To best appreciate the depth of the Republican abyss, to truly comprehend the cult’s fatalistic slide toward political suicide, you need to read what Senator Bill Cassidy said yesterday.
The Louisianan conceded on CNN that Trump, if nominated again, will likely doom the GOP in 2024. He singled out the classified documents case and called it “a slam dunk” for the prosecution. Therefore, he warned, “we may have a candidate for president who has been convicted of a crime. I think Joe Biden needs to be replaced, but I don’t think Americans will vote for someone who’s been convicted.”
He got that right. According to one new national poll, 53 percent of Americans say they “definitely” won’t vote for Trump if he’s nominated, and another 11 percent say they “probably” won’t. According to another new national poll, 64 percent of Americans say that the felony charges in the coup case (that’s indictment #3) are “serious,” and a 49 percent plurality wants Trump to suspend his campaign (only 36 percent want him to stay in).
But when Cassidy was asked whether he’d still support Trump if he were nominated again, the senator said: Yup! In his words, “I’m going to vote for a Republican.”
Translation: Even if our nominee is a convicted felon who hurls us over a cliff, I’m gonna be there with bells on.
Most Republican leaders are worse, of course. The party that used to pride itself for being tough on crime indulges a criminal defendant in its midst. Suck-up senators like Tom Cotton ignore the mountain of evidence and simply dismiss Jack Smith and “the woman in Atlanta” as “rabid zealots.” (The woman has a name.) Presidential candidates like Ron DeSantis and Tim Scott are busy debasing themselves; Scott says the Trump criminal probes are “un-American and unacceptable.”
Every time I think that the cult has bottomed out in terms of moral depravity, it drills down deeper. Its lust for political suicide is endlessly, albeit perversely, fascinating. The sane American majority rightly believes that anyone hit with four indictments and 91 felony raps is unfit to be president, but the cult’s adherents don’t seem to know it or want to acknowledge it. Actually, their addiction to Trump is even more pathetic than that; according to yet another new national poll, Trump voters trust Trump more than they trust their own friends and families. I kid you not.
These fools are deaf to reason – even from fellow Republicans who are warning that the party is flirting with disaster. Tom Rath, a seasoned New Hampshire GOP operative and past adviser to five Republican presidential candidates, says that “If (Trump) gets to the general election, it would be devastating.” Barbara Comstock, a former Republican congresswoman, calls Trump “a 4 times indicted, two times impeached sore loser who the majority of Americans never want to see in the White House again.” Alyssa Farah Griffin, a Republican spokeswoman who worked for Trump, tweets: “Trump is destroying the GOP & we’re all just pretending that isn’t reality.”
Two new pieces in the conservative National Review are particularly blunt. Jim Geraghty states the obvious: “When considering the combination of the evidence, the potential jury pools, and other factors, there is a good chance that if nominated for the Republican presidential nomination, Donald Trump will be (campaigning) as a convicted felon…earning the title “convicted felon” makes a person less likely to be elected President of the United States.” Alas, he laments, “Today’s Republican Party is not rational, and/or it does not really want to win the 2024 presidential election.”
And another conservative commentator, Charles C. W. Cooke, is trying to talk sense to the cultists, starting with this irrefutable truth: “The broader public hates Donald Trump. I have no doubt that there are lots of Republican primary voters who do not know many people who hate Donald Trump. Perhaps you are one of them. But the thing is: Those people that you don’t know still get to vote. There are a lot more of them than there are of you…
“If he is nominated in 2024, he will prove a drag again. How do I know this? I know this because, helpfully, the voting public is letting us all know it before Republicans make yet another terrible mistake. If the party’s plan is simply to ignore this information…then it will deserve everything that comes to it.”
But hey, the MAGAts who are buoying Trump’s pre-primary poll numbers in Iowa and New Hampshire don’t read anything that outs them as suicidal addicts. (Or they don’t read at all.) Nor are they likely to listen to someone like J. Michael Luttig, a retired federal judge with stellar conservative credentials, who said last week that Trump and his suckers “have corroded and corrupted American democracy,” that Trump has committed “literally crimes against the United States of America,” and that this country “cannot function until the Republican party comes to its senses.”
For the senseless lemmings, things will only get worse. Now we’re getting reliable reports that ex-chief of staffer Mark Meadows has flipped on Trump in the classified documents case. He has reportedly told federal prosecutors that shortly after the National Archives first requested the return of the stolen docs back in 2021, “he offered to Trump that he would go through the former president’s boxes to retrieve the official records and send them back to Washington. Meadows told investigators Trump did not accept his offer.”
Perhaps another presidential loss in 2024 (following the 2018 midterm losses, the 2020 presidential loss, the 2022 midterm underperformance) will do the trick and break the spell. I’m reminded of the scene in Citizen Kane when a political boss tells the pigheaded protagonist:
“You’re the greatest fool I’ve ever known…You’re going to need more than one lesson. And you’re going to get more than one lesson.”