Wednesday, November 16, 2022

The Ego has Landed


 Still got that Mussolini smug grin going, I see.

I did see some bits of the speech - all the greatest "hits" delivered in rambling fashion:  the nation under his reign was like heaven on Earth; it's now a crumbling, wretched wreck again that only he can fix.  

Couple of new things I noticed:  death penalty for drug dealers (expressing approval of execution immediately after trial - pretty much the same day - like he reckons Xi told him is the system in China.)   Also a bit of the trans gender stuff (no men in women's sports), which wasn't such a thing back in his first campaign.   

Anyway, he'll be charged before too long, I reckon.   I wonder if that will be the opportunity for Hannity and Carlson to withdraw support?   

Update:  George Will putting out the strong anti-Trump case in the Washington Post points out a few things worth remembering:

Among the Republican nominating electorate, Trump has a floor of forever Trumpers, but the floor is sagging. If his bitter-enders were the questioning sort, they would ask: What states that he previously carried might he lose in 2024, and what states that he previously lost might he conceivably carry in 2024?

His 2016 victory was sealed by wafer-thin margins (a combined 77,744 votes out of 13,940,912 cast) in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. All three just elected Democratic governors, two (Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan and Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania) by landslides over notably supine Trump grovelers who were out of their depths and perhaps their minds. Trump’s marathon post-2020 tantrum was ignited when he was declared the loser in Arizona, which has just elected a Democratic senator and perhaps governor. Georgia, which Trump won by 211,141 votes out of 4,114,732 cast in 2016, and which he lost by 11,779 votes out of 4,999,960 cast in 2020, just emphatically reelected Gov. Brian Kemp (R) and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R), both of whom Trump reviles because they acknowledged the arithmetic of his 2020 Georgia loss....

What handhold can Trump, the entertainer turned bore, now grasp to stop his current slide? He has always been a Potemkin tycoon, parasitic off the superstition that great wealth is somehow symptomatic of other greatness. Hence his tenacious secretiveness regarding his tax returns, which might reveal the fictitiousness of his financial wizardry. New York prosecutors could soon lift the veil....

The midterm elections indicate that a growing number of voters seem inclined to make cool-eyed calculations as unenthralled adults: Do not seek the best imaginable political outcome; seek instead to avoid the worst.

The problem is, though, the Trump base is in a cult and immune to such reasoning.  How the party and its "establishment" is going to deal with that is the puzzle.  (Even though I suspect they will hope that his legal problems will help solve it, we know that Trump will just paint those as the Deep State against him, and fund raise off it.)

 

 

5 comments:

  1. Hence his tenacious secretiveness regarding his tax returns, which might reveal the fictitiousness of his financial wizardry. New York prosecutors could soon lift the veil....

    The refusal to release tax returns might be relevant to the court case in NY because that is about the discrepancy between the property values in the taxes and the loan applications. Releasing the tax returns would have awakened his investors to the lie.

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  2. Awful but very unsurprising news. I hope for his latest presidential bid to be such a terrible failure that it will shatter his ego and any remaining public image of him as a 'winner'.

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  3. Tim! Did you see my post (attractively illustrated) about the wild chickens of Singapore? I expected to have a comment from you about it, but none..:(

    http://opiniondominion.blogspot.com/2022/11/consider-chickens-of-singapore.html

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  4. I did, they're great!

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  5. He is a vote loser.

    I would not be surprised if at some stage he withdraws. Surely even deplorables want to win in 2024

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