Photo: donaldtrump.com
Donald Trump
If Republicans think they can refuse to nominate Donald Trump for the presidency again without a bloody gang war, they’ve got another think coming. He doesn’t intend to go quietly.
Announcing his candidacy last week, Trump called Atty. Gen. Merrick Garland’s criminal investigations into his role in the violent insurrection and his apparent theft of top-secret government documents to be the single gravest threat to “our civilization” in history.
Now Trump’s demanding Republicans “stand up and fight” prosecutors to keep him out of jail. Any elected Republican who fails to do so will shoot to the top of Trump’s enemies list along with Liz Cheney, Mitch McConnell and every Republican who voted for his impeachment.
It’s the scorched earth beginning of Trump’s next presidential campaign at a time many Republicans are eager to escape Trump’s toxic domination after he destroyed the overwhelming midterm victory they anticipated.
Above the Law?
Garland knows there’s no way to avoid the constant barrage of dishonest political attacks from Trump and his supporters. They came almost instantly after Garland appointed special counsel Jack Smith to oversee the Trump investigations. Smith previously led the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section and more recently has been the chief prosecutor of war crimes in Europe for the International Criminal Court.
No one has impeccable enough credentials to escape being smeared as a witch hunter by Trump. He immediately denounced Smith’s appointment, entertaining a rightwing gala at Mar-a-Lago with all his usual lies: “The corrupt and highly political Justice Department just appointed a super-radical-left prosecutor.” Only Trump would consider prosecuting war crimes a radical leftwing act.
No legitimate U.S. Justice Department can fail to hold any former president or self-declared presidential candidate accountable for attempting to violently overthrow American democracy or for jeopardizing national security by hiding hundreds of highly classified government documents including 18 marked top secret in his beach house and refusing to give them back.
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By trying to make the next presidential election all about himself, Trump will create far more problems for Republicans than for Garland. So far Trump’s corrupt presidency has been disastrous for Republicans in three straight national elections. Trump’s ready to go for four. Trump doesn’t care if it destroys the party. He just desperately craves public attention.
Hateful and Racist
Republicans already missed their chance to rid the party of Trump and the violent White supremacists and neo-Nazis who support him. After Trump was defeated by the largest vote in American history, they pretended his howling mob didn’t chase them through the Capitol trying to murder them to overthrow the election.
After their miserable midterm showing, Republicans wish Trump would stop repelling voters, but they haven’t done anything to change the openly hateful, racist, misogynist, antisemitic, anti-LGBTQ political party Trump created in his own image. Republicans no longer support protecting the rights of all Americans if they ever did.
Seriously, can anyone explain the difference between Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the latest Republican rightwing flavor-of-the-month? DeSantis has the same vile political views on race and gender and an equally offensive public personality. DeSantis is simply Trumpism without Trump.
At some point, Republicans need to do far more to become a legitimate conservative American political party again. The only political ideology Trump Republicans share is their hatred for the racial and religious diversity of America. It’s what limited them to a razor-thin majority in the House when they expected to flip 20 to 30 seats.
That narrow majority will give the Crazytown Republican Caucus led by Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene veto power over anything passed in the House, which is likely to be very little. Fortunately, Democrats won control of the Senate to continue confirming rational judges capable of reading the Constitution and allowing President Biden to fill any sudden openings on the Supreme Court. One can always hope.
One of the lessons Republicans should have learned from their dismal showing is an overwhelming majority of Americans want their political leaders to start doing something about the economic problems families are facing today instead of whining about a presidential election they lost two years ago.
Trying to prevent President Biden and Democrats from doing anything to make life any better for Americans does not count as positive political leadership. Neither would it be for Republicans to keep renominating the worst Republican president in history with multiple criminal investigations closing in on him. No cheap imitations like DeSantis either.
Don’t expect Trump to take it well. When Trump’s rambling, incoherent campaign announcement deteriorated into complete gibberish—Sample: “I’ve gone decades, decades, without a war, the first president to do it that long”—even Sean Hannity cut away. When many in the crowd tried to escape Trump’s hour-long, randomly meandering speech, Mar-a-Lago security prevented them from leaving.
National Review, founded by Republican icon William F. Buckley Jr., responded with a large picture of Trump headlined “No.”
