Biden and Trump have very different perspectives on the economy. Biden’s is based on data… Trump’s is based on a desire to manipulate his sad, slow-witted audience. Biden: “America has the best economy in the world.” Señor T: “We are a nation whose economy is collapsing into a cesspool of ruin, whose supply chain is broken, whose stores are not stocked, whose deliveries are not coming... [T]he numbers paint a different picture, one more in line with Biden’s narrative of American economic dominance than Trump’s apocalyptic warnings.”
Inflation is way down from the mess Trump left Biden and “U.S. gross domestic product grew 2.5% in 2023, significantly outpacing that of other developed economies... ‘The U.S. economy is leading the way for the global economy. It’s driving the global economic train,’ Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi told CNBC.”
And although Trump’s crooked DJT stock is making people jittery now, the stock market and the housing market have made record gains since the voters threw Trump out of office. None of this reality means anything to the former gaslighter-in-chief. Nothing he says even tries to mimic objective reality. Possibly a bigger problem is that much— even most— of his party has gone down the same road.
Just yesterday, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes subpoenaed two neo-fascist members of Congress, Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar, who were complicit in Trump’s attempted coup. Gosar, in particular, was encouraging far right, violent domestic terrorists to help overturn the election, while Biggs was urging Trump to not leave the White House. Mayes in more likely to indict Trump than Biggs and Gosar, but all three of them should face a firing squad.
Meanwhile, it looks like another crackpot extremist, Clay Higgs (R-LA), wants in on the action as well. Yesterday, Luke Broadwater and Alan Feuer reported that “Even by a conspiracy theorist’s standards, the wild claims made by Higgins stand out. The hard-right congressman, now in his fourth term in the House, has said that ‘ghost buses’ took agent provocateurs to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to instigate the riot. He has claimed that the federal government is waging a ‘civil war’ against Texas. And he has called the criminal charges against Trump for mishandling classified documents a ‘perimeter probe from the oppressors.’ But far from relegating Higgins to the fringe of their increasingly fractious conference, House Republicans have elevated him. They made him the chairman of the subcommittee overseeing border enforcement, and Speaker Mike Johnson named him one of 11 impeachment managers tasked with trying to remove the homeland security secretary from office in a Senate trial set to take place next week.”
Higgins’ “unsupported theories,” they wrote, “portray law enforcement and the government in an evil, conspiratorial light. This week, in a lengthy podcast interview, he expounded at length on his belief— based, he said, on his own extensive investigation and evidence that only he has been able to see— that federal law enforcement officers entrapped Trump’s supporters into violently attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6. He was repeating a conspiracy theory that has been debunked repeatedly. Over the course of a two-hour interview on the Implicit Bias podcast, Higgins, wearing a shirt emblazoned with the logo of the Three Percenters, a right-wing antigovernment militia, repeated the lie that the 2020 election was fraudulent. He laid out an outlandish story that tied the rise of the coronavirus pandemic to what he said was a plot by the government to infiltrate pro-Trump online forums and urge members to engage in ‘riotous’ behavior, as he put it. Finally, he said, also groundlessly, that federal agents posing as Trump supporters traveled to Washington on Jan. 6 and tricked Trump’s backers into carrying out mob violence.”
“It was the latest reminder that, more than three years after the attack,” concluded Broadwater and Feuer, “right-wing Republicans at every level continue to spread falsehoods about what happened on Jan. 6 and are now seeking to use those lies as a rallying cry to denounce the government, promote Trump’s candidacy and rile up his supporters… ‘The whole thing,’ Higgins said, ‘was a nefarious agenda to entrap MAGA Americans.’”
And now the RNC has been remade in Trump’s image, his crooked family running the show, the only goal… grifting. Yesterday, Frank Donatelli, a former deputy chair of the RNC (2008) wrote that thanks to the Trumps, “little help for Republican House and Senate candidates will be forthcoming this year from the RNC [which has also] cut back its mail-in voting program, doubling down on Trump’s opposition to early voting… in spite of the fact that a growing number of Americans are casting ballots before Election Day— nearly 50 percent in 2020.”
Instead, the RNC will beef up its anti-fraud unit, guaranteeing more baseless litigation, failed court cases and angry speeches by Trump. The one thing the new unit will not do is eliminate or significantly reduce early voting, meaning that Republican congressional candidates are on their own in turning out their voters.
It hasn’t been announced yet, but the likely next shoe to drop will be for the RNC to begin paying Trump’s legal bills for his four criminal trials, and maybe for appeals in the civil actions that have already cost him over $500 million in fines and sanctions. Viewed in the aggregate, this new focus amounts to severely curtailing any assistance for other Republican candidates— save the one whose family now runs the RNC.
None of this bodes well for Republicans this year— and the future is no brighter. That’s because Republican activists and those attracted to Trump are wedded to a set of beliefs that are unpopular with the larger American public. Trump himself has few deeply held beliefs aside from self-preservation, but here are a few MAGA-inspired principles that GOP primary voters now embrace.
Well, it might not bode well for Republicans (or Putin). But it bodes well for normal Americans, for American democracy, for Justice, for NATO, for Ukraine… “Trump’s right-wing allies in Washington,” Donatelli wrote, “are drawing up plans to fire government workers and install loyalists who will do what he says. Note that in the first week, his daughter-in-law fired dozens of RNC workers, a preview of what he would do if elected president. It’s no surprise that his guest at Mar-a-Largo recently was one Viktor Orbán, the autocrat from Hungary, who is a Trump favorite, along with Putin of course. Isolationism, anger and grievance, chaos and authoritarianism. These are not winning issues for Republicans, yet that is where the party is headed for the near term. For Reagan Republicans and advocates of limited government, the search for a new political home can’t begin soon enough.”