Back in 1982-84 I was Public Information Officer of the New York State Assembly, reporting to the Democratic leadership, which was the Chairman of the Ways & Means Committee, Jerry Kremer, and the Speaker of the Assembly, who was Stanley Fink. At one point, shortly after his 1983 inauguration, I happened to mention to the Speaker that the new Governor, Mario Cuomo, seemed to be getting a good press.
To which the Speaker responded this way: “Yea, he’s getting a good press because nobody’s leaning on him – yet.”
And lately, it seems to me that the same thing is happening to Donald Trump. It’s not that Trump is getting a good press. It’s that after being out of office for nearly 10 months, he’s getting no press at all. In other words, nobody’s leaning on him.
What did Newsweek have to say about Trump this week? They claimed there was ‘outrage’ in MAGA world because it appears that McConnell is about to make a deal with Joe to keep the country from going into default.
And what does this MAGA ‘outrage’ consist of? A statement by none other than Trump himself which reads: “Looks like Mitch McConnell is folding to the Democrats again.”
Where and when did Trump make this statement? On his own website where visits have decreased by more than 85 percent over the last four months. That’s some outrage, I must say.
Trump is heading out to Des Moines, IA for another rally this weekend. He’s allegedly the favorite among Iowa GOP voters to head the ticket in 2024. A recent poll showed his favorability rating at 91 percent. Meanwhile, when a Boston Globe reporter interviewed people who were attending a big Evangelical meeting in Iowa this past July, there were plenty of folks who were ready to vote for whomever headed the 2024 GOP ticket, Donald Trump or not.
I conduct an admittedly unscientific analysis of Trump’s public presence every night by watching the NBC Nightly News and counting how many times his name is mentioned during the segment that covers political goings-on in D.C. When Trump was President, he made this segment virtually every night, sometimes multiple times every night.
I can’t remember the last time that Trump was mentioned by Lester Holt or one of his correspondents on the national news. He does get some air-time on the morning shows, but those shows are nothing more than some gossip which fills in between the endless advertisements for various fake medicines and exercise machines.
For all his diminished blunder and bullshit, the fact is that right now Donald Trump’s impact on the 2024 election consists of one vote – his own vote. The idea that he’s the front-runner to head the 2024 ticket only demonstrates that the GOP doesn’t have anyone else at the moment whose name is worth anything out of his or her own state.
How many people in Iowa or South Dakota or Missouri have ever heard of Ron DeSantis? Think that anyone in Nebraska knows who Nikki Haley is? The oddsmakers have her in third place behind Trump and DeSantis, which shows you how weak the GOP field is right now.
The problem in the United States is that because we aren’t a Parliamentary system, you’re either in or you’re out. And if you’re out, i.e., if your party is the minority party in Congress and you don’t occupy the Oval Office, nobody really cares what you do or say. Because no matter what you do or say, you really can’t get anything done unless the majority party in Congress or the individual sitting behind the Resolute Desk needs you to get something done.
Yesterday I got a call from the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee and before the kid finished his spiel, I said I would send them a hundred bucks. I’m assuming that the phone will ring today with a call from the DNC asking me to send them some dough that will be used to fund some Democrat running for a seat in the House, and I’ll send them a hundred bucks too.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. If the goddamn Republicans want to roll over and play dead over whether a woman can decide for herself whether she wants to bring another human being into the world, that’s fine with me. But I don’t want to see such dip-shit political meanderings filling up the political segment on the NBC Nightly News.
There’s a reason I have never voted for a single Republican in the thirty-eight elections in which I have voted since I voted for the first time in 1968.