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Donald Trump mugshot
Milwaukee’s first debate by eight Republicans pretending to be candidates for the party’s presidential nomination is over and it was a complete waste of time.
Halfway through the debate, six of the eight candidates raised their hands to declare their support for Donald Trump if he’s the nominee even if he’s convicted for any of his multiple crimes attempting to violently overthrow President Biden’s election. So why are they running against Trump if they support him?
Republicans are no longer an American political party. They’re an ongoing criminal enterprise to destroy free and fair elections firmly under Trump’s control. Without Trump even showing up for the debate, his lead for the nomination continues to grow.
At this point, most of the other candidates are running for vice president. They think they can inherit whatever’s left of the party after Trump’s gone without doing anything to get rid of him. There may not be anything left.
‘We Can’t Win’
They should heed the warning of doom from Trump’s former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley: “We have to face the fact that Trump is the most disliked politician in America. We can’t win a general election that way.”
It was one of the few truthful statements from any Republican candidate all night. But as Republicans of color in Trump’s openly racist party, neither Haley nor South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott have any chance of winning the presidential nomination either.
Many Republicans opposed civil rights and women’s rights even before Democrats embraced those activist movements in the 1960s. Trump has now supercharged the party’s white male supremacy by creating a radical, rightwing Supreme Court supermajority determined to roll back decades of constitutional protections for gender and racial equality.
The hatred of Republicans for Black and Brown Americans also applies to Vivek Ramaswamy, the multi-millionaire child of Indian immigrants who dominated the debate. Auditioning for a Fox News talk show, Ramaswamy was Trump’s stand-in channeling the criminal president’s most preposterous lies.
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Keep Drilling!
Ramaswamy declared climate change a hoax, promising industry could keep drilling, fracking and burning all the filthy coal it wants without worrying about any fraudulent hurricanes, floods or wildfires destroying life on earth.
As demonstrably ignorant as Ramaswamy’s rhetoric was, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie dishonestly twisting his denunciation of Ramaswamy into a racist Republican attack on President Barack Obama was even worse.
“The last person in one of these debates … who stood in the middle of the stage and said, ‘What’s a skinny guy with an odd last name doing up here?’ was Barack Obama,” Christie said, “and I’m afraid we’re dealing with the same type of amateur standing on the stage tonight.”
There was nothing amateur about President Obama’s successful economic recovery from President Bush’s Great Recession. In 2017, Obama and Biden left Trump with the longest continuous streak of job creation in history. By the spring of 2020, Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic was destroying the economy again wiping out a decade’s worth of job gains. Bidenomics restored all those jobs a year ago with continuing job growth preventing another recession.
Fake Election Plot
The most embarrassing Republican endorsement for Trump if he’s the nominee came from his own vice president. Mike Pence saved democracy by refusing Trump’s order during the counting of electoral votes to throw out the votes Biden won in seven states including Wisconsin and replacing them with fake Trump electors fraudulently created by Republicans.
Now Kenneth Chesebro, an attorney for the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty founded by the ultra-rightwing Bradley Foundation, is speeding up Trump’s day in court for those crimes in Georgia.
Chesebro, a central figure in the federal and state indictments of Trump for the fake electors plot, sent all the Republican fake electors detailed instructions to make their fraudulent documents appear genuine. Chesebro is demanding a speedy trial in Georgia on the specific charges against him. Georgia district Fani Willis says she’s prepared to start her racketeering trial against all 19 criminal defendants. A judge has scheduled Chesebro’s trial to begin Oct. 23.
One can imagine all the steaks covered in catsup that are hitting the wall in Trump’s dining room. Trump’s perpetual legal strategy to stay out of jail is delaying justice as long as possible.
Even if Trump succeeds in severing his own trial from Chesebro’s, major state trials are televised in Georgia. Trump’s not going to enjoy watching Pence and many of his indicted co-conspirators who cut deals to reduce their own sentences testifying against him as much as he did watching his nationally televised violent insurrection on January 6.
Conservatives who support democracy need to create a new political party. Their Grand Old Party has been permanently destroyed. The Republican party intends to keep nominating Trump for president until prosecutors take him off the street.
In Georgia, no Republican president will ever have the political power to pardon Trump or reduce his prison sentence.
