Ironically, Viceroy Donald Trump has something in common with Bill Maher, Stephen Colbert, and the other professional Trump-haters on late-night TV: Their jokes go flat without a live audience. And if you watch Colbert (and I’m not sure why I still do) you know he’s very vocal about wanting to get back in front of a crowd. So if it’s that bad for him, how bad must it be for Trump, who craves attention the way a tweeker craves meth?
Last Saturday, the answer proved to be: Pretty fuckin’ bad.
How must it feel to sell your soul for success? There have been many stories of making a deal with the Devil for power or fame, for example, becoming a world-famous songwriter only to die in an elevator and find out that Hell is the elevator playing Muzak versions of your songs for eternity. But for at least three years, Donald Trump got damn near every thing he wanted. He got elected president with everyone telling him it was impossible. Even after various financial and corruption scandals were exposed, nobody could touch him, because Republicans protected him. And that’s because Trump has, or at least had, a cult of fanatics who really would vote for him if he shot somebody on 5th Avenue.
But then coronavirus happened. And it happened because Trump thought that doing anything at all about it would depress the stock market. And even when that downturn proved to be short-lived, Trump refused to create a national policy or announce tests because the virus seemed to be hitting hardest in “blue” states with Those People. And the need to create public health measures meant that primary elections had to have a lot of polling places shut down, especially in economically disadvantaged areas, which to Trump and his Party is a feature and not a bug. But then the George Floyd case happened, after the Breonna Taylor case happened, after the Ahmed Arbery case happened, and the reason the Floyd case caught fire when the others didn’t might have had something to do with the fact that a whole bunch more people were quarantined or unemployed than might have been a few months ago. So a lot of those people ended up on the streets, which led to both civilian riots and police brutality, which led to Trump ordering the crowds around Lafayette Square to be gassed and dispersed so he could walk to St. John’s and hold a Bible, which was his biggest public relations fiasco until the next one. In the face of rocketing coronavirus numbers both nationally and in Oklahoma, Trump decided to hold his first big time America Is Back rally on the weekend of Juneteenth, in the safe, heavily Republican state of Oklahoma, in Tulsa, for some reason. It should have been a sign when both the pro- and anti-Trump crowds outside the venue were much smaller than expected. Then it turned out that no less than six staffers in Oklahoma already tested positive for the virus by Saturday June 20. Then by the time Trump got to Tulsa, they had to cancel the speech at the outside overflow podium because there WAS no overflow. As it turned out, a venue that had a capacity for 19,000 ended up with about 6,200 Trump fans. So by the time Trump came out to take the stage, he was the happiest man on Earth. And then, did you see the picture of Trump stomping back to the White House with his tie off, clutching a MAGA hat in his hand? Wow. He looked like Vladimir Putin paid him for an hour.
How must it feel to know that this is the price of the deal? That no, as a matter of fact, not everyone is going to love you so much that they would risk sickness and death for you? That maybe you’re NOT invincible forever?
And did anyone even care what Trump had to say about politics? All this week, all the talking heads could deal with was how Trump spent over ten minutes making excuses for why he needed to drink water with two hands. Just to prove he could, he drank water with one hand and threw the glass away, and THAT was the biggest cheer of the night, which only proves where Republican standards are. Then he went on about having to walk slowly down a ramp at West Point cause he was so afraid he was gonna slip. And this is another reason he’s losing against Joe Biden: The more he tries to ridicule Sleepy Joe and prove he’s the roughest, toughest man in the room, the more he comes off like George Costanza.
“I was in the pool! I WAS IN THE POOL!!”
But really, we’ve all gone on along enough about Trump’s greatest self-own (until the next one). The problem is, it may not matter. In fact, the shrinkage of Trump’s crowd size may not really be good news for Democrats.
What we have here is a moment that separates the men from the boys, so to speak. All of us, but especially Trump Republicans, have to face the possibility that we may not be alive to vote in November if we don’t wise up now. Half the reason Trump retained such popularity he had is because the economy was good, and now that’s endangered. But he’ll still have a certain core of cultists who support Trump because they look at the Book of Revelations and think that he might bring about the Last Days. Not that Trump is the Antichrist. Lucifer actually IS a man of wealth and taste.
But it is now proven that 12,800 people who “should” have been at the Tulsa rally chose self-preservation instead. That doesn’t mean they all became Biden voters. It means they realize they can’t vote for Trump in November if they don’t practice self-preservation. It also doesn’t mean they want the government to do anything about the coronavirus; after all their main regret about Trump, if they have one, is that “he’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.” It never occurred to them until now that the people he’s doing the best job of hurting are them. But he’s still doing a bang-up job of undermining the rest of the country, and since they hate this country, that’s what matters.
The dilemma, as was always the case, is having a government that lasts long enough to destroy the liberal status quo ante without being so stupid and incompetent that it destroys itself first. In the most recent primaries, Republican voter registration has actually gone up from the midterms in which Democrats made gains. The Hill: “In 2018, both parties (in Georgia) had gubernatorial primaries, and turnout was 555,000 in the Democratic primary vs. 607,000 in the Republican primary. This year, even though there were no contested statewide contests on the Republican side, almost a million voters cast ballots in the GOP Senate primary and almost 1.2 million voted in the Democratic Senate primary. That’s an increase of more than 120 percent in the number of Democratic primary voters and more than 60 percent in the number of Republican primary voters compared with 2018.
“This year, for the first time since 2008, more voters took a Democratic primary ballot than a Republican primary ballot. In the Senate primary, 53 percent of voters took a Democratic ballot — and this does not seem to have been a result of the absence of a contest on the Republican side. In the Seventh Congressional District, where the Republican incumbent is retiring, there were hotly contested primaries in both parties, and 57 percent of voters took a Democratic primary ballot. Likewise, in the Sixth District, the Democratic incumbent, Lucy McBath, was unopposed while Republicans had a contested primary to choose her challenger; yet 58 percent of voters chose a Democratic primary ballot.”
According to the Intelligencer of Charleston, West Virginia: “As voters turn in absentee ballots, turn out for early voting or prepare for the June 9 primary election, more Republicans and unaffiliated voters are registered to vote than Democratic voters this election in West Virginia. “According to voter registration numbers released Thursday by the Secretary of State, the number of voters registered with the Democratic Party as of the close of the primary election registration period on May 19 was 474,961, or 38.63 percent of the state’s 1.2 million registered voters.
“The number of voters registered with the Republican Party as of May 19 was 425,008, or 34.57 percent. The number of unaffiliated voters was 281,587, or 22.9 percent. The May 19 voter registration totals put the Republican Party just 4 points away from tying the Democratic Party in voter registration.
“If this pace continues in just over 24 months, Democrats will lose their long-held voter registration advantage,” said Melody Potter, chairwoman of the West Virginia Republican Executive Committee.”
Republicans are scared. They will not admit that they’re scared of coronavirus, but in Tulsa, they voted with their feet. And of course, they’re even more scared of Democrats. And while they may not consciously realize this (a huge part of modern ‘conservatism’ is being reactionary rather than conscious), in order to have a chance to destroy “the deep state” (formerly just ‘the state’) and create the government of their liking, they have to keep Republicans in charge of government. And that means that they have to save Trump from himself.
Just because they now realize they can’t follow Trump into the ditch, doesn’t mean Republicans have quit negative partisanship or the motivation of Trump’s cult of personality. They just have to tactically withdraw from it right now. Because as in 2016, all the opinion polls don’t matter as much as the general election vote, and in 2020, you don’t get to vote in the general election if you’re dead. Don’t look at the polls. Look at how many Republicans are registered, and look at who’s winning their primaries.
So, with all this in mind, Trump is hardly knocked out, the Biden Democrats can still make a mistake and Republicans can still pull through. All Trump has to do is focus, grasp the moment, and not be lazy, stupid or incompetent!
…In other words, Trumpniks, see you next year in Commie Muslim Transmanistan.