Remember the Duke of Windsor? He was Edward VIII who abdicated the British throne in 1936 because he wanted to marry a twice-divorced woman from Philadelphia. He then spent the rest of his life showing up at fancy charity dinners in Palm Beach and St. Tropez (depending on the season) and if you gave a big enough donation to the fund to rescue stray cats or whatever, you got to sit at his table for at least part of the meal.
The truth is that the real reason Edward gave up the throne was because Churchill and a couple of other liberal MPs were appalled by this guy’s infatuation with fascism, his evident love for Hitler, and decided he had to go. After he abdicated, the former King spent a couple of years chumming around with fascists and right-wingers of various stripes. Then when war broke out, he had the good sense to keep his mouth shut and by the time World War II was over, nobody remembered him at all.
I am now convinced that this is exactly what’s going to happen to Donald Trump. He’s been chumming around with every loudmouth right-wing media and political asshole he can find; he’s been getting up at these rallies and talking non-stop for a couple of hours about the election ‘fraud,’ and he makes sure that the media continues to describe him as a ‘good bet’ to run again in 2024.
The tip-off was a comment made by Chuck Todd on his ‘Meet the Press’ show this past weekend when he said that Trump would ultimately ‘pull the plug’ on another campaign because it would be ‘too much work.’ And then on Monday comes the news that both the technology chief and the head of programming have quit Trump’s social media program because the app simply doesn’t work.
Maybe they got fired, maybe they didn’t get paid, who the hell knows? But the bottom line is that Trump depended on social media for his entire political presence both before, during and after he was in the White House, and now to quote Grandpa, it’s all ‘gurnisht helfen’ (read: nothing at all.)
And just to rub salt in the wounds, the first thing that Twitter announced after Elon Musk bought a 9 percent stake in the company was that there was no plan to reinstate Trump’s Twitter account, notwithstanding Musk’s support for internet free speech.
So, without any real social media presence there’s simply no way that Trump can put together a national campaign, and I note, incidentally, that visits to his website dropped 6% last month.
Want to see where Trump will end up? Take a gander at something called the American Freedom Tour which will make a May 14th stop in Austin, TX assuming they can rent some space. The tour is led by Trump’s idiot son and will feature such luminaries as Kimberly Guilfoyle and Dinesh D’Souza, but the Austin event will also feature an appearance by the 45th President himself.
Now here’s the kicker, ready?
The Freedom Tour allegedly supports four basic conservative values – faith, family, finance, and freedom. Along with the spieling, you also have an opportunity to get the financial ‘training’ that will help you become ‘self-reliant’ and ‘achieve the American dream.’
In other words, you’ll be asked to pay to attend some kind of seminar which will give you all the necessary tips to make you a first-class investor in whatever Wall Street boondoggle this scam-show wants to promote.
Here we go again. It’s Trump University under a different name. But it’s the same old carnival show that got Trump into trouble the last time around when he agreed to pay $25 million to people who spent as much as $35,000 to learn how to make a buck in real estate deals from the best dealmaker of them all.
I think it’s entirely appropriate that Trump ends up where the Duke of Windsor left off – shilling not for charities but for his own investment scam which is one and the same thing.
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