Donald Trump is That Awkward Moment When the GOP Hears What it Sounds Like

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Last updated on September 25th, 2023 at 01:44 pm

trump-phoenix

Somehow, Donald Trump has become that awkward moment when Republicans finally hear themselves talk. And, in hearing everything they believe articulated in the public forum, they are horrified.

You know how bad things are for those poor fellows on the political right when they start to claim Trump is actually a Democrat plant, put there to make them look bad.

But no. Sorry to say, that’s just how insane you folks have become. You really do sound like that.

I almost feel sorry for you, and probably would if you’d actually learn something from this experience.

But you haven’t. And you won’t.

They deserve this:

Sure, we will always have the Ted Cruzes and the Scott Walkers, and I have argued elsewhere that all this can be traced back to Rick Santorum as an immediate antecedent. It used to be just Santorum saying the stupid stuff nobody else would say. Now they all do it.

It’s just that nobody listened to Santorum. And can you blame them? He is about as interesting as his Dan Savage neologism.

They have all become Santorum. Even Trump. But people listen to Trump. Oh, how they listen to Trump. Often mouth agape in horrified silence, but they listen.

And this is new. Donald Trump might be the demagogue the Republican base has been waiting for. I’m not certain Mitt Romney ever really clued in on what the GOP stands for these days. He was too busy thinking about Mitt Romney to get beyond peripherals like plastic raincoats.

But Trump gets it, and he doesn’t mind saying it. Much to the delight of liberals and progressives, who are happy to have things finally out in the open.

And let’s face it: It’s bad. Very bad. Trump’s verbal ineptitude makes Rick Perry’s prolonged 2012 faux pas pale by comparison. As Dave Letterman quipped about his untimely retirement, it was the worst mistake of his life to leave just as Trump enters the stage.

Oh the jokes. Even Jesus couldn’t turn 4,000 people into 20,000. Even Jesus couldn’t claim of the Sanhedrin, “Oh, they love me!”

Scott Walker can claim that he is doing what God wants him to do, like so many Republican candidates before him *ahem* Sarah Palin *ahem* and we can’t prove otherwise. But when Trump says Hispanics love him, it is easily proved, of course, that they can’t stand him. We can’t ask God, but we can sure ask Hispanics.

This is all so very embarrassing for the Republican Party and it is fun to watch them squirm, not only the establishment but his fellow not-so-establishment running mates, other guys the establishment would likely not mind jettisoning.

Who doesn’t love seen Karl Rove – and by extension, George W. Bush – openly and brazenly attacked by a Republican presidential hopeful?

I don’t know. We have been asking that for years. And,

Maybe they didn’t realize how bad their rhetoric sounded until the mainstream media broadcast it? Perhaps they should have – 2012 and Mitt Romney are in our recent past after all.

Or maybe, as some have suggested, they are perfectly comfortable with the things Trump is saying, but horrified that he is actually saying them. You know, out loud.

We may never know what is going on in their heads as they listen to Trump. Heck, they may never know what’s going on in their heads.

We do know this, however: In the end, when you look at the Trump platform, this lowbrow cracker Renaissance led by a rich white guy, what you are seeing is a replay of 2008. That’s right: Republicans aren’t reaching very far into their past for a Golden Age to latch on to.

The message is the same: Take back our country. In 2008, a bunch of poor white crackers funded by the rich guys who took their jobs, managed to scapegoat black folks for their misery. The same thing is happening now, with “Mexicans” in the role of blacks.

You remember how riled up they got when our first black president told them, “You didn’t build that”?

Well, Obama was wrong this once: they did build that. All on their own. They can’t pin the Confederate flag on us, and they sure as h*ll aren’t going to pin that Frankenstein Trump on us.

As they say in the old Westerns, you dealt the cards. Now play ’em. And no, Kenny Rogers isn’t going to save you either.

This is the reality of the Republican Party. They may want Trump to shut up, but this is what they sound like, and for whatever reason, they are horrified. No Democrat alive, not Barack Obama, not even Bernie Sanders, could have stirred up this ant’s nest of hate.

Megyn Kelly’s pointing to Karl Rove’s “math you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better” couldn’t change reality in 2012, and voodoo math won’t save Rove or the GOP in 2016 either. #Bushy beware: there is a new stupid in town, and his name is Trump.

Hrafnkell Haraldsson
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