… sometimes bad things happen.
Something like three or four months ago my primary computer burned out. It took more than a month to replace it, and as using a smartphone is tough on old eyes when consuming a lot of content, nor useful when writing, I dropped reading Professor Richardson, Erick Erickson, and Daily Kos. However, since the first two were delivered to my UMB mailbox, they simply stacked up.
For the last couple of weeks I’ve been skimming those messages, and Erickson’s castigations of both Democrats and Republicans, including the President and Leader of his Party, has been quite impressive, not only for content but for the fact that the castigations of certain conservatives exist at all.
It also prepared me for this Punchbowl News item:
Senate Republicans are preparing to buck President Donald Trump on two of his long-running obsessions: the White House ballroom project and the “weaponization” of federal agencies against his allies.
It’s a risky gambit, taking on an emboldened president who’s busier settling scores against members of his own party than he is in taking on Democrats.
But Republican leaders are making clear they’d rather risk a Trump outburst than participate in what they see as a campaign of political self-sabotage.
That means scrapping plans to fund security for Trump’s controversial East Wing ballroom. Senate Republicans are also using the reconciliation bill to restrict Trump’s new $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund to compensate people who believe they were unfairly targeted by the feds.
Both are politically toxic for vulnerable Republicans in a midterm year defined by affordability issues and high costs.
This is the sort of thing that suggests a discordance of aims between President and … let’s say the Party to which he claims to belong. This is not leading, because he acts independent of almost all opinions in the Party, whether they concern the futility of tariffs, the wisdom of attacking Iran now, if ever; the talk of acquisition of Greenland or Canada; his inclination towards a boastfulness of the most self-directed wish-fulfillment sort, which is little more than lies; etc. His apologists, mouthing frantic claims of solid judgment and 12-dimensional chess and Biblical Cyrus, are falling from this Tower of Babel and, blinking in shock, attempting to rebuild their fallen positions. Just think of His Former Dominance, Tucker Carlson, or Candace Owen, reduced to attacking Charlie Kirk’s widow.
Or the shaking of the Tower by the Epstein Files revelations.
I think we’ll continue to see Republicans starting to turn on Trump. Some won’t immediately, attempting to use the reversal of others as stepping stones to increased prestige within the conservative power structure, but that’ll be a mug’s game, and more than one Republican politician will soon see the involuntary termination of their political career, brought on by the mistake of clinging to Trump’s trouser leg. Trump and his minions are rolling towards isolation in their half-reconstructed White House, mouthing plans as Republicans persuade Republicans of the wisdom of impeaching Trump.
And will Trump’s dementia permit him to fly away one day to a land without extradition? Or will he dig in his heels and end up being dragged bodily from the White House? A leader must have loyal minions, and they’re leakin’ away.
