-profitable insider-like stock trading. Finally, for weeks and with many votes already cast, Republicans in Washington found pointless, Scrooge-like obstacles to defy the universal consensus for federal pandemic support.
Macro picture matches the micro
And the future hardly offers a bundle of good news for either Republicans or Trump. Battling demographic shifts, as rural, red state voter percentages shrink, Republicans are midway in a self-destructive cycle. Yes, gerrymandering and voter suppression helped Rethugs win House seats this time, even hold Senate seats they should have lost. But what current top Republican, all of them dripping with Trumpist toxicity, looks like a plausible 2024 frontrunner? Trump hasn’t ever and will never win a popular majority, and his hold over the Electoral College is now exploded.
With less media coverage, indictments awash on taxes and spending, and certainly more bad-news tell-alls on the way, who imagines Trump will look better in four years? That assumes he doesn’t face serious health threats—or realizes another political blood bath will forever cement his loser image. More likely, he will enjoy the greater control of being a mock, shadow president, without dim advisers forever telling him what not to do. Why not kick off a cable/media venture, open up the Trump Golden Age Fantasy Theme Park—guaranteed to swamp the aggrieved in past American greatness—and finish by turning his know-nothing political cult into a sustainable religious scam? Why drain the swamp when money falls in your lap by creating new ones?
Scenarios for the future
The corrupt, ham-fisted Spoiled Brat of modern political history was never much of a Republican. Or anything but a Trumpian. His deranged, short-term need to dominate (and profit) is served by playing the candidate, thus putting a big freeze kibosh on others with less baggage. A divisive pretend president naturally becomes a divisive pretend candidate. What if in two years, however, he becomes party poison? No problem as that sets up what he’d relish: his own personal/family third party. How else to assure deviant offspring can run whenever they like? That prospect fragments the Rethugicans for years.
We know there’s funding from the ineducable, foolish base, plus a dozen perverse billionaires, to keep the wacko Trump family up to their ears in the outrageous conspiracy war parade. Good luck to anti-Trump Lincoln types seeking to salvage what’s left of the establishment Republican Party. Any rightwing third-party schism means Status Quo Joe strolls into a second term, as he’s already far more presidential than the demented loser. If Joe staggers a bit, then we’ll have a modestly-left, non-white woman as President Harris in four years. Or any other conscious Democrat , even dare we hope a legitimate progressive?
Even without an historic party schism, Trump will both torpedo Biden’s term and fire warning shots at any nervy challenges to his hegemony. In any case, which of the following qualify as legitimate, electable national candidates: Cruz or Pence or Cotton or any House zealot still pulling the oars for Trump? Not by my reckoning. Even without Trump, will today’s Republican dinosaurs nominate anyone who smacks of either Bush, let alone Eisenhower, TR or Lincoln? The center has been cored out – filled with racism, caging immigrant children, ignoring science and health calamities, screwing up tariffs, and calling whatever the base can’t stand, like climate change or the pandemic, a “hoax.” No mainly white, fundamentalist Christian, fake populist party, allergic to economic deliverables, has a national future. That’s even truer if the party remains little more than a pernicious cult—and its leader, stripped of constant media attention, loses his luster—and millions in tax and campaign penalty costs.
To sum up, we have a disruptive, incredibly selfish party leader without Republican loyalty on his good days. Clearly, he never needed the party as much as it needed him. And if elected GOP hacks get in Trump’s way, or deviate from slavishness for five minutes, the Donald will do what he does to all obstacles, read or imagined: demonize, dump and defy. A disgraced, impeached loser, whose popularity is all about crude entertainment, starring outrage against socialist liberals, has no personal, winning record of achievement on which to mount a comeback. What personal achievements glorify the Trump years as the Towers advertise his real estate conquests?
If Dems take both GA senate seats, that only confirms that Trumpism and Trumpery and Trump in purple states are yesterday’s newspapers, fit only for wrapping fish. Why should Democrats be the only party prone to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? The party who would today scoff at Lincoln or TR is well on its way to cementing its minority status, at least if winning the White House counts.
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