Yesterday afternoon I woke up from a brief nap feeling about as unsettled and worried as I could be. Did I have Covid symptoms? No. Did I receive a phone call telling me that one of my grandchildren was seriously ill? No. Did the IRS send me a letter saying that I owed the government $40,000 in back taxes, interest, and penalties? No.
What happened is that just before I fell asleep, I read a brief story about a speech that senile Joe delivered at a kick-off rally at a high school in Rockville, MD where he stood up in front of a large crowd and basically said the GOP was now the ‘MAGA-Republican’ party. At a back-yard private fundraiser which raked in a million dollars prior to his speech, Biden told his donors that MAGA represented a ‘semi-fascist’ ideology that threatened America and needed to be defeated and thrown away.
Why did Joe’s rant bother me? Because now the November vote is being defined as a context between Socialism/Communism versus MAGA/Fascism - and what if the Democrats win? What if the Democrats pull off a mid-term result which nobody believed was possible one month ago but all of a sudden, things seem to have changed?
Don’t believe me? Both YouGov and Politico have the Democrats up by 5 in generic Congressional polls.
Now you would think that given how many words I have published lambasting MAGA and the GOP over the last several years, that the last thing I would worry about would be Trump’s demise. But what happens if he really does pull a disappearing act because he’s facing a possible indictment in Georgia and Truth Social goes broke? When a Murdoch property like the New York Post runs a lead story about how Truth Social can’t pay its bills, this ain’t just some trash reporting from the Fake News, right?
If Trump loses his social media gig, if Fox finds him too toxic for their shows, if he gets indicted and his lawyers, if he can find any lawyers, tell him to shut the f**k up, what will I write about? And if you think I’m kidding, you’re wrong. Believe me, if Trump takes a nosedive, I won’t be the only political journalist waking up in a cold sweat.
Incidentally, I just read the affidavit which supported the Mar-a-Lago FBI search, and even with all the redactions, this is really serious stuff. Unless you’re Sydney Powell, the last thing any attorney will do is walk into the office of a federal magistrate and state that a search warrant is needed to establish ‘probable cause’ for a ‘criminal investigation,’ (I’m quoting the affidavit) without having something to back it up.
You certainly won’t do it if the individual for whom you are trying to establish ‘probable cause’ happens to be a former President of the United States.
If I were the subject of a search of my home based on an affidavit like the one prepared for the Mar-a-Lago search, I’d be on the next flight to Gabon or some other ‘shithole country’ that doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the United States.
And once everyone begins to realize the emperor no longer has any clothes, he becomes fair game for just about every nasty, little thing that can be dug up about the way he behaves.
So, for example, there’s a story out this morning that after Trump endorsed a guy for Governor in Wisconsin, and a picture of them at a 2022 rally appeared on a Facebook page, it turns out the picture was actually from a 2020 rally – in other words, fake news.
Now you would think that nobody would care whether some picture on Facebook was what it claimed to be. But once you’re down at the bottom after having been on top, you’ll get kicked around from here to God knows where.
Maybe I’m overstating my concern. Maybe somebody else will emerge who will try to take over leading the MAGA herd. But it took from 1964 to 1976 for Reagan to pick up the pieces scattered around by the Goldwater campaign.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t have twelve years.