Date: 2024-10-19 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00017555
The Trump Presidency Idiocy
Rick Wilson revels in Trump’s misery after his ‘idiotic’ plan to smear Biden falls apart
Peter Burgess
Scott Gaetz image via Screengrab
On Friday, former GOP strategist Rick Wilson penned a scorchingly sardonic column in The Daily Beast, mocking President Donald Trump and his “Ukraine Clown Posse” as an utter failure.
“Donald Trump is having the latest in a long run of terrible, horrible, no good, very bad weeks, and the strain is showing on his poxed, jowly face and in his raging, undifferentiated anger at everyone but himself and everything but his own increasingly evident instability, incompetence, and desperation,” wrote Wilson. “Trump’s simultaneously baroque and idiotic bank-shot plan to disqualify Joe Biden in the 2020 election is backfiring, his Senate shield wall is cracking, and his crew in the House is reduced to staging dumb, desperate panty-raids into classified facilities to try and protect him. After a bump, Biden’s numbers seem to be moving up, and Trump may have given him two of the most valuable gifts in politics; the right opponent and an inoculation on an issue that might have otherwise haunted him.”
Trump’s rabid supporters, Wilson went on, don’t even seem to realize how serious things have gotten for their hero.
“The gap between what’s happening to Trump in the real world and what happens inside the soft fantasy bubble of the Trump Matrix is vast and widening,” wrote Wilson. “It’s harder and harder to deny his peril. For a long time, Trump and his followers had a kind of fuck-you swagger, confident his Mighty Bullshit Wurlitzer would always overcome truth, decency, the law, and the rules of political physics. This week, they have abandoned that tone for one of screechy belligerence edged with Fuhrerbunker panic.”
Wilson also laid into Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and his cohorts for trying to seize control of the impeachment narrative by illegally raiding a Secure Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) where a witness interview was taking place.
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“The purpose of Gaetz and his frat rats wasn’t to bring the facts to light, or to expose some nefarious behavior by the Democrats and Republicans on the three committees leading the impeachment inquiry, who were in the SCIF hearing the testimony of yet another fact witness in what is now absolutely established as a quid pro quo in Donald Trump’s attempt to extort the Ukrainian government,” wrote Wilson. “Their dumb stunt — ‘light treason,’ as my friend Molly Jong-Fast calls it — wasn’t to pin down imaginary Deep State liars. It was a pathetic distraction, the work of a few minutes to try to put a Band-Aid on the boo-boo of Donald Trump’s fragile, shaken ego and confidence, all while compromising national security and attempting to intimidate witnesses.”
Though Trump has weathered other theoretically career ending scandals, Wilson wrote, this time he might not be so lucky.
“In the Senate, Mitt Romney is making trouble of the best kind, John Thune is signaling his unease, and Mitch McConnell refused to back Trump’s lie that he blessed the content of the infamous Zelensky call where the American tried to extort his Ukrainian counterpart,” he wrote. “The polling and fundraising collapse in key GOP Senate races for 2020 has McConnell pondering the ultimate triage: saving the majority by sacrificing the President.”
“The panic in the Republican Party is palpable, and delicious,” concluded Wilson. “Trump will grow more angry that the Senate isn’t immolating itself to support him. The House GOP and the Trump media apparatus will demand louder noises, more distractions, more Trump-hadi tactics in support of a President who has already poisoned their future. It’s going to be loud, and very, very ugly.”
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