I normally don't do two columns the same day. But things are suddenly moving quickly, and tomorrow's column will be an important read.
So, Trump goes on his Truth Social app this past weekend and rants against Bill Maher, who said on his TV show that the FBI raid ‘saved’ Trump’s political career.
And what does Trump say in response? He takes Maher seriously and goes into a long-winded kvetch about how the FBI raid was an ‘assault on liberty and very bad for our country, which is incredibly angry right now.’
The country’s incredibly angry? I drove several hundred miles this weekend through bucolic country in three New England states and all those incredibly angry people were lined up at every soft-serve ice cream and take-out place that I passed.
What Trump still doesn’t realize is that if you never shut up, sooner or later people just tune you out. I mean, how many times can you listen to anyone saying the same goddamn thing over and over again?
There was a large billboard somewhere in New Hampshire carrying an ad for a local company that was looking to hire help at $21 an hour. That’s forty grand to stand in front of a machine and stuff what comes out of the machine into a carton which will then be taken into the warehouse by another guy driving a forklift who’s probably getting paid fifty grand a year.
I think Maher’s probably right. Since everyone has a job that’s paying a lot more than minimum wage, Trump needs something else for everyone to be pissed off about, otherwise he’s a dead political duck.
Except that nobody really cares about the FBI as long as they’re not knocking on your door. Nobody cares if a former President took home ‘classified’ documents, whatever the word ‘classified’ means. And as I drove past probably more than 500 houses in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine over the weekend, I saw a grand total of 3 MAGA flags.
It really makes no difference if Trump supporters won GOP primaries in red states. What matters is if they won primaries in states where Congressional seats will be contested in slightly more than two months. And what I’m hearing is that someone who won a GOP primary by saying that the 2020 election was ‘fixed,’ will have a serious problem in the general election because as majority of all registered voters don’t buy Trump’s vote ‘fraud’ argument anymore, as if they ever did.
The day that Twitter banned Trump, he had nearly 90 million users. Right now his Truth Social count seems to be somewhere around 2 million and in recent months it has actually declined.
Does this mean Trump can’t get 15,000 to come out to some rinky-dink airport in Kansas or Georgia to listen to him talk? Of course, he can. But so what? In 2016 Trump showed up at more than 60 big events but won the election because he flipped three blue states – MI, PA, WI - by less than 2% of the total votes cast in those three states. In 2018 he ran all over the country again and the GOP lost control of both the Senate and the House. In 2020 he did another 60 events and only lost the national election by 7 million votes.
How can anyone take this guy seriously? That’s what I want to know. Who cares what he says or what he does? He spent four years in the White House basically doing nothing except watching Fox and handing out MAGA trinkets to anyone who came by.
His attack today on Elaine Chao, who was his Secretary of Transportation but quit after January 6th is really about as low, vulgar, and stupid as you can get. Here’s what he said on Truth Social about the wife of Mitch McConnell: “This is such an affront to honor and to leadership. He should spend more time (and money!) helping them get elected, and less time helping his crazy wife and family get rich on China!”
Trump was referring to McConnell’s stated concern about the quality of some of the Republican candidates running for the Senate in 2022. You mean there’s any doubt that Mehmet Oz matches up to even the lowest, possible criteria for taking the top slot on the Pennsylvania ballot for the GOP?
I had a relative, now long gone, who used to tell me he ‘knew for a fact’ that FDR was a Marxist and that the New Deal was a Communist plot. He knew it ‘for a fact.’
Maybe the simple truth is that Trump really is delusional which certainly doesn’t prevent him from getting up every day, flicking on the TV and watching Fox News. And if Fox doesn’t understand how the country’s going to Hell in a handbasket, at least we still have Donald Trump and Truth Social to set things straight.
It could be worse. Trump could still be sitting in the Oval Office making a nightly speech on national TV.