More to the point, anyone paying the slightest bit of
attention has now determined that the likelihood that the President of the
United States is not merely a con artist and an authoritarian bully but also a
pedophile and rapist has moved out of “preponderance of the evidence” territory
and into “beyond reasonable doubt.”
Few criminals have ever acted more guilty. The Trump administration can’t even keep its
lies consistent. The files were on Pam
Bondi’s desk, but they don’t exist. The
whole thing is a Democratic hoax, but Bill Clinton’s name appears. Curmie’s recent appreciation of Luigi Pirandello notwithstanding, anyone with the analytical skills of the dumbest kid in
kindergarten knows that all of those statements can’t be true at the same
time. The only question is whether any
of them are.
Certainly, moving Ghislane Maxwell to Club Fed was
sufficient evidence of rampant corruption to convince all but the well and
truly brainwashed, and asserting that survivors’ testimony at the press
conference is “irrelevant” or that Republican legislators who exhibit even
enough backbone to want the truth to come out are “hostile” certainly should
have clinched the issue even for the stragglers who hadn’t long since come to
that conclusion.
Of course, those who drank deep of the MAGA Kool-Aid don’t
care, and those of us who dare suggest that Dear Leader is anything less than a
literal godsend will continue to be called Trump Deranged, irrespective of
evidence, even by people who know better (or ought to). But the hard-core MAGAs seem to be losing at
least some of their suasion in the Republican party: when you’re revealed as
too big of a sicko for Marjorie Taylor Greene, the proverbial writing is on the
wall. Special elections are showing huge
gains for Democrats: breaking the state legislature’s GOP super-majority in Iowa by gaining an easy victory in a district that voted for Trump by double
digits a few months ago is but one example.
And that’s significant.
Curmie may find the political stances of the current crop of GOP pols more
problematic than those of their predecessors of a few decades ago (yes, they’re
considerably worse than Nixon or Reagan), but there are relatively few of them
outside of the Manchurian Cantaloupe’s appointees who could legitimately be described
as evil. There are some, of course: Mike
Johnson (aptly described by Curmie five years ago as “a hitherto unknown little turd”), Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott
and Ken Paxton come to mind.
Most, though, are simply amoral (as opposed to immoral),
cowards. Some, like Susan Collins, Rand
Paul, and Lisa Murkowski, will occasionally offer a bit of token resistance before
ultimately capitulating every damned time to whatever whim takes shape
in what passes for a brain in the Mad King of Trumpistan. These people cannot be trusted, full
stop.
But others—those who may not have a lot of core beliefs but
sure would like to be re-elected—are beginning to recognize that servile obeisance
to POTUS just might cause more problems than it solves. The Astroturf support of billionaire mega-donors
is nice, no doubt (or at least Susan Collins thinks so), but the disillusionment of the citizenry is real. Distancing oneself from a party leader who is
underwater on literally every issue, and on some of them even among Republicans,
comes a little easier under those circumstances.
Curmie isn’t celebrating an imminent return to power for the
Democrats, at least not yet. The GOP’s
willingness to be completely forthright in their declarations that they have no
interest in representing their constituents, only in maintaining their party’s
control of the government, is concerning.
The leftie press is suggesting that the Trumpsters wouldn’t be so openly
seeking to gerrymander if they weren’t afraid of the results in a fair
election. Whether that’s true or not is,
of course, a matter for conjecture. It
could be that the GOP seeks a supermajority, or that they’re confident in
victory (remember Trump’s almost-admission that Elon Musk had manipulated the 2024 election?), anyway.
None of this is new, of course. Curmie remembers a dozen years ago when Greg
Abbott, then the Attorney General for Texas, cheerfully declared in a court document (!) that of course their most recent gerrymandering was designed specifically to
increase the power of the Republican Party, but, you see, it wasn’t racially
motivated (note: it was, of course), so it was OK.
And no, Gentle Reader, Curmie is not pretending that the
Democrats aren’t perfectly willing to play the same game. Indeed, they have. But as the New York Times’s Sam Wang wrote about the 2012 election, “Both sides may do it, but one side does it more
often.” And, of course, Democrats voted 220-1 for
the 2021 “For the People Act,” which would have required non-partisan
commissions rather than state legislatures to establish Congressional districts;
Republicans opposed the bill 209-0, with two not voting. It was then blocked from even receiving a
vote in the Senate by Mitch McConnell.
But this piece isn’t about gerrymandering… although we may
return to that topic in the future. What
matters here is the extent to which the Epstein affair matters. The answer, Curmie suspects, could be
anywhere on the continuum from “a lot” to “not much.” As noted above, everyone already knows that
Trump will be implicated if that material ever becomes public. The only question is how significantly. But knowing in one’s brain and one’s heart that
such evidence exists and being unable to deny that evidence’s existence are two
different things.
Still, Trump’s boast early in the 2016 campaign that he could “stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and
shoot somebody and [not] lose voters” may be a little more true than we’d like
to believe. Certainly, anyone who ever would
have actively supported Trump—as opposed to despising him less than the other
candidate—is indeed sufficiently lacking in morality (or even humanity) that
the only thing that would make such a person change their mind would be for
Trump to stop being a racist, sexist, anti-intellectual, plutocratic homophobe.
Still, whereas such people are willing to excuse his lies,
his felony convictions, his open grifting, and his incoherent bluster… they
might just draw the line at raping junior high girls. The MTGs of the world will tell the
tale. At the moment there’s a trickle of
dissent. If it stays that way, we’ll
have to wait until at least next year’s midterms to see how things play out. But even one or two significant defections
could open the floodgates. All bullies—and Trump is unquestionably in that category—are
cowards. If he stops scaring people, he’s
powerless, because he’s too fundamentally stupid and narcissistic to convince
anyone to come around to his point of view without at least an implicit
threat.
There is another possibility, of course: that we have the distraction backwards. If, hypothetically, the files reveal that Trump was less complicit in the Epstein/Maxwell sexual exploitation ring than we had believed, then all the attention given to the files was itself the distraction from other illegal or unethical activity.
Ultimately, though, there is one central question: will the Republicans whom Curmie once disagreed with but
respected stop bowing and scraping to the Grifter-in-Chief? It’s possible. After all, Trump has already secured the
title of Most Corrupt President in US History.
He’s not only won the race, he’s lapped the field, leaving Nixon,
Harding, and Grant looking at each other wondering how to even compete with
that. But the average GOP Congresscritter demonstrates, shall we say, invertebrate tendencies.
Will the courageous and patriotic survivors of Epstein,
Maxwell, and Trump who addressed the world this week save the country? They just might. Unfortunately, they could be our only chance.
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