You must be as excited as I am for
this week’s GOP midterm convention. I’m being serious—well, kind of. I’m
excited because a midterm convention is such a preposterous notion, such a
display of desperate, indulgent, Napoleonic vanity, it will undoubtedly make a terrible
situation for the Republicans even worse.
Except for the Kool-Aid-drinking
third of the population, America is sick of Donald Trump. The third of us
who’ve always seen him as a fascist were sick of him 10 minutes after he
descended that escalator. The middle third, well, their enthusiasm for him has
waxed and waned, but in these last couple of months, they finally seem to have
realized what a charlatan the man is.
So this convention, in other
words, is exactly what America doesn’t want: two more prime-time nights of
watching Donald Trump whine and moan and tell the country how great his poll
numbers are and how “hot” America is. That should work great!
It appears that the
idea was Trump’s, not some aide or sycophant’s. That makes sense. Only Trump
is dense enough to think this is a good idea. Much has been made of the fact
that they scheduled this without realizing that they’re competing (this
Wednesday and Thursday) with the first two nights of the new NFL season, and
against marquee matchups both nights. But I prefer to think that one of his
saner aides knew this and scheduled it anyway, praying that most Americans
would rather watch Sam Darnold and Matthew Stafford than tune in to Trump’s train
wreck.
Have you seen that list of
speakers? If they’d asked me to come up with a speaking list, I couldn’t have
concocted something this self-parodic, this certain to repel middle America. There’s
Mr. Measles, a.k.a. RFK Jr. He’s almost
as unpopular as Trump. There’s Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary who
used to brag that America under Trump would see 4, 5, or even 6 percent GDP growth (actual 2025 figure: 2.1 percent, or 25 percent worse than Sleepy Joe’s
2024 number) and who in a just world would be prosecuted for lying
to Congress. Todd Blanche, the most corrupt attorney general since, well,
Pam Bondi, but a man so shady and unprincipled that he makes Bondi look like Louis
Brandeis. And Karoline Leavitt—America wants more of her, right after she quit
her job, mouthing her mendacious platitudes like those brainwashed
soldiers in The Manchurian Candidate? Don Jr.? Seriously? Don Jr.??
Oh. There’s also Scott Turner.
Who’s Scott Turner? Good question. I didn’t know. And I’m not telling you. He’s
in the administration. You can google him, and when you see him, I think you’ll
see why they added him to the list.
What a bestiary. And that’s why I’m
kind of excited. A president at 35 percent in the polls presiding over
$4.15 a gallon gas and thinking he’s doing something neat by trying to change
New Mexico’s name (“Oh, hell, no,” blared
a headline in the Albuquerque Journal) will now go before the nation
for two nights spewing lie after lie about the economy. Pass the popcorn.
Here’s the thing about economic
lies. There are many things in the political arena you can shade or obfuscate.
You can hide your falsehood in a thicket of complexity. You can play on
people’s fears and prejudices. But you start telling people that the
skyrocketing cost of everything isn’t happening? They will see right through
that. So Trump can lie about, say, what’s going on with Iran, or what he’s
allegedly doing behind the scenes vis-à-vis Russia-Ukraine, or what ICE is
getting up to, and some people will believe him. Or if they don’t quite believe
him, they have a difficult time proving that he’s lying.
But people know that economic lies
are lies because they live the economy every day of their lives. You can’t tell
people who just shelled out $8 a pound to grill the kids some burgers on Labor
Day that affordability is a Democrat hoax. So I feel pretty confident in
saying not only that Trump won’t get a bounce from this convention. Indeed, if
there is a bounce, it will be for the Democrats generally and for James
Talarico specifically (the convention will take place in Dallas, the idea being
in part to shore up corrupt Ken Paxton’s low-energy Senate campaign).
No, Trump’s only hope in November,
as even he may know deep down, is to steal it. The lawsuit to stop the Postal
Service from implementing new rules on mail-in voting is working its way toward
the Supreme Court and may get there very soon. The Supreme Court is as corrupt
as it’s been since the 1850s, but even with that being true, it’s hard to see
how five justices will find any justification for the executive branch having
any say in how elections are conducted, since the Constitution expressly and
clearly says that duty belongs to the states, with Congress playing a secondary
role.
So he should lose at the
high court. But that just means he’ll ignore the ruling. We already have a
whistleblower who came forward to say that the USPS has violated
multiple court orders in attempting to implement Trump’s March 2026
executive order on voting restrictions. ICE still may show up at some polls.
The military? Probably not, but Trump would surely try, and Pete Hegseth would do
everything he could to please the boss.
Will it make a difference? It
might. We shouldn’t kid ourselves. It is on one level terrifying, knowing that
there’s no law Trump won’t break, no article of the Constitution he won’t
shred, and no lie he won’t tell in order to avoid humiliating defeat.
On the other hand, we still have
good cause to be reasonably confident that elections will be conducted for the
most part honestly. Election officials, even most Republican ones, tend to take
their duties pretty seriously. They did in 2020. They had more motive then to
keep him in office, I should think. Now their desire to cheat for a lame-duck
loser should be pretty de minimis.
In the meantime, let’s sit back and
enjoy the show this week and remember how, about 15 months ago, we were
actually scared of these buffoons.
