Last night my wife and U stopped off for dinner on the way home from work. We walked into a popular franchise restaurant which was pretty well filled up. We were given a booth from which we could see one of the wide-screen TVs which was hanging from the ceiling over the bar.
There were probably a half-dozen TVs in the room and every set was showing the news. I’m not sure if the sets were tuned to Fox or CNN but every screen was playing the story about Trump’s indictment earlier that day.
Know what was the most impressive thing about watching a TV story about the first indictment of someone who had served as President of the United States? It was the fact that as far as I could tell, I was the only person in the entire Applebee’s restaurant who seemed to be in the slightest bit interested in what was being reported on the news.
And it wasn’t as if the announcement about Trump’s indictment was old news. We arrived at the restaurant at about 5:30, which was exactly the time that the story first broke.
Everyone in the restaurant kept eating, talking, drinking, and basically entertaining themselves as the whole indictment story played across all the widescreen TV’s. The news show then switched to what appeared to be some story about Ukraine which also elicited not any kind of viewer response.
I didn’t bother to look at the TV news any further because I was concentrating on eating my three deep-fried cauliflower tacos and drinking my Corona with lime. By the time we got home, of course, my CNN feed had the usual suspects ranting about the indictment, beginning with DeSantis, and then going through the rest of the Humpty-Dumpty’s who claim to be the GP leadership or at least the GOP shitheads with the loudest mouths.
CNN put out a pretty good summary of the reactions by the alt-right gang, with all of the comments from DeSantis, Pence, Youngkin, et. al., reading like they had been written by the RNC and then circulated around.
But the best and juiciest response of all came from Trump himself who claimed he was ‘indicated’ by a group of ‘Thugs and Radical Left Monsters’ who are still attacking what used to be ‘fair and fair’ elections.
So, now we have a new legal process called ‘indicated’ which is being tried out for the very first time by the Manhattan DA. And if Trump’s mis-spelled statement doesn’t get him ranked rhetorically up there with Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, I don’t know what does.
Actually, one of Trump’s most consistent defenders and ass-kissers, Marjorie Taylor Greene, happened yesterday to be at Gettysburg where she defended Trump and predicted he will win again because everything he’s being accused of doing is nothing more than ‘lies.’ And to make sure her audience understood her argument, MTG then listed the lies – “Ukraine, January 6th, Stormy Daniels, Russia, Impeachment Number One, Impeachment Number Two and now a phony indictment by a ‘George Soros-backed Manhattan DA named Alvin Bragg.”
Funny, but what struck me as I played the 3-minute tape a second time to make sure I hadn’t missed one of the anti-Trump lies, was the total and complete absence of any mention of the 2020 stolen votes.
How do you defend Trump and not start off by recalling the man’s three-year campaign to convince himself and everyone else that he would still be sitting in the Oval Office if there hadn’t been a 2020 ‘big steal?’
I’ll tell you why all of a sudden, the ‘stolen’ election narrative has disappeared. It’s off the GOP radar screen because Dominion, the company which makes the voting machines, has sued Fox because the network continued to promote the ‘election steal’ nonsense even when they knew that those claims weren’t true.
How difficult would it be for Dominion’s attorneys to submit an amended lawsuit which would add Marjorie Taylor Greene or Trump himself as defendants in that suit? Even Trump is no longer whining about how he was the victim of a ‘stolen’ election. Now he whispers something about ‘fair and honest elections like we used to have.’
The GOP can now ratchet up the defense of Trump as we move towards Tuesday when he’s going to turn himself in. But just remember this: the best thing that could happen to all those 2024 Presidential wannabees like Youngkin, Haley, DeSantis and the rest of them would have a better shot if Trump’s fat ass was sitting in jail.