It’s pretty difficult to figure out who says the most bizarre, the craziest and the most stupid statements made by anyone in the GOP. That’s because in order to represent the GOP in public life you have to say things that are simply too bizarre, too crazy, or too stupid to be believed.
In that respect, the winner of this contest has usually been Donald Trump, who yesterday made what has to be the most bizarre statement he has ever made. I am referring to something he put on Truth Social about Ron DeSanctimonious or whatever Trump his calling him these days.
Referring to an upcoming visit to Iowa where DeSantis has also been stumping around, Trump criticized DeSantis for voting to cut social security, ‘obliterate’ government medical care and impose a 23% national sales tax which, if enacted, would represent the single, biggest tax increase of all time.
Ready? Are you sitting down?
Trump says he’s going to Iowa and then attacks DeSantis for: a) voting to cut social security; b} raising the minimum age for receiving social security payments to 70; c) getting rid of Medicare; d) imposing a national, 23% sales tax.
This is Trump saying these things about someone else? Since when did Trump become such a big liberal who all of a sudden wants to protect social security and government-financed health?
Here’s the guy who for the last eight years has positioned himself to the Far Right, using a combination of hyper-nationalism and racism to pull the entire GOP narrative into MAGA-land and now he’s tilting to the Left!
And you know what? He’ll get away with it for the simple reason that just about everyone who supports Trump doesn’t really care what he says.
I’m in the gun business, so I know a lot more Trump voters than most of the folks who read my blog or subscribe to the Medium website where my columns appear. And when I ask Trump supporters why they support Orange Shithead, the usual response is: “I like him.”
Get these folks into a discussion about specific policies that Trump supports and the best you’ll get is something about how he wants to ‘bring America back.’ Exactly what America needs to be brought back from is never very clear.
And don’t make the mistake of thinking that every Trump-lover is a closet racist who remembers how good things were before the ‘element’ moved into the neighborhood and everything went to Hell in a handbasket or worse. This was one of the dumbest mistakes that Hillary committed in 2016 when she came out with the ‘deplorables’ remark and doomed her campaign.
I don’t remember the last time a Presidential election turned on how the candidates disagreed about an issue or how they would deal with this or with that. Clinton beat Bush in 1992 because he was telling people he ‘felt their pain’ after they lost their homes in a hurricane while Bush was relaxing on his sailboat in Maine. The other Bush beat Kerry because of something Kerry didn’t do on a swift boat in Viet Nam.
In case you didn’t know it, today is the first day of Pride Month, which is when we celebrate LGBTQ. Now here we have DeSantis, who just signed a whole bunch of anti-LGBTQ laws which put him in the forefront of the anti-woke brigade. And dollars to donuts, Trump will find some way to cozy up to the gays as well. Ditto the pro-choice folks as well.
Think I’m kidding or just being sarcastic for the hell of it? I’m not.
Trump’s the first politician who figured out that the chief responsibility of an elected official is to run for office all year long. Which, by the way, is the reason why the polls show him ahead of Joe for 2024.
And before you start thinking that these numbers will change as soon as Joe ramps up his campaign, you might want to think about this. If Trump had kept 3 states in 2020 – MI, PA, WI - that he flipped in 2016, he would have won the whole thing.
Now Joe got 7 million more votes than Trump received in the general election, but the total margin of Joe’s victory in those three states was – ready? – less than 2 percent!
So, when all I said and done, if all Trump needs to do next year is find a couple of thousand votes in three states where he found those votes in 2016, why not look for those votes on the Left instead of on the Right?
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