What to do when you spend millions of your own money, get less than 20% of the votes, and get creamed by a guy whose name didn’t even appear on the ballot?
Declare that you won and the actual winner is hopelessly weak!
“We just earned 20% tonight and no one knew who we were!”
Enough said. The absurdity of it all speaks for itself.
It is hard for me to find a more plausible theory of Phillips’ candidacy than ego. He’s torched his future political prospects unless he wants to wade into the GOP/MAGA world and he’s done nothing except make himself an object of curiosity and ridicule.
I’ve met the Congressman maybe five times in my life – maybe enough times that he sorta recognize me – and would say this to his face: Stop. The only people benefitting are the vendors who will take your money for as long as you’re willing to pay and even they are laughing at you as they order another Buffalo Trace on the rocks with your money.
Good take and good advice. I respected him before this. This feels very selfish, delusional, and performative.
WaPo’s Dana Millbank has a good take on 1) Trump’s mental state and 2) Phillips’ campaign including quotes from an event he attended where the Congressman sounded more than a little MAGA to me:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/01/23/new-hampshire-primary-2024-scene-trump-phillips-haley/
Especially love this part from Milbank:
“…the only principle clearly in evidence during the fish-restaurant talk was self-reverence. It takes an impressive level of narcissism to proclaim oneself to be the only person with integrity, while assuming that his colleagues — all of them — are acting in bad faith.
And now Trump himself is cheering the Democrat on. Maybe Phillips should pause his vanity campaign long enough to ask himself why.”
A.Effing.Men to that. Self-absorbed, but not at all self-aware. I respected him in the past. (Cliché alert) That ship has sailed.
If we didn’t allow clichés, we’d have might blank pages here! No one is more guilty than me.
No worries! (bwahahahaha– done now!)