The Jester’s New Clothes

Donald Trump, in response to Mitch McConnell’s having dumped him in the alley after making a complete fool of him for five years — this being no great feat, given the man’s foolish essence — has “lashed out” at his old puppeteer in his typical twelve-year-old mean girl fashion. And in the process, Trump reveals, admittedly somewhat superfluously, what a pathetically craven shell and shill he is and always was. And when I say “pathetically craven shell and shill,” this is just my idiosyncratic translation of his cult’s more common phrase for describing their hero, namely “ninety-eight-dimensional chess master.”

Trump issued a new statement calling McConnell a “dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack” — three adjectives and a complex grammar form that Trump neither knows nor could have researched on his own, establishing off the top that a ghostwriter has stepped in to save him from the loss of his more comfortable 140-character limit. Further evidence of his newly-hired help: 

“The Republican Party can never again be respected or strong with political ‘leaders’ like Sen. Mitch McConnell at its helm,” Mr. Trump said. “McConnell’s dedication to business as usual, status quo policies, together with his lack of political insight, wisdom, skill, and personality, has rapidly driven him from majority leader to minority leader, and it will only get worse.”

“…can never again be…McConnell’s dedication to…together with his lack…rapidly driven him from….” Yeah, that’s Trump’s pen. Sure. According to The New York Times, “One person close to Mr. Trump said his initial version of the statement was more incendiary than what was released publicly.” “More incendiary” is a nice euphemism for “more illiterate.”

In any case, granting that the former puppet-president’s real sentiments on this occasion are considerably less civil and more “incendiary” than the statement Stephen Miller or some other climbing “political hack” wrote for him, I will simply take the public script at face value, in order to make a couple of passing observations about the latest position shift from the traitor-in-chief, the man who boasted in 2016 that he could shoot a man on Fifth Avenue without losing his followers, and has proceeded to prove, over the past three months, that he can in fact do much worse than that without disillusioning any of his baboons.

In 2014, Donald Trump donated 60,000 dollars in total to Mitch McConnell’s Kentucky primary fight against popular Tea Party challenger (and future governor) Matt Bevin, Trump’s largest personal donation to any national candidate, ever. Along with making the megadonor list on the pro-McConnell, Karl Rove-affiliated PAC “Kentuckians for Strong Leadership” — scare quotes necessary due to the group’s peculiarly non-Kentuckian list of big donors — Trump also officially endorsed McConnell for Senate Majority Leader on social media. Well, to be truthful, he initially posted his endorsement for McConnell as House Majority Leader, until reposting it correctly after someone (presumably from McConnell’s office) informed Trump that McConnell was a senator — or perhaps informed him that the United States has a senate.

That was roughly one year before Trump announced his presidential run. 

Then, during the early primaries and caucuses of 2016, when it had become apparent that Ted Cruz would be his main opposition for the nomination, Trump built his entire “Lyin’ Ted” campaign against Cruz on the distinctively pro-establishment foundation of defending McConnell against Cruz, who had famously criticized McConnell on the senate floor. As Trump said in a press conference at the time, you can’t go around criticizing your leader.

(Telling note from that time: Defending Mr. Establishment himself against the man who had been the Tea Party’s favorite senator prior to Trump’s ascent, precisely because he had criticized McConnell publicly, cost Trump not one supporter. On the contrary, the pro-McConnell, anti-conservative, toe-the-line position Trump was striking against Cruz instantly became the absolute truth for his cult, in spite of contradicting everything they had claimed to believe the day before. At that moment, it was evident, and duly noted by a very small number of us with public platforms, that the Tea Party movement had been effectively co-opted as a secret weapon against itself by the GOP old boys club, with Trump as the establishment’s useful idiot.)

Today, however, “Trump” calls McConnell a political hack lacking political insight, and a scare-quoted “leader” behind whom the Republican Party can never be respected or successful. 

And his baboons? Of course, they hate McConnell again as commanded, just as they rallied to his defense against “Lyin’ Ted” back when their idol was spouting that line of bullcrap. The point of all this is only what I have explained in detail repeatedly since 2016, and right up to this week: Mitch McConnell has chewed them up and spit them out, just as he has done to their cowardly court jester since 2014. He adopted Trump as his drooling hatchet man in crushing the constitutional conservative grassroots movement in America once and for all. 

Translation for the terminally duped: “Once and for all” means decisively, permanently, irreversibly. The only thing “incendiary” about Trump’s too-clever-by-half con job on the American public is the vile stench of cold ashes emanating from what used to be his nation’s last tree of hope, before Mitch McConnell’s establishment found the match they needed.


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