I believe I have previously mentioned my fanboy enthusiasm for the work of Mark Leibovich, formerly of The New York Times Magazine and now, like just about every other four star journalist/writer, at The Atlantic. Leibovich’s classic book is “This Town” a truly “inside” view of the D.C. cocktail party/power culture, where politicians, lobbyists and big name journos regularly-to-constantly schmooze, clink glasses and incestuously buff up each other’s bona fides. It was as hilarious as it was dismaying.
His most recent, “Thank You for Your Servitude”, released last fall, was all about the truly craven GOP toadies — can you say Lindsey Graham fast enough? — who have taken out triple mortgages on what little soul they ever had to defend Donald Trump on everything he’s ever said or done. Which means committing character suicide five times a day.
Anyway, Leibovich being Leibovich with his Times/Atlantic pedigree, gets all sorts of people who really should know better to talk to him. And almost all play laughable word games to lay out their imagined resolution for what we’ll call “the Trump problem.” A chaotic epoch that nearly all of them wish would end … like yesterday … no matter how much they defend him publicly.
What Leibovich leaves for his punchline conclusion is that there is actually a detectable consensus, though only a couple party pros dare say it out loud.
And that is … they wish (and hope) the guy just up and dies. Face first into a bucket of KFC wings. Whatever.
You laugh. But they’re serious. I ask you, what do you think mouldering stalactites like Mitch McConnell really think is their best way out of the constant Trump quagmire?
This all came to mind again the other day when a couple of us were talking about the last time the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates were set a year and a half or more before the election? How far back do you have to go in our lifetimes? Adlai Stevenson and Ike in ’56? In every other election cycle the presumptive tickets shifted significantly over the 18 to 24 month “home stretch.”
And yet … here we are in June of 2023, 16 months before the next election and the hardened assumption is that our choices will again be Trump and Joe Biden. One guy is 81 and while competent moves like a guy who is, well, 81. Opposite him is a guy, nigh onto morbidly obese and demonstrably erratic mentally, who has just turned 77 and is under more legal pressure than John Gotti, with indictments piling up faster than tickets on an overparked delivery van in lower Manhattan. (I have personal experience with that one.)
My point here is to warn against certainty in this situation and prepare contingencies.
Trump looks strong. He is making his usual boatload of money off the Mar-a-Lago indictment. (And again, what is in anyone’s mind who writes a $50 check to a guy who says he’s a billionaire?) His poll numbers vis a vis Ron DeSantis and the other GOP munchkins remain daunting. Sixty-plus percent of Republican voters say they believe he won the 2020 election. He looks invincible, and as we all know, could campaign all next year wearing an ankle bracelet. (Hell, he could sell replicas at his MAGA merch tables.)
But … it is very hard to imagine Trump bears up physically under the stresses that are compounding by the hour. And mentally … well, he’s Trump. But as some have pointed out, a big part of his appeal to his celebrity-obsessed base is that he’s “fun” or at least “entertaining”, two, um, virtues less evident with every droning, monotonous, whiny speech, like the buzz-killer he delivered in Bedminister after this week’s indictment.
Thankfully, his main competition over in the Pissed Off White Victim bubble is De Santis who has all the charm and entertainment appeal of a medieval executioner.
And Biden … well, face it. 81 is 81 and serious things regularly happen to 81 year-olds with the best health care money can provide. What happens with even a minor stroke? Or some other age-related infirmity? Should Biden be so incapictated he’s unable to run, try imagining the Democratic scramble — even this month, much less next summer or later, to produce another unifying candidate. Kamala Harris? Mmmm, I kinda doubt it. Mayor Pete? Gavin Newsom? Bernie?
Minus Trump, how do you assess a DeSantis match up against Biden? How many “swing voters” would reflexively gravitate back to the young, smarter, more disciplined, Trumpy-but-not-Trump Republican? Would his cynical, cro-magnon policies like that six-week abortion ban and all-the-guns-you-can-eat really deter critical suburban women?
I don’t know, but because I embrace the gloom, it’s stuff I think about.
Have a nice day.
Good one, Brian. I’ll never see Desantis again without thinking ‘medieval executioner’!
Anybody in the Republican candidate roster other than Mr. XXL Depends gives Biden a race. Even the crazy VC whose name I’m too lazy to Google in order to spell correctly.
If Fat Boy is the nominee – and I agree it looks to be his to lose – and Biden doesn’t stroke out then Biden wins 55-45, the modern equivalent of a Harding/Cox or Roosevelt/Landon blow out. Cheeto’s ceiling is set and the only thing he can do is lose altitude from there. From an Electoral College perspective, I start with the 2020 results map and add North Carolina so 319-219.
But your larger points stand: the most likely exit ramp for the Umber Jackhole is on a gurney with a ventilator and we’re one broken hip or mini-stroke away from election chaos that might – just might – be enough to let ex-Priesident Pusssygrabber back in the game. Particularly in a scenario where No Labels runs a centrist to peel votes away from the Dems from the middle and Green Party candidate Cornell West peels a few from the left.
If the Republicans give a shit about winning they ought to coalesce behind Tim Scott. They’ll lose the hard racist segment but they’ll more than make up for it with centrists and never-Trumpers who come home. He’ll also pick up a bunch of low-information voters (or whatever the PC term is these days for voters who don’t understand or care how profoundly the government affects their lives) who will assume – wrongly – he’s a moderate because he’s Black. Same arguments with slightly less traction apply to South Carolina’s other presidential candidate, Nikki Haley.
Well first I’d like to remind you that this Umber Jackhole XXL Depends Pussygrabber happens to have been — and think he still is — President of these Grand, Glorious and Exceptional United States of America. Therefore he is entitled to the same respect we accord every other Orange Pussygrabber the Electoral College has shoehorned into the White House. In other words, watch your tart tongue young man. That said, no less a political eminence than Mike Murphy, long time GOP op, Never Trumper and co-host of the consistently entertaining “Hacks on Tap” podcast (with David Axelrod) is a big Tim Scott fan. He likes the “positivity’ and the “sunny-ness” of the guy. But he also concedes that the MAGA crowd is going to be, shall we say, a bit hesitant to pull the lever for a black guy if Trump is out of the picture but DeSantis is still in. He also whispers the “bachelor” word, suggesting you know what. But hell, South Carolina is on baord with him and Lady Graham, so why worry about a black LGBTQ Republican in the Oval Office?
Ugghhh.
So what? Your hard heart isn’t going pitter-patter?
The one thing that makes my heart go pitter-patter is watching the continuing devotion of the entire GOP field and GOP party to the effort to enforce a complete ban on abortion, and the efforts to also restrict access to birth control.
One one level, this makes me feel that the Democrats could run Barney the dinosaur and win….