Republicans, blink if you're being held against your will
The GOP's transition to full-fledged *cult* is complete.
Never mind Churchill, Governor, you’re not even a Liz Truss.
DeSantis suspending a Presidential campaign that started badly and got worse from there? Not surprising.
Trump cruising to an almost certain victory in the 2024 Republican Presidential nomination race? Not surprising.
Donald Trump having a puncher’s chance1 at winning a second non-consecutive term in office? Sadly, even that’s not surprising.
No, this is the part that should not surprise me anymore, and yet I still have trouble wrapping my head around it:
“It’s clear to me that a majority of Republican primary voters want to give Donald Trump another chance,” he said, adding: “He has my endorsement because we can’t go back to the old Republican guard of yesteryear, a repackaged form of warmed-over corporatism that Nikki Haley represents.”
The irony, of course, is that Haley will almost certainly endorse the man whose current campaign strategy is to mock her birth name.2 Just as he denounced DeSantis as “Ron DeSanctimonious,” which I didn’t consider among his most inspired schoolyard insults, but it got the job done.
At least he didn’t accuse DeSantis’ father of carrying out the Kennedy assassination, as he did for his main opponent in 2016. Who responded by pointedly refusing to endorse Trump at the Republican national convention, to a chorus of boos. And then promptly fell into line.
If we survive all of this, there will be studies and articles and books written about how the Republican Party transitioned from political party to “new religious movement,” also known as a cult.
Politics has become a substitute religion for many Americans, and I don’t think that’s exclusively a right-wing phenomenon. I’ve long said extreme-left “social justice” politics has every characteristic of a religion except the possibility of salvation.
But extremist left-wing movements have at most a toehold in America’s main center-left party, and many of them are openly hostile to the Democrats.3 By contrast, what was once the country’s main center-right party has been completely absorbed by the MAGA cult.
It’s kind of like Scientology, except that more high-ranking Scientologists than Republicans have defected.
And if, like me, you’ve gone down many an online rabbit hole reading about the Church of Scientology, you know they don’t take it in stride when former officials or members leave. They will harass you, sue you, threaten you and - allegedly in the case of Shelly Miscavige, wife of Church leader (and Tom Cruise BFF) David Miscavige - hold you hostage.
Shelly’s whereabouts at the moment are unknown, but there have been reports of wellness checks by police in which she’s told officers she doesn’t want to leave.
That’s bad enough, but at least Scientology has only 25,000 members, give or take a few thetans. Outside of Clearwater and maybe Los Angeles, they really don’t have a lot of power.
When a cult and its leader have a shot at taking over an entire country? That’s almost too scary to think about, but we have to face it head-on. It’s not the true believers I’m worried about, so much as the ones who know better but keep it to themselves.
Off-the-record comments, and tell-all books written a few years from now, won’t cut it in 2024.
Right now I’d say the odds are one-third narrow Trump win, one-third narrow Biden win, and one-third Biden blowout.
To be fair, he’s not the first Trump to do so. When exposed to liberals insulting people of color who don’t toe the line, even David Duke would tell them to dial it back a little.
Witness the recent phenomenon of pro-Hamas Xwitter accounts saying they won’t vote for Biden even if it means a Trump victory, dusting off an old strategy which worked beautifully for the German Communist Party in the early thirties.
Trump was saying last week that DeSantis will have to CRAWL to him and ask many many times very sincerely to get back in his good graces "and he will have to kiss a lot of my ass." When you think how big that thing is, DeSantis might have a chance of finishing the job by election day. It's that or Trump gleefully destroys any chances DeSantis has as a Republican in the future.
These guys are worse than Scientology - they really don't have much influence here in L.A. beyond the city limits of Hollywood. They're no longer "cool" in the creative community.