Trump got booed at his event with Bill O’Reilly this weekend when he admitted that he had been boosted. He made the argument that it’s important for him to take credit for the vaccines but I’m not sure his crowd thinks that’s quite as important as he does. He sent the note above to NY Times write Maggie Haberman yesterday when she asked him why he said it.
He really wants people to believe that he personally cooked up the vaccines in the White House kitchen, maybe with the help of Dr. Ronny Jackson and Scott Atlas. I don’t think that message is going to get through, at least not as long as we are in the middle of this. He made the pandemic a political issue when he admittedly downplayed it because he didn’t want the economy to falter during his election year. MAGA went so all in on that that they are even killing themselves to own the libs. Does he think they’ll change their minds now that hundreds of thousands have sacrificed themselves on his alter?
Trump seems to have read the room and immediately retreated to his old stand-by to get the cult excited again:
The mission is to keep them agitated over the election and recast january 6th as a peaceful protest against it. And for GOP officeholders, it is the litmus test:
Five Republican candidates for governor of Minnesota were asked at a forum last Wednesday whether they thought President Joe Biden won a “constitutional majority in the Electoral College.” None of them was willing to utter a plain “yes.”Their responses, which ranged from explicit inaccuracies to feeble dodges, made nationalnews. But they weren’t unusual. The Minnesota candidates sounded like Republican candidates generally tend to sound on the subject of the 2020 election.
A refusal to endorse the legitimacy of Biden’s victory has become a key requirement in Republican primaries across the country. From conservative Alabama to the swing states of the Midwest, numerous Republicans trying to win party nominations in 2022 have joined former President Donald Trump in refusing to publicly admit that Trump just plain lost.
Some candidates are aggressive, turning the lie that Trump was the rightful winner into a central part of their campaign pitches. Other candidates are evasive, straining to sidestep a direct answer on the question of Biden’s legitimacy.
Both approaches are dishonest. And both are evidence of a disturbing fact about the state of the Republican Party: you’ll find it very hard to win a 2022 primary if you decide to openly acknowledge the truth about Biden’s fair-and-square victory.
“You can do that, but understand the consequences. The consequences are probably that you’re going to lose,” Steve Mitchell, a Republican pollster in Michigan, said in an interview. “So if you’re willing to lose based on doing that, go ahead.”
I love that cynical shrug, don’t you? “Hey, if you want to lose, tell the truth.” As if destroying people’s faith in our democratic system by saying that it only works when your side wins is just another political tactic.
That January 6th “press conference” looks to be a coming out party for him. It should be a doozy.
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