Donald Trump is a Failure
And his crazy letter to the January 6 Committee is only more proof of that
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[Donald Trump's] cynicism is unbounded. His lack of empathy and compassion can be summed up in a phrase I suspect he's most proud of having made famous: 'You're fired.' I mean, really, I'm not joking. Think about that. Think about everything you learned as a child, no matter where you were raised. How can there be pleasure in saying, 'you're fired!'"
—Vice President Joe Biden, Philadelphia, July 27, 2016
Last Thursday, October 13, 2022, the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol held its final hearing, summarizing the narrative of the first attempted coup d’état in American history. Every committee member took a role in narrating the conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 election that leads back to former President Donald J. Trump, a close circle of elected and unelected Republican cronies. It was a theory of the case, as trial lawyers would say, one illustrated by testimony, paper, and electronic documents selected from the mountains of evidence the Committee has accumulated.
While those of us who have watched each hearing learned very little that was new, there were two startling moments at the end of the two-hour hearing. The first, discussed in my last post, was candid film acquired by subpoena from a documentarian who followed Roger Stone in the days before the election. Stone, a long-time political consultant and dirty trickster appeared to be saying that, should Donald Trump lose the election, there was a plan in place to deny the election results and then overturn them by violence.
The second shocker was the Committee’s announcement that it planned to subpoena Donald J. Trump to testify under oath. Although Trump has indicated he would like to testify live, this will never happen for two reasons. The first is that there is very little time before the election, and Democrats do not want to host a three-ring circus that could potentially derail, or detract from, candidacies in key states.
Then, absent an election miracle, when the 118th Congress is sworn in on January 3, 2023, Democrats will be in the minority, the Committee will be disbanded, and the subpoena will be voided. Regardless of the Committee’s probable and imminent demise, it mustered the federal government's apparatus to assemble a case that it will hand off to a branch of government that will be unaffected by the midterm elections: the Department of Justice.
The second and more important reason is that even the bottom-feeder lawyers who now work for Trump know it would be malpractice not to do everything in their power to prevent their client from testifying under oath. With multiple criminal and civil suits pending against him, including a federal one for election tampering, Trump would face the choice of perjuring himself (likely) or telling the truth (worse.)
Nevertheless, in response to the committee’s subpoena, Trump found a stupid thing to do anyway. He sent a letter to the Committee (you can read it here) that begins: “THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2020 WAS RIGGED AND STOLEN!” It accuses the Committee of persecuting the thousands of armed insurrectionists who mustered at the Ellipse and, at Trump’s direction, attempted to stop President Joe Biden from being installed as President and presumably restore a failed incumbent presidential candidate to the Oval Office.
Repeating every lie that has accumulated since November 2020, Trump’s letter insists that his election loss was historically impossible: “Since 1888, no incumbent President has gained votes and lost reelection. I received many millions more votes in 2020 than I did in 2016, unheard of in our political History.” Accusing the Committee of failing to investigate “Election Fraud” for the umpteenth time, the former President blames this fictional fraud on Black voters: “Yet somehow Biden beat Obama with the Black population in select Swing State cities, but nowhere else.”
If we were not used to such communiqués, in 240 characters, blog posts, or speeches, the letter would read as a spoof. But in fact, it is a dark form of mockery, one encapsulated in a schoolyard taunt from my youth: “I’m rubber, you are glue; whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you.”
It is a typical Trump tactic: rejecting failure by projecting failure on others. The archetypical bully, Trump attempts to humiliate and dominate his enemies by telling lies about them, seizing on snippets of public identity, physical appearance, or personal history to make them seem ridiculous. His self-invented superiority is amplified by depicting those around him as either failures or potential failures. You can access many of these taunts on a list of these insults compiled by the New York Times from his defunct Twitter account, suspended on January 7, 2021 (another failure: who but a loser can’t hang onto at least one Twitter account?)
Like these tweets, and his persistent verbal assaults on others, Trump’s letter to the Committee does not respond to facts or reveal new information: it only builds and elaborates on old lies invented to conceal old failures. And the core accusation is that others, not he, have “failed.” In its zeal to pursue “a Charade and Witch Hunt,” the Committee failed to uncover election fraud (that never happened.) In the case of January 6, Trump falsely asserts that he had assembled thousands of troops: “I did my job long ahead of schedule.” Why he would have felt the need to assemble these troops is unclear: Trump asserts that the insurrectionists he beckoned to Washington were only “hard-working American Patriots” and “concerned American Citizens.” And yet, in anticipation of their arrival, he “assembled troops.”
Therefore, it was not he, but the Democratic leadership, who was at fault for the violence on January 6: “Why the failure to act or use this ready force?” Trump asked—about troops he had never assembled—insinuating that the sacking of the Capitol was yet another instance of Democrats being soft on crime.
But logic and reality are not the points of Trump’s lies. The point is for Trump to disguise his actual failures by cloaking them in the invented failures of his critics. This emerged as a central tactic in the 2016 campaign. In July 2015, he derided Senator John McCain as a failed airman during the Vietnam war: “I like people who weren’t taken prisoner,” Trump explained sarcastically to a howling audience. He claimed in a 2016 debate that former Florida Governor Jeb Bush came out against Super PACs to divert attention from his "failed campaign” and Trump responded to critical coverage in The New York Times and CNN by characterizing them as "failing" businesses.
But objectively, Trump is a failure, He is not only a failed president and author of a failed coup but also a failed businessman whose chicanery has put him and his corrupt children in ongoing legal jeopardy. Beginning in the 1990s, Trump suffered six bankruptcies, a divorce, and numerous business failures. Yet he diverted attention from these calamities by transforming otherwise successful people into losers on national television. On The Apprentice, the reality show that Trump launched in 2004, the catchphrase "You're fired!" automatically transformed a businessman who could no longer obtain credit from major banks into a successful, canny entrepreneur.
Yet, the failures are beginning to cascade, and only in his fantasies—and those of the millions of Americans who also believe there is someone called Q who will return the Former Guy to the presidency—is Trump a success. Truth Social, Trump’s media company is well on its way to failure. Just yesterday, he was served with a lawsuit that could cost him $250 million and the ability to do business in New York State. And a federal election tampering suit in Georgia looms—one that may pull in other prominent Republicans who also pressured Georgia officials to tamper with legally cast votes.
Regardless of whether the candidates he endorsed win in November, Donald Trump is the definition of a failure. The only question is: how long will it take for the first jury to tell him that?
Short takes:
At Eyes on the Right, Damon Linker points out that part of what makes strategies to counteract right-wing politics hard to formulate is that the GOP specializes in incoherence. For example, “That’s a lot of hostility to the administrative state on the American right!” Linker writes. “But then what are we to make of the post-Trump line of argument holding that Republicans should be seizing the administrative state rather than gutting it?” (October 17, 2022)
Although the Chamber of Commerce and other conservative business groups came out against election denialism, the fact is they would choose a Republican who is an election denier over a Democrat any old day. “Since January 2021,” Judd Legum writes at Popular Information, “corporate PACs have donated over 35.6 million dollars to 291 candidates for federal and top statewide offices that continue to deny or question the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.” (October 17, 2022)
One of the most interesting midterm election dramas is in Utah, where libertarian Evan McMullin, endorsed by that state’s Democratic Party, is within striking distance of porcine Trump fluffer Mike Lee. According to the Deseret News’s Dennis Romboy, the result is five Super PACs drenching Utah media in ugly ads. “Put Utah First, a Salt Lake City-based super PAC made up of independents, Republicans, and Democrats,” Romboy writes, “has spent nearly $2.6 million in the race, including nearly $2 million in ads targeting Lee and about $700,000 supporting McMullin.” One billboard paid for by Put Utah First features Lee’s famous statement that Trump is “Captain Moroni,” a questionable attempt to portray the Former Guy as a sacred figure from the Book of Mormon that may seem blasphemous to some in the faith. (October 16, 2022)
Gone is the "saving Democracy" and in with the "election denier" campaign slogan. Cute how that plays onto 'Holocaust denier.' It looks like the Dems really want to get slaughtered in an epic way. I was expecting we'd see an even generic, but it looks like it will be >5% Republican, but we will see in a few weeks.