The Daily Escape:
“A leader without followers is simply a guy taking a walk.” – John Boehner
Trump will lose in November and he will lose in January when the Electoral College has its say. Wrongo hasn’t concluded this via his mad polling skills, but Trump has jumped the shark. He needs to exceed 46.5% of the national vote to get near an Electoral College win. But even his most dedicated followers now routinely are walking out of his rallies, so he can forget about 47%.
“Trump will never concede defeat, no matter how thorough his loss. Yet the more decisively Vice President Kamala Harris wins the popular vote and electoral college the less political oxygen he’ll have to reprise his 2020 antics; and, importantly, the faster Republicans can begin building a post-Trump party.”
He won’t go quietly, he may go violently, but he’s going. So the question becomes who or what replaces Trump as head of the MAGA movement? Let me make the answer clear: JD Vance comes next.
Why? He’s quick witted, articulate, greedy for power, and completely shameless. Hypocrisy won’t stick since he has endless bullshit to spin without blinking his eyeliner. All this makes him incredibly appealing to MAGAts. Vance is far more dangerous than Trump because he is exactly what the Silicon Valley tech bro Nazis and the extreme white Christian nationalists want.
Wrongo and Ms. Right were persuaded by Liberal friends to read Vance’s 2016 memoir. The pitch was that Vance explained why White Trump voters from southeastern Ohio and West Virginia wouldn’t vote for Hillary, or lean progressive in their politics.
The book is simply Vance pushing propaganda that fits the policy preferences of leading Republican policy groups. Vance’s stereotypes were shark bait for conservative policymakers who feed the mythology that the undeserving poor make bad choices and are personally to blame for their own poverty. So why waste taxpayer money on programs to help lift people out of poverty? After all, Vance got out of hillbilly Ohio without them.
It is depressing that liberals didn’t notice that Vance places so much blame on welfare rather than, on say, neoliberalism economics and corporatism. Those are the ideologies that moved jobs offshore, that got their companies leveraged, and later bankrupted while the jobs were never to come back.
Vance’s buddies are among the people who precipitated the economic holocaust in Middle America. He’s worked for money men Peter Thiel, Ted Leonsis, and Steve Case. In 2016, the gods of greed and hate had given him a mission.
So the question among Republicans is how best to push Trump’s exit to Mar-a-Lagos 19th Hole. That will be unquestionably assisted by Trump’s legal woes. If Harris is president, all of the cases go forward, and several result in convictions, accelerating Trump’s exit from the stage.
And who’s the leader in the club house? Sadly, the GOP is a Party driven by its base voters. That means the demands of the base will, at least for the foreseeable future, drive the leadership of the Party. That means the person who is shameless enough to feed them racist lies, someone shameless enough to admit they’re lies on CNN on Sunday. Ladies and gentlemen I give you JD Vance!
From CNN:
“Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance on Sunday defended false claims about Haitian immigrants eating the pets of residents in Springfield, Ohio in an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union.”
To support his claims, Vance pointed to what he said are firsthand accounts from constituents who have told him this is happening, though he didn’t provide evidence:
“The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,”
CNN’s Dana Bash replied, “You just said that this is a story that you created.”
JD Vance clearly isn’t ready for prime time, but as the leader of the ever-dwindling MAGA spud of the 2024’s GOP, he’ll do. Try to remember that this is a guy who went to Yale. Who’s gotten by on his resume rather than much of his actual achievements.
In the pantheon of shitty GOP politicians reflect on this:
“Dems: I can’t imagine a worse politician than Richard Nixon.
Ronald Reagan: Hold my beer.
Dems: I can’t imagine a worse politician than Ronald Reagan.
Newt Gingrich: Hold my beer.
Dems: I can’t imagine a worse politician than Newt Gingrich.
George W Bush: Hold my beer.
Dems: I can’t imagine a worse politician than George W Bush.
Sarah Palin: Hold my beer.
Dems: I can’t imagine a worse politician than Sarah Palin.
Donald Trump: Hold my beer.
Dems: I can’t imagine a worse politician than Donald Trump.
JD Vance: Hold my beer.
Dems today: I can’t imagine a worse politician than JD Vance.”
Ask Vance: Whose suffering does your lie draw attention to? The two plausible answers are “our country’s poor refugee population”, or “American pet owners, somehow.”
What a shameless, stupid, dangerous shit pile of a human.
The true successor to the GOP leadership will turn out to be yet another scary Ivy scholar (Harvard) with service in the US military, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK). Unlike Vance, Cotton is ready for political prime time.
For the next few years, we will watch these two scary Republicans duke it out to see if either is the flavor for the MAGA base. We will also watch to see whether the GOP can once again become a Party led by its senior leadership or simply by its rabble.
OK, that’s Wrongo’s opus for this week. Let’s leave you to ponder a piece of soothing music to start the week. Here is “Solveig’s Song” from Edvard Greig’s “Peer Gynt Suite Op 2 No 55” played by the by Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra:
To some extent, the redneck culture that raised JD Vance are a bit different. Colin Woodards book, American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, describes America as consisting of a series of groups from those from the northern part of Mexico to Canadians. And the rednecks come off as largely immune to taking steps to improve their communities.
PS, as a husband of a wife who has been treated for cancer for 2 plus years, I hope you can maintain your life. We have not been able to here.
Terry, I have inoperable pancreatic cancer. There’s no question that returning to our former lives has become an impossibility. Cancer now informs every decision we make 7×24, and we’re still accommodating to what the future may hold, but I’m finding hope and gratitude in the many small things that it takes to get me through each day.
Brilliant!
Pat: Get up! John’s posting is BRILLIANT!
David: Yes, dear, right away.
….
Pat: So? What do you think?
David: Yea, really good.
Pat: No, brilliant!
David: Ok, brilliant.
Brilliant, or does she simply like the answer that Harris wins?
I mean BRILLIANT!!!
” … the person who is shameless enough to feed them racist lies …”
The root problem is that these people are hungry for those lies. They believe what makes them feel good, even if deep down they know them to be lies. People like Trump and Vance opportunistically tap into and stoke that, and they always exist.