Donald Trump is Dead, Part 5 — Great Republicans and the Party Divides over the RNC Claim that January 6 was Merely “Legitimate Political Discourse.”
I love our two-party system.
I have been a faithful observer of Republican and Democratic politics since I left Cornell with a doctorate in American Studies in 1981.
In a nutshell, I then worked on occasion for Congressmen and women and for some time I held positions in the White House on key Advisory councils. I believe I can be persuaded to vote Republican or Democratic depending on the validity of the official in question. I care about the survival of the Republican Party, the party of Abe Lincoln. If you follow the endorsements of my books, you’ll see introductions and intelligent comments from leaders in both parties. With all this said, I hope you keep an open mind for the rest of this entry. I am writing to help a “more-healthy” and “more-reliable” Republican party — with viable substance based candidates — evolve in the next 24 months. I hope we restore a party which my colleague the 10-year elected House rep from Rhode Island Claudine Schneider calls “Republicans with Integrity.”
You can see that Trump is dying when it comes to integrity, and electability.
THINK BACK BEFORE THE IMPEACHMENTS and the HORROR
As a nation, we stumbled into Donald Trump. I remember feeling sick in my stomach during the 2016 campaign. Despite the love of Russia’s Putin, and the constant false claims, I knew about four men at my club in midtown Manhattan (The Lotos Club, founded by Mark Twain) that had their real estate firms RIPPED OFF by The Donald.
Furthermore, during my work in corporate America and with global firms of renown, I knew his cronies would take the wild dog over the careful institutions based on pluralism I had adored since college. They wanted revenge after Obama, and they were wild dogs, in essence.
Yet here is the update since.
- Donald Trump’s world is crumbling around him.
- The self-proclaimed King is dead.
- Starting this month, or perhaps as late as the mid-term election results, do not expect any elected loyalists to actually say, “long live the King.”
I believe the political calculus has changed. The electable Republicans that are savvy are no longer supplicants to the big lie. The popular liberal press is exaggerating the alignment behind Trump, as it sells for fundraising. By mid-term, it will be clear: Trump is naked, standing exposed, like a big lie.
GETTING REALISTIC, LIKE A BIG BEN FRANKLIN
I started documenting this slow death of The Donald’s political chances, the demise of his social media, and the underselling of his seats at speaking gigs in 2022 over eight weeks ago. You can track that truth on Medium.com and elsewhere, if you wish. I mention this as a social historian, a bit ahead of the popular press on both extremes.
Reread those segments I wrote since Christmas if you want to see how it all played out. The world came around to my position. You can see it. I talk in detail about what the mainstream press covered, and what they missed, and where was all pointing, across 8 years. I see this because I am not ideological; I look at the history, the trends.
Like in a five-part Shakespearean tragedy, it is this fifth part that is critical. Here, think about the drama in the new Denzel Washington movie on “The Tragedy of MacBeth.” This moment — from February thru April or May — is when the trees start moving in on the corrupted King Trump. The landscape itself has changed around The Donald, and he is unsteady. He is like MacBeth, stuck in Key Largo, surrounded by fools, and a stern family and wife.
Take the recent evidence: many other great Republicans are speaking out, like Mitch McConnell. These elected survivors of Trump are saying, to quote Mitch’s exact phrasing:
“January 6 was an act of violent insurrection.”
History, and video footage, show them right — not just the January 6 committee. Can not the RNC see that?
Mitch has restated that this week, in response to the stupid phrasing of the RNC . This RNC statement, and the censure of the two great Republicans on the January 6 committee) costs Trump loyalists daily.
This RNC statement, in writing, was bad political timing, and its value was worse than nothing. It hurt. Those acts in early February helped more see the tragedy on the horizon. The trees were moving. My many Republican friends, both moderate to pro-Reaganites, found the RNC dump and Trump the loser again. This is act five of the tragedy, thus Part 5 of my ruminations.
That stampede that I had predicted near Christmas, with my first entry on Medium under the title “Trump is Dead”, started in earnest after the Republican National C stumbled over adding the words that January 6 was simply normal legitimate political discourse. The rest is history, my friends.
The media went crazy with that phrase for four days running. The exact stupid phrasing “legitimate political discourse” was known by all elements of society, both international and domestic, to be tied to a censure of the two public servants who happen to be Republicans on the January 6 committee. People will write books about this big pivot in Republican sentiments.
You can think about this coupling of phrase and deed as similar in effect to when a dying corpse wiggles in convulsions and last gasps. Doctors are used to this, but the public finds it newsworthy. Trump is Dead is no longer a prediction.
Stepping Back On a Few Things We Can Not Know About Congress
Between the new year and the RNC’s announcement, something unknown to the public must have happened in the hallways of Congress. Some sniping, some slander among leaders, must have inspired both the stupid phrasing, the censure, and now the responses in public. These pivots happen with deliberation and are the essence of politics. We will never know the actual cause of this snowballing; but we can catch the chill. Trump has something worse than Covid at this point. He is standing along in Key Largo, with debt, and a pile of lawsuits climbing up his pant legs like scorpions.
His life support system has become fragile — leaving the Republican party divided and former VP vividly against him! Before the political survival, Mitch McConnelll stated his position this week (you can see in all he has said since January 6). For some time now, McConnell has a visceral hatred of Donald Trump. Big time others in the Senate and House have publicly condemned the phrasing. Vice President Mike Pence said this month that it would have been “un-American” for Trump to overturn the election in a recent Washington Post article. That’s right, the Vice President who stood by the disloyal Trump’s side.
WHERE DOES DONALD TRUMP GO FROM HERE?
The Trump business is under investigation for fraud while his family members are being subpoenaed for a number of misstatements and omissions made in the valuation of assets. I cannot predict if he winds up in jail, surrounded by penalties, or isolated in rage. But his political comeback, based on a big lie, has frayed.
The people of Manhattan and New York remember what a con man Trump was. The investigation, which is being led by New York Attorney General Letitia James, details findings that include the overvaluing of at least six assets for loan applications, insurance coverage, and tax deductions for the Trump empire. HE should never have been launched by the RNC in 2016 in the first place, and he will go down as the worst president — republican or democratic in history to date. You may disagree out of desperation, but recall the facts, please.
As the house of Trump crumbles, so does his political hold on the Republican party. Yes, the RNC seems to be positioning themselves to back him in 2024, however his influence is fading. They are not fools, expect changes in the RNC after those supported by Trump in the midterms prove losers. The Republican party is beginning to splinter with the Never Trump movement growing. I talk to some of these leaders monthly, now, even as a Businessman.
In a NYT’s interview, Geoffrey Kabaservice, a historian of the Republican Party and vice president of political studies at Niskanen Center, a libertarian think tank talked about the party and Trump’s antics has said this month: “I think there’s a fair amount of burnout, to be honest,” adding, “folks are retreating into their cocoons.”
Expect some new Republican moths and butterflies emerging before the mid-terms. That is what politics with a big P is about.
Cocoons hibernate in a sense for a distinct period, and then new ones fly much further than Ted Cruz and his clan after the midterms. Count my words.
My 19th book called “A New Way to Wealth: The Power of Doing More with Less”, is available now from the publisher at www.doingmorewithlessbook.com, and on all major bookselling websites on March 22.
