WHITHERING TRUMPS
November 15, 2022 -Durt Fibo
Final thoughts: In 2020, Joe Biden won the election with 81.3 million votes (51.3%) to Trump’s 74.2 million (46.8%). In the 2022 midterms, Donald Trump endorsed over 330 candidates (according to the New York Times), for which his super PAC, MAGA Inc., spent more than $16 million on television advertising in the final month in six states –per the tracking firm AdImpact –which came to around 9% of all Republican spending on the same races during that period. By the evening of the November 9th, Trump was grumbling that, overall, Election Day was “somewhat disappointing,” then stood on his hindquarters and boasted that his personally endorsed candidates had “219 WINS.” As a number of journalists had pointed out a while back, Trump’s record of “winners” was born favored by promoting unopposed House incumbents in safe seats.
But the Republican losses relative to what they fully expected to gain led to the next scene of over 70 million Republicans running through the house with their hair afire. By November 10, lifelong sorority skank and early Trump cheerleader Ann Coulter took to Brietbart News to pronounce the midterms as “a humiliating defeat for Trump.” Coulter demonstrated how the candidates most associated with him had most ‘underperformed.’
The passionately pro-Trump New York Post ran a cover characterizing Trump as a tumbling Humpty Dumpty. The same paper christened him “Toxic Trump.” Now, more paid politicians are openly accusing him of having sabotaged the elections.
Donald Trump went from the man most desired ejected from New York in 2015 to presumed Republican presidential candidate just under a year later. His decision to declare was weighed against the future success of his television show; he lived for celebrity, money and incontrovertible power, and, at the time, he bet that he could get more of all that in the White House. Backroom negotiations continued, but NBC actually told him “You’re fired!” once Trump began riffing on Mexican immigrants and whatever else shot out of his mouth. NBC canceled both The Apprentice and the Miss USA Pageant.
From the inexplicable elevation of Trump to candidate, then President, then pharaoh, and now pariah, the Republican Party has served as his personal production crew for an even more humiliating show than any of Trump’s previous Grand Guignols. But political parties change when pressed, for all the mercenary reasons one can imagine. Trump himself has belonged to the Democrats, the Reform Party, Independents, and three entirely distinct times the Republicans.
Parties change, parties swell, they shrivel, they warp, parties split. US history is replete with shavings and fresh attempts, including the Know-Nothings, the Progressive Party, the Bull Moose Party, the Dixiecrats, the People’s Party, and the American Independent Party, among others. Even before the formal divisions in the 1820s, “Federalists” and “Democratic Republicans” aligned themselves with Washington/Adams, or Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson’s group became the Republicans and the remainders became National Republicans. By 1828 the Democratic party was created from a coalition supporting the presidency of Andrew Jackson. They were suddenly opposed by the Whigs, and the so-called Anti-Masons. The Whigs withered and transmuted into the Republican party; the Democratic Party split into the anti-slavery Northern Democrats and left the pro-slavery platform to the Southern Democrats.
Throughout the hours of the January 6 Beer Belly Putsch, Trump was reportedly riveted to his television watching mayhem sprawling and some 2,000 rioters breaching the Capitol Building, but —per the New York Magazine– was very displeased with the appearance of the rioters, and complained that his supporters looked “low class”. HIS supporters. He already knew what sorts they were because he’d been face-to-face with them during his “Save America” rally speech. In fact his introductory harangue was: “Well, thank you very much. This is incredible. Media will not show the magnitude of this crowd. Even I, when I turned on today, I looked, and I saw thousands of people here. But you don’t see hundreds of thousands of people behind you because they don’t want to show that. We have hundreds of thousands of people here and I just want them to be recognized by the fake news media. Turn your cameras please and show what’s really happening out here because these people are not going to take it any longer. They’re not going to take it any longer. Go ahead. Turn your cameras, please. Would you show? They came from all over the world, actually, but they came from all over our country.” Disregarding his inaccuracies (eg, “from all over the world”) and his people’s sartorial repellance, the crowd did have numerous Ivy League leaders, such as Stewart Rhodes, bowler-hatted political ‘tricksters’, Secret Service men in black, some congressman running like Forrest Gump, and drunken lawyers slurping disbarment.
From the 2015 golden stairs announcement (a descent) to Jan 6, 2021, the metallic filings of misfits, millionaires, billionaires and theocrats were magnetically formed into a mace that was swung down upon the feeble skull of US democracy. Since then, for the most part, politicians, civic authorities and the general population accepted this mace as “the base” of the Republican Party, and despite some courtroom deflections the weapon was rumored to have grown large enough to crush everyone in its way or innocently standing nearby.
Now the major donors have suddenly taken to avoiding Trump. Curtains were drawn at the Perlmutters; oiling Joe Manchin swept the Warrens away; and beastly dead was Adelson. But he could perhaps go demand return favors from Leora Levy, in the Nutmeg State. Not to worry; he might be stupid, but Trump is a street-level hustler by nature. He’s mulling offering double or nothing.
To continue its destructiveness and win the 2024 presidential election, the Republican Party is likewise calculating the threat of the base. Two months ago Gallup polls claimed that 28% of the US ‘identified as’ Republicans, with an additional 14% classified as ‘Republican-leaning independents’. When queried specifically about the illegitimacy of Biden’s presidential win, the total number dropped to roughly 19%. Republicans and their lean-tos, pressed further by ABC News and the Washington Post about whether violence against the current government was justifiable, ultimately settled down around the 9 to 13% level. All the foregoing was reckoned before this midterm election.
So what remains of Trump’s version of the Republican Party? Far fewer mega-donors, roughly the same non-white voters, and perhaps an unchanged amount of that perfumed euphemism “non-college educated” white voters. The Pew Research Center maintains that white voters without a college degree were “critical to Trump’s victory in 2016, when he won the group by 64% to 28%.” In 2020, Biden roughly maintained Democrats’ 2018 share among the group, as did Trump (who actually lost a percentage point in 2020). And there is the immovable sun around which it all hitherto revolved –Donald Trump’s necessary conditions for life: adulation, money and zero civilized parameters. If these break out of orbit, they could, in the ripe old American tradition, split off to form a new political party, which would act as a spoiler and pull votes very specifically from the Republicans.