Is Donald Trump going soft? Or is his command of the Republican Party slowly diminishing?
It’s safe to say, in the seven or so years that Trump has served as the center of America’s political universe, the journalism profession has worked feverishly to find ways to define him. None succeeded. One common leftist refrain is that he’s a serial liar who’s re-invented himself as a nationalistic populist in order to fool enough mind-numbed suckers (translation: conservatives) to nominate him for president and then elect him to the office.
Naturally, these privileged social climbers reasoned, Trump couldn’t accomplish the feat in the Democrat Party, so he dedicated all his fortune and strength to taking over the GOP instead. Democrats are enlightened, right? They’re compassionate; they want to level the playing field; they insist on tax rate fairness; they believe in “science” and “climate change”; they save the planet practically every day just by waking up in the morning.
To them, Trump, on the other hand, is a shyster, a thrice-married playboy who made himself notorious by being the most outrageous on a real-life version of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous”. His politics run was all an act, they lectured. He’s not really pro-life, he just became that way to make himself viable in the judgmental, anti-woman GOP.
Trump succeeded alright, but he was ultimately doomed to fail -- and it’s finally happening now, according to the elites. His phony nature has been exposed, and it’s ugly. In a piece titled, “Why Trump Is Losing His Grip on the GOP”, liberal Politico writer John Harris wrote:
“Trump’s personality and history gave him special ability to make the phoniness indictment. Journalists and biographers have yet to find a chapter in Trump’s 75 years when he might be described as honest in the conventional sense of that word — someone who tells the truth and follows the rules because it is the right thing to do, even when it is disadvantageous to do so.
“But just because Trump is someone who is comfortable lying — anyone paying attention has known that since the 1980s — he was not at the outset of his political career defined by artifice. His grandiose self-conception, his vanity, his gleeful satyriasis — these are common traits in politicians, but most would try to hide them from view. Trump put them proudly on display. On the few occasions he was ever scolded into an apology — such as his notorious comments about how women like to be grabbed by famous people — he backtracked quickly. Whatever else you could say about Trump, he was not a phony…
“...Trump has moved from being the beneficiary of America’s instinctual suspicion that most politicians are phonies who don’t really believe a thing they say, to being the enforcer against politicians who are insufficiently phony in professing blind devotion to him.”
Blah, blah, blah. Blah, blah, blah. Yeah, yeah, Donald Trump is all about personal vanity and punishing those who don’t bend at the waist, get on one knee and kiss his ring. To observers like Harris, even those who show sufficient Trump-devotedness get burned by his laser-like stare if they don’t do it sufficiently quickly and neatly enough for his preference.
The liberal storyline is getting old. This time Harris suggested that Trump’s un-endorsement of Alabama Congressman Mo Brooks last week was phony -- that it was due to Brooks’ stated views concerning moving on from the 2020 election. It’s curious how badly Democrats and the left want to move ahead from the happenings of November, 2020 themselves. Why? Could it be they’re terrified that more people will become “woke” to the fact there was lots of evidence of funny business and foul play back then?
Anyone recognize the name Mark Zuckerberg and the newly minted term “Zuckerbucks”?
Or maybe liberals hate it because highlighting the 2020 election shines the spotlight on themselves? Talk about phonies! Democrats spent months hiding a presidential candidate from view -- senile Joe Biden -- who stumbled and mumbled and insulted people every other sentence and couldn’t seem to keep his nose out of women’s coiffures or his hands off of little kids’ shoulders.
Or what about the fact Democrats and the media willfully hid direct evidence of the Biden family’s corruption in order to maintain the ruse that “Uncle Joe” was a great guy who rode AMTRAK to work every day just so he could go home and take care of his grown boys at night? If Joe was a politician in Washington his whole life, how did he get so rich? How did his family members get rich? How did crack-smoking, hooker screwing son Hunter manage to land lucrative business deals with Ukrainians and Chinese interests?
And liberals say Donald Trump is phony just because he pulls one of his endorsements? Sheesh.
After reading Harris’s latest liberal attempt to explain the Donald Trump phenomenon, I felt like posing a theory of my own: “Why liberals don’t understand why conservatives are drawn to Donald Trump -- and never will.” Another question I have for Harris, which I won’t contain within quotes, is, why do liberal writers keep addressing Donald Trump? What’s their obsession with him? Why are they always trying to explain him yet never get it right? It’s obvious that they hate him, and they’ve each taken their turns over the past seven years ripping into the lifelong real estate developer and tabloid TV star. They’ve argued, over and over and over again, that Trump isn’t relevant in today’s Republican party, can’t possibly win the hearts of the American people, and could never be elected.
They’ve whistled why the GOP burned. Or so they thought. How many times in the lead-up to 2016 did gleeful Democrats predict that Trump was destroying the opposition party, not by actually dismantling the voter core of the faction but by simple statements, facial expressions, body language, social media posts or… because he wasn’t like Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell?
In essence, journos like Harris suddenly morphed into defenders of the Republican establishment status quo. How they longed for the days when the gentlemanly (wimp factor?) George H.W. Bush, or the easily bullied George W. Bush, or the curmudgeonly but harmless war veterans Bob Dole and John McCain, or the plastic and substance-less flip flopper with a nice hairdo Mitt Romney, were once again elevated to the top of the GOP presidential ticket by the simpleton Republican voters.
Heck, they deduced GOP voters were so religious, backwards, gun-toting and abortion disproving that they would choose the un-electable practically every time just to save face. The second-place finisher in the previous Republican nominating cycle was a shoe-in to win the next contest because dutiful conservatives wouldn’t dare deprive the guy of his chance. Men like war hero John McCain waited eight long years for his moment in the spotlight.
Liberals loved the fact that the establishment always won, too. Remember how rich bad guy Caledon Hockley (in the epic 1997 saga Titanic) looked contemptuously at poor good guy Jack Dawson and said, “I always win, Jack, one way or another”? That’s exactly how the left envisioned the stodgy blueblood Republican establishment. They loved how the party poohbahs always stepped on the little guy, the upstarts, the challengers, the Tea Party congressmen, the members of the Freedom Caucus or the leaders of the various conservative organizations who demanded that the GOP actually stand for something.
Liberals got it all wrong. And they’re way off base on Trump, too.
For the most part, Trump, in his endorsements, is looking for the types of candidates that the establishment would only consider if they’re the sole choice in a primary race.
Trump hasn’t lost his touch with endorsements, and his retraction of his backing of Mo Brooks was not “phony” or an attempt to disguise his withering power within the GOP. I think it had everything to do with Trump’s bad experience in Alabama during 2017’s special election, the one where the grassroots nominated controversial conservative Judge Roy Moore in defiance of the elites’ say-so.
Recall how the jilted Mitch McConnell refused to support Moore even if it meant a Democrat would win the seat and vastly reduce the Republicans’ power in the upper chamber. Also remember that the Democrats launched a smear campaign at Moore, claiming there were a number of incidents decades before (and therefore unprovable) where Moore exhibited a preference for much younger women. Moore denied it. It smelled fishy. Democrat Doug Jones won the election despite Trump’s help for the Republican.
Chock it up to another case where the establishment didn’t get their way so they took their ball and went home. “I always get my way, Jack, one way or another.” Trump acts as a counterweight to the crybabies. He’s not phony -- they are.
That being said, Trump should be extremely careful with his endorsements, for if one goes off track, the media jumps on it as though he no longer has the “power” that he once possessed, and he’s finished as a kingmaker too. I don’t believe this is true, though if the endorsement losses mount, it could certainly start to look that way.
People don’t pay any attention to endorsements unless they come from someone like Donald Trump, and even then, they’re of somewhat limited value. Perhaps Trump should try highlighting the candidates he doesn’t want a little more forcefully -- like Liz Cheney -- and his notice will bring scrutiny to the race. Either way, it’s doubtful Trump has lost his grip on the GOP.
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