Donald Trump — The Great Unifyer. Can You Imagine That?
All of a sudden, the 45th President of the United States seems to have disappeared. In May, his website got 27 million hits; in July he had 3.6 million hits. That’s only a decline in traffic of somewhere around 90 percent.
Meanwhile, on Saturday, August 31st, Trump is supposed to appear at a rally on a farm in Cullman, Alabama, which is the last day in the month when he was allegedly going to be reinstated as President. His new Vice President may be Mike Lindell, who sells those pillows online, and he’s also, of course, going to be protected by a group from QAnon.
You are reading this and saying to yourself no, this can’t actually be happening. A former President of the United States of America can’t be making such a big jerk out of himself.
But let’s remember whom we are dealing with. We’re dealing with someone who has absolutely no concern about acting like a jerk, as long as he makes the news.
On the other hand, now that the GOP is beginning to smell blood because of a video feed yesterday that showed a bunch of Afghans clinging to the side of a C-5A as it rolled down the runway, some of the more enlightened followers of Trump are hoping that maybe, just maybe they can make the unrequited President over into something he’s never been.
And what will this new Trump be? The great unifier who will restore all the good feelings we had before Biden stole the election and screwed everything up.
Remember how happy we were before the election last year? Remember how unified and comfortable we were with one another — White, Black, Asian, Hispanic — before the Democrats started all that critical race theory nonsense which is designed only to sow discord and hate?
Most of all, remember how nobody was being forced to wear a mask or get a needle stuck in their arm just because some quack doctor like Anthony Fauci was put in charge of the response to Covid-19?
The more the GOP tries to promote a narrative which politicizes how we deal with the virus, and the more the GOP tries to wrap itself in a protective coloration which denies mandating any public health response to Covid-19, the more the GOP will find itself increasingly out of step with what a majority of Americans now believe.
The last time Gallup ran a survey about vaccination reluctance, the results show that three-quarters of all adults are either vaccinated or plan to get vaccinated against the virus. And while roughly one out of five adults appear to be unwilling to get intravenous protection no matter what the rest of us say or do, the bottom line is that most Americans simply don’t buy the idea that a vaccination mandate is a bad thing.
In another three weeks, more or less, the 2022 election cycle kicks off in earnest. And for all the talk about how the GOP has become the DTP, (as in Donald Trump Party) the bottom line is that he lost the 2020 popular vote by more than twice as many votes as he lost the 2016 popular vote.
So, you can call yourself the Party leader all you want, and you can hold as many rallies on someone’s farm as you want, but if you can’t deliver votes, that’s the end of that. Remember what happened when Trump went down to Georgia to deliver two Senate seats?
Which is why I found a long article about Lindsay Graham in last week’s (failing) New York Times an interesting read because it points out that Graham has evidently been counseling Trump to ‘take it down a notch’ in order to remain at the front of the pack.
But the only thing that ever gets Trump noticed is when he ratchets it up a notch or two notches or three. The idea that Trump could ‘bring us back together’ or ask everyone to ‘love everyone else’ is about as realistic a scenario as believing that the Taliban will let women walk around Kabul in shorts or tight skirts.
As far as I’m concerned, the more Trump continues to whine about the ‘stolen’ election, the more he says that the January 6th riot was the handiwork of ANTIFA, the more he insists that BLM will become a law-enforcement agency when we defund the police, the more we have a chance to maintain the Democratic Congressional majority in 2022 and re-elect the Biden- Harris team in 2024.
