This Trump dog and pony show can only lead to one thing: both his and his supporters disgrace

 

I am fairly certain, to one degree or another, that most people are getting sick and tired of the dog and pony show being led by Donald Trump, his pathetic Republican sycophants and the "Trump media," yet it goes on—and on, and on. I don’t understand why the legitimate news media just doesn’t focus on why this is really going on here: Trump is either afraid of going to jail once he loses the protections of the office, or he will be revealed to be such a charlatan that even if he doesn’t go to jail for financial and tax fraud, his “brand” will be tarnished to the point of ending his “political” career, and he will be what he hates the most: a loser. And who wants to attach there political fortunes to a loser?

Of course Trump only has himself to blame. For one thing, he refused to release his financial and tax statements as other presidential candidates have done in the past. He has been fighting like a rabid animal in the courts to prevent the release of those records, and obviously is acting as if he has something to hide. Trump also faces defamation lawsuits from two women who claim he sexually assaulted them. Naturally his supporters will say these are all politically motivated, but the truth is that Trump has gone so far out of his way to burn every bridge and make himself so unlikeable to so many people that it is no longer enough to say that he is  corrupt, a cheat and an incompetent businessman and let it go at that. For once he should actually pay a real penalty for his crimes, rather than others having to pay it for him.

Despite all of this, there are many Republicans who have been weighing what is more important: fanning the far-right radicalism that Trump has inspired, or their own reputations. Given that morality and ethics has nothing to do with it, it seems the former more than the latter. There will be a cost if Trump’s political “brand” ultimately becomes sullied by criminal and civil judgments, but Republicans are seemingly betting on the hypocrisies and self-deceptions of the core Republican voter, the ones who easily allow themselves to be taken in by the “show”—which has become little differentiated from a WWF event, where everything is fake, but the Trump audience still thrills to the bombastic hyperbole, headlocks, power slams and backbreakers.

Even Republicans who claim to “accept” that Biden is president-elect, like Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, still must “prove” their “loyalty” to Der Fuehrer by insisting that even at this late date some kind of investigation be conducted into false election claims and conspiracies, and only in those heavily Democratic districts in swing states that Trump lost; if that isn’t trying to steal the election on extremely narrow grounds, I don’t know what is. Speaking to Jake Tapper on CNN this past Sunday, DeWine repeatedly refused to admit the fraudulent nature of the claims being made to undermine democracy by Trump and those purveying the most ludicrous conspiracy theories.

DeWine further undermined his own credibility by pointing out that Republican judges had repeatedly thrown out baseless claims of fraud, yet he still insisted that “the people”—meaning the far-right fanatical core of Trump voters—would not accept the election result without yet another “recount” of votes, despite several recounts already having been performed in Georgia, and in the two heavily Democratic counties in Wisconsin. The hypocritical nature of this should  be apparent when we remember that in an attempt to find a way to “win” the popular vote in 2016, Trump’s own partisan election commission decommissioned without finding any evidence of fraud. Yet we must insure that the most self-debasing Trump fanatics must be "satisfied"--which of course will never happen so long as Trump continues to debase the office he still holds for a few more weeks.

DeWine also ignored Tapper’s reminder of evidence of voter suppression in Democratic districts in Ohio in the 2004 presidential election, claiming that Ohio had one of the “best” systems for counting only “legal” votes in the country. But the reality is that Republican states do everything they can to suppress legal voting, typically through faulty record-keeping systems that seem inherently designed to  “malfunction” or be so labyrinthine as to be deliberately self-defeating. Furthermore, it is only the few heavily Democratic districts which are deemed “suspicious,” not the many smaller rural and boondock districts that always seem to vote 95 percent Republican.

DeWine and other Republicans seem not the least bit embarrassed by the Washington Post’s reporting of a phone call Trump made to Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which Trump pleaded with him to “find” another 11,780 votes, one more than the margin Biden won the state. Trump insisted that there was “no way” he had lost the state, winning by “hundreds of thousands” of votes by “his” count. Being forced to listen to a laundry list of false claims or easily explained actions, Raffensperger repeatedly told Trump that his information was “wrong,” and that he shouldn’t believe every conspiracy theory on social media. Trump responded to this with “Oh this isn’t social media. This is Trump media. It’s not social media. It’s really not. It’s not social media. I don’t care about social media. I couldn’t care less.” Today, Georgia election official Gabriel Sterling felt compelled to conduct a press conference debunking all of Trump's claims.

Of course we need not ask what the hell Trump is talking about when he refers to “Trump media”—4chan, QAnon, Newsmax and the like. The never say quit, never surrender sycophants at Fox News are also at it again. Gayle Trotter defended Trump’s impeachment-level deed, calling him a “fighter” and blabbering about the mythical “far-left” agenda that seems to turn some people into jellified fear freaks—especially nonsensical given the very real fascist agenda of Trump and Stephen Miller. Even though Jeanine Pirro had been forced to air the same retraction of voter fraud claims that Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo had to, this past weekend she had Trump trade advisor Peter Navarro on her show claiming that Vice President Mike Pence had the “authority” to call for a special counsel to investigate fake vote fraud claims and delay Joe Biden’s inauguration.

The Constitution allows no such action, but as usual this is yet another absurd act of desperation that serves absolutely no purpose save to delay the inevitable: that Biden will be president on January 20, that the 150 Republican senators and House members supporting Trump’s attempt to overturn democracy will be forever stained with disgrace and infamy, and that Trump cannot further delay the reckoning for his crimes much longer.