Before I start speculating on whether Republicans really are moving on from Donald Trump, let’s get this out of the way:
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve written some variation of this, only for him to re-emerge like the cat in The Cat Came Back. And yet, the vibe feels very different in late 2022 than it did even in early 2021, when Trump survived the aftermath of the Beer Belly Putsch.
Park MacDonald at UnHerd agrees, in a column with the fate-tempting title “This is the end of Trump”:
It is a dangerous business to predict the political demise of Trump, who has been making pundits look stupid since he stepped onto the national stage. Few took him seriously as a candidate when he first declared in 2015, few believed he could defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016, and few believed he could come within a few tens of thousands of votes of re-election in 2020. But this time is different. Trump really is done.
[…]
Once Trump was the nominee and, later, the president, the most powerful force in American politics, negative partisanship, was there to do the heavy lifting. For most Right-leaning Americans, you could always tell yourself something along these lines: “Sure, Trump is a loose cannon with a complicated relationship to the truth. But I like his policies, the economy is doing great, the media is biased against him and exaggerates his flaws, and in any case, better him than a Democrat.”
Trump’s talent for polarising the entire political field made it easy for him to shore up Republican support. Whatever he did, good or bad, one could be sure that at least one prominent Democrat (and probably more than one) would respond with something so outrageous to the sensibilities of Republican voters that they would feel they had no choice but to support their man.
Then, 2020 changed all that. There was, of course, the loss itself, the refusal to concede, and the debacle of January 6, although the latter meant more to voters who were already inclined to dislike him. The bigger problem for Trump was simply that he was no longer president. No more White House press briefings, no more Twitter account, and no more 24/7 Trump news cycle, despite the best efforts of CNN and the January 6 committee. Trump was, of course, still the most famous Republican in the country, and still beloved by most of the base — for a time. But for a man whose singular political genius was his ability to command attention and turn it to his advantage, being one option among many for 2024 — not to mention one with eight years of political baggage in a country where voters are notoriously fickle — was always going to be an uphill battle.
It took the midterms and their aftermath, however, to deliver the death blow. Everyone in the GOP knew that Trump had backed a number of bad candidates in winnable races, but in the last few months before the election, most believed the hype about an incoming red wave (I did too). But the red wave was fake news, and Trump candidates sank the GOP ticket in major swing states such as Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona. Trump responded by lashing out against DeSantis, one of the few Republicans to make an impressive showing in an otherwise disastrous year. In 2016, he had ridiculed candidates such as Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, and it had worked because voters believed in their hearts that they really were low-energy losers. Now Trump was the loser attempting to bully the winner, and the jokes weren’t funny anymore.
The month and a half since the midterms has been one long, rolling disaster for Trump. Against the wishes of his advisors, he announced his reelection bid barely a week after the electoral bloodbath, earning the endorsement of only one senator. Rupert Murdoch abandoned him. His company was found guilty of criminal tax evasion in Manhattan. He hosted Kanye West and the white nationalist Nick Fuentes in Mar a Lago; following a massive backlash, his camp was forced to claim that he had been tricked by the rapper’s entourage, only for Kanye to go on Alex Jones a few days later and sing the praises of Hitler. After the release of the “Twitter Files” — internal documents relating to the company’s decision to ban Trump after the Capitol Riot — Trump seemingly called for the suspension of the Constitution. By the time he announced the NFTs, it was hard not to wonder if even he had given up hope.
The big NFT scam announcement seems to be going over poorly even among ride-or-die MAGA acolytes:
With Trump out of office and barely leaving his bedroom, and a viable contender with strong owning-teh-libs power waiting in the wings, I find myself remembering that Charlie Brown did indeed end up kicking the football.
Well, sort of:
I’m old enough to remember a time when Elon Musk purported to be a free speech absolutist, and #resistance Twitter waved away concerns about overly aggressive suspensions and bans by pointing out that it’s a private platform whose owners are not obligated to allow everyone a voice if it violates their policies.
Because it was, like, six weeks ago.
Now, Musk is nuking critical accounts left and right, and the “their platform, their rules” crowd is shrieking about censorship:
Twitter on Thursday evening suddenly suspended several high-profile journalists who cover the platform and Elon Musk, one of the richest people in the world, who acquired the company just a few months ago.
Hours after the suspensions took hold, Musk faced off with one of the journalists he suspended in a Twitter Space audio discussion before an audience of more than 30,000 listeners. The suspended journalist, along with several others, found a backdoor way onto the platform through the website's audio function.
“You doxx, you get suspended. End of story. That's it,” Musk said, explaining his latest policy to the group, before he left minutes after having joined the discussion.
Musk was referring to Twitter's latest rule change about accounts that track private jets, including one owned by Musk himself, which was put in place Wednesday.
The accounts of Ryan Mac of The New York Times, Donie O'Sullivan of CNN, Drew Harwell of The Washington Post, Matt Binder of Mashable, Micah Lee of The Intercept, Steve Herman of Voice of America and independent journalists Aaron Rupar, Keith Olbermann and Tony Webster had all been suspended as of Thursday evening.
The Twitter account for Mastodon, a platform billed as a Twitter alternative, was also suspended early Thursday evening. Twitter accounts operated by NBC News journalists were unable to tweet any links to Mastodon pages. Mastodon was, however, trending on Twitter.
I am most certainly not a fan of some of the people who got suspended, like Rupar and especially Keith Olbermann, whose unbroken streak of getting acrimoniously expelled from media platforms is like the Wayne Gretzky assists record of journalism.
But sometimes you have to suck it up and stand up for the rights of people you dislike and disagree with. I am pleasantly surprised to see some right-wingers - and even Fox and Friends! - doing just that.
Just because Musk doesn’t live up to his own stated principles about freedom of expression doesn’t mean these principles are bad. It just means that if we don’t stand up for them, we can’t trust that anyone else will.
How Russia expected to fight the air war over Ukraine:
How Russia is actually fighting the air war over Ukraine:
Mark Felton has a video about the Russian military converting ancient Antonov An-2 biplanes into heavily armed impromptu drones to smoke out Ukrainian air defences:
The strategy (originally used by Azerbaijan against Armenia a couple of years ago) actually kind of makes sense when you learn about how it works. But this can’t be what Putin and his war planners had in mind this time last year.
Trump's laughing at everyone who laughed at him yesterday. All the way to the bank.
There were 45,000 NFTs in the "collection."
He sold out all 45,000 by this morning, less than 24 hours after the Major Announcement.