Here’s the really big question which nobody has been asking but I’ll ask now: If Trump finally shuts the fu*k up and disappears, how do we know the person who replaces him won’t be worse?
And given what’s happened in Trump-land over the last 24 hours, this question isn’t just a vague possibility, but could actually be about to occur.
Trump not only pulled out of the GOP debate because he knows that things would be said about his current legal dilemma that he simply can’t afford to talk about in public, but he also cancelled a press conference scheduled for Monday when he was going to prove that not only the 2020 election, but all the indictments were also rigged.
Now when has Donald Trump ever turned down an opportunity to get up in front of the media and shoot off his mouth? When has he ever been unwilling or unable to STFU? Never. Not once until now.
Which is, of course, what everyone on the liberal and alt-left side of the political divide has been hoping would happen because, after all, Trump was planning all along to install a Fascist regime, regime? It can’t get any worse than that, right?
Wrong.
And here’s why there’s a very good chance that if Trump really does leave politics to follow his new career as a permanent defendant, that his replacement could be worse.
First of all, if the Georgia indictments tell us anything, it’s that Trump may have sounded like a big, tough, anti-democratic, pro-Fascist guy, but when all is said and done, he was and is just a bumbling fool who ran against a hapless opponent in 2016 and has then spent the last nearly seven years trying to market his MAGA brand.
What kind of schmuck would actually believe that those Three Percenters and Proud Boys assholes who swiped the souvenirs off of Nancy Pelosi’s Capitol desk could become an organized, armed force that could take on the U.S. Marines? As Joe said, and of course he was mocked for saying it but it was totally and completely true, if you want to fight the U.S, Government, you’d better bring your F-15.
So, Trump sat in the Oval Office, day after day, listening to self-promoters like Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon and Roger Stone tell him how they had a ‘plan’ to keep him behind the Resolute desk (the real Resolute desk) when all they really had were some ideas to get themselves rich quick.
Which, by the way, is exactly what Trump used to do every day when he sat in his Trump Tower office listening to this guy and that guy who came in and tried to sell him a deal. I know this because in 1990 I went up there to try and make a deal between Trump Air and a company I represented called Fairchild. Both companies have long since collapsed.
Anyway, back to what this column’s really all about.
The GOP debate coming up on Wednesday isn’t about winning the nomination – it’s too early for that. The debate will be an attempt by seven Humpty-Dumpty’s to try and grab a piece of the MAGA pie, because this is how and why someone will be able to begin doing what Trump has been doing for the last eight years, namely, running a continuous Presidential campaign.
Trump is the very first President who behaved in the Oval Office the exact, same way he behaved when he first started running to get into the Oval Office in 2015. After his 2016 inauguration he continued to hold rallies, he continued to deliver daily rants on social media, he continued to stick his face in front of a mini-cam whenever he could, he just never STFU.
And this behavior is what built and maintained the so-called Trump ‘base,’ along with the fact that his narrative was a perfect blend of anger, profanity and a completely staged ‘authenticity’ which appeals to every white man in America who enjoys feeling pissed off.
DeSantis tried to cut into Trump’s MAGA following but he just doesn’t come across with enough anger or resentment to make it work. If anything, he behaves and acts like he can’t wait to stop sounding like Trump Lite and resume a quasi-normal political life.
No, if someone is going to replace Trump as the 2024 GOP wannabe it will be someone who can out-Trump Trump, someone who can quickly figure out how to take the following that Trump built over the last eight years and get them to support another name.
You don’t do that by becoming a ‘moderate’ Trump. You do that by going to the Right so that everyone in the MAGA will know you’re the real thing.
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