Everyone knows that fake news is one of the big stories of the 2010s. But what about fake politics?
In a sense, almost the entire GOP establishment is a fake organization. They pretend that Trump is their leader, publicly praising the man. But privately they view him as a corrupt leader that was deserving of impeachment. They won’t say this out loud, as they are afraid of their own voters.
The NYT has a good piece on how GOP leaders like McCarthy and McConnell initially wanted to get rid of Trump after January 6, but caved when it became clear that GOP voters objected. (And of course McCarthy lied about it.) Some of the details did surprise me:
During the same Jan. 10 conversation when he said he would call on Mr. Trump to resign, Mr. McCarthy told other G.O.P. leaders he wished the big tech companies would strip some Republican lawmakers of their social media accounts, as Twitter and Facebook had done with Mr. Trump. Members such as Lauren Boebert of Colorado had done so much to stoke paranoia about the 2020 election and made offensive comments online about the Capitol attack.
“We can’t put up with that,” Mr. McCarthy said, adding, “Can’t they take their Twitter accounts away, too?”
Perhaps McCarthy can convince Elon Musk to take away their accounts.
JD Vance has been extremely critical of Trump, basically saying the same sort of things that I say in my blog. So why did Trump recently endorse Vance in the Ohio senate race? Doesn’t Trump know that Vance privately despises him, and only recently changed his tune to win votes? Of course Trump knows that; he’s ignorant but he’s no fool. Vance’s phoniness actually makes Trump even more likely to support him. Trump’s loves seeing all these GOP figures kiss his feet, and its even more enjoyable when he knows that are abasing themselves in doing so. Recall the case in Texas with Bush’s son, or the case of Mitt Romney being interviewed for Secretary of State. Thump loves publicly humiliating people; it’s a way of exercising his power.
The day after the 2020 presidential election, I said that the result was actually bad news. Instead of 8 years of Trump we’d have 12 years of the man. I was mocked in the comment section, particularly in January 2021 when the election markets showed his odds of winning falling below 5%. Who’s laughing now?
And don’t count on terms limits holding. The Constitution does not forbid Donald Jr. from running in 2028 and then effectively turning the job over to his daddy.
Once you become a banana republic, legal constraints are meaningless. Once the ethical norms are gone, government officials will do whatever they wish and no one will stop them.
PS. How many of you made 7-fold returns on Trump contracts based on my post-election advice?