Low Expectations and Dark Hopes for the New Year

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The arrival of a new year always brings a heightened level of giddiness, accelerated by blind hope and a largely fact-free belief that things will be better this time around. It’s part of the stories we tell ourselves to get out of bed in the morning and … go out and do exactly the same things we’ve done every previous year.

For Catholics it’s a bit like the “confessional effect” where we go in and tell the priest all the miserable things we’ve done, said or thought, get exonerated and set free in the wild to start all over again.

That said, on this the third day of the new year I’m enjoying my coffee and watching the D.C. press horde scurrying after the Capitol’s new power brokers … Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene and, um, Kevin McCarthy. They are the center of attention. Because they are now, for the moment at least, the critical characters in the present (and future) Congressional drama. Put another way good friends, the United States really is reduced to caring what Lauren Boebert has to say about … anything.

No one knows how this election for Speaker of the House will play out, but what is abundantly clear is that the delusional mass psychosis that is Trumpism has not yet been expelled from the Republican party. It’s at least one more cycle of defeat and chaos from exhaustion.

The great natural cycle of rebirth has delivered the same mutant baby. For this moment and likely for the next two years, MAGA narcissism and all the dysfunction and corruption that it engenders will have it’s hands around the throat of the House of Representatives.

But — and here comes the “hope” part — all this chaos points to where 2023 could likely take the Grand Old Party.

For all the accusations people of my ilk hurl at conservatives for their nihilism, their willingness to torch the whole damn ranch in pursuit of some undefined “total victory”, a nihilistic denouement is clearly where “the crazies” are going in this McCarthy/Speaker fiasco.

Related and more significant in the realm of gross nihilism, their intellectual leader, the Orange Former Guy, holed up in Mar a Lago has been hinting broadly that if professional Republicans don’t stop blaming him for the election disaster of last November and being nicer to him, he’ll run as an independent in 2024.

I see a lot of Trumpian logic in that.

Being notoriously lazy and undisciplined, Trump has to regard a campaign free of all the bureaucratic exertions, rules and formalities of a party nomination as immensely appealing. Money wouldn’t be a problem. Hell, he grifted a quarter of a billion off his MAGA congregation for a bogus legal defense fund. If he confined himself to occasional airport rallies, daily Truth Social videos, and all the free airtime Newsmax and Mike Lindell TV will feed to his forever fervent, deeply retrograde “base” he’d easily match the return all that icky, sweaty, expensive hand-shaking people like Mike Pence would have to do to get 1/100 the attention.

Of course Trump couldn’t win election to the White House. But his (currently) assured support from even 20% of Republican voters would seriously confound the strategies of other candidates, to the point they, like McCarthy with his “crazies”, would have to offer him undigestible, self-defeating concessions to preclude him from attacking them. He’d “win” by maki ng them lose. In other words, a narcissistic nihilist’s fever dream.

So, my apologies for the semi-bummer here so early in this new year. But irrational exuberance just ain’t my thing.

12 thoughts on “Low Expectations and Dark Hopes for the New Year”

  1. I fully expect the Giant Talking Yam to go full scorched earth on the GOP, because who better to blame for 2020 and 2022? And as he goes at it, the crazies will try harder and harder to get in his good books. Someone asked on TV “What could Kevin McCarthy do to get those 5 votes for Speaker?” and I told my husband, “Give Trump head live on national TV.” Of course, after he did that, Trump would despise him even more and tell the crazies, “Don’t vote for that c***sucker.” And they won’t.

    • This reminds me of the first episode of “Black Mirror”, where the terrorist demands the priome minister canoodle with a pig on live TV … something I believe Kevin McCarthy would be willing to do.

  2. I, for one, am a firm believer in keeping Trump strong. The sooner he loses power, the sooner all the Republicans will try to make us forget that they ever loved him.

    So now is the time for the republican party to go the way of the Whigs and the Federalists. That is, it’s time for the republican party to die, and for a new conservative party with a new name to start standing for things that used to be “republican values.” Like “honest Fiscal Conservatism” and “Freedom of Choice.”

    Call me PollyLarry. But I think we are watching the Party of Lies begin to eat itself alive. And when If this party completely implodes — and they lose the presidential election and both houses in 2024, the non-republicans will pass a voting rights bill. And we may finally get the momentum we need to prove that their ideas don’t work anymore.

    PS – Brian, I pretty much laugh reading every column, but not always on the opening line. 🙂

    • I’ve come to think Trump has finally become an asset to Democrats. As Rick Wilson said long ago, “Everything Trump touches dies”, and that is verifiably true. The Great Orange Albatross’s fingerprints on pretty much any candidate for a statewide office pretty much guarantees a Democratic victory. I doubt I’d ever go so far as to send him money, but a strategy of tacit encouragement might serve the “Sanity Caucus” quite well over the next two years.

  3. Could Trump as a third-party candidate draw enough votes in the general election to split the 47% of Americans who voted against Biden in 2020 and allow Biden to win a plurality in 2024? Seems very possible.

    However, one question I have is whether Trump could get himself on all the state general election ballots, without the Republican Party infrastructure doing that essential groundwork for him. Trump could raise enough money to run a race, but would he and his new third party have enough organizational patience and disclipline to meet a variety of complex, state-specific filing requirements and deadlines?

    • Excellent point, but he might still be able to do significant damage as a write in candidate

    • That was on my mind when I wrote that post. Based on what I read from Maggie Haberman and the like, Trump’s current “team” is a fresh variation on the nitwits and scam artists that populated his White House. Do they have the capacity to get him on the ballot in 50 states? Very good question. But assumimg he waits until after the GOP’s debate and primary season to decide he has the extraordinary benefit of 100% name recognition and respect for “all he did” in his four years in D.C. … according to your average MAGA-naut. We’ve heard of a Rose Garden campaign. Trump could run a Mar a Lago sand trap campaign, rarely if ever leaving Florida but still talk relentlessly to his sad sack faithful.

  4. I, for one, thoroughly enjoyed today. The only thing that would have made it better would have been photos on the front page of Kevin McCarthy thanking George Santos for his support….

    • If McCarthy were a farm animal he’d have been euthanized by now. What sort of an idiot puts himself through this? It’s a situation made worse by the fact that Congress literally has nothing else to do until this clus terf**k is concluded. But until then, I’m putting more buttah on the popcorn.

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