Month: January 2023

As I have written before, Trump has never had as much juice with the congress as people said he did. After all, he had both the House and the Senate in his first two years and basically only got tax cuts for the rich done, which was the GOP’s Holy Grail. Everything else was just rescinding and withdrawing Obama’s policies and executive orders.

They really don’t care about him now.

After Kevin McCarthy failed to win enough votes to become House speaker on Tuesday, former President Donald J. Trump held a call with Mr. McCarthy and Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, one of the key Republican members of Congress blocking Mr. McCarthy’s bid.

Mr. Trump’s goal was to break the logjam. But if Mr. Trump had wanted Mr. Perry to quickly flip, it wasn’t to be: The next day, Mr. Perry voted against Mr. McCarthy three more times.

Mr. McCarthy’s inability to corral enough votes this week has underscored the limits of Mr. Trump’s political potency inside a party that has not controlled the Senate since 2018, lost the White House in 2020 and failed, so far, to identify the next leader of their narrow majority in the House.

Even if Mr. McCarthy is eventually successful, Mr. Trump has, once again, struggled in his role as his party’s kingmaker. His handpicked candidates failed to usher in the red wave Republicans had hoped for in the midterm elections in November. His attempt to install a new Republican leader in the Senate was crushed. His third consecutive presidential campaign, launched six weeks ago, has underwhelmed.

Now, Mr. Trump’s sway over many of his own loyalists in the House has fizzled in the most public of ways and on the most public of stages — a reminder that the insurgency in Congress isn’t so much a creature of his creation but a force that predated him and helped fuel his political rise.

For over a decade, a group of House Republicans has sought to disrupt the establishment leadership. The House Freedom Caucus evolved out of the vestiges of the Tea Party, playing a key role in the ouster of John Boehner in 2015 and blocking Mr. McCarthy’s efforts to become the Republican leader at the time.

Today, most of the 20 Republicans who have blocked Mr. McCarthy’s speakership are clear Trump loyalists, including several who have already effectively endorsed his 2024 White House bid. And even among them, a small group — including Mr. Perry — have been involved in negotiations with Mr. McCarthy’s team.

Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado, who unseated a fellow Republican in 2020 who she said wasn’t supportive enough of Mr. Trump, openly defied the former president from the House floor on Wednesday, saying he should tell Mr. McCarthy to withdraw from the speaker’s race instead of directing his focus on the insurgents. In an interview later with Sean Hannity on Fox News, Ms. Boebert appeared to try to soften the blow, saying, “I love President Trump. You’re not going to turn me on him, you’re not going to pit him against me.”

And in another show of belated deference, Representative Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican who had mocked Mr. Trump’s endorsement of Mr. McCarthy on Twitter, voted on Thursday for Mr. Trump to be the House speaker.

Mr. Trump has backed Mr. McCarthy’s effort for weeks and held separate rounds of calls to holdouts who have adamantly opposed the move. The former president appeared surprised that some of his loyal lieutenants in the House were not responsive to him, according to two people familiar with the calls who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Mr. Trump, who often tries to avoid limiting any options for himself, stopped making aggressive calls after that. But he was forced to be more public in his support than aides had planned when he picked up his ringing cellphone on Tuesday and gave a muted comment to a reporter from NBC News, prompting questions about whether he still backed Mr. McCarthy.

So he made a public declaration on Wednesday morning. But even that failed to move the roughly 20 House members who have dug in against Mr. McCarthy.

“It’s a combination of them realizing his influence is not what it was, and also his heart doesn’t seem to be in it,” said Peter T. King, the former Republican congressman from Long Island.

Trump hasn’t been putting everything he has into this for good reason. His record is terrible and he doesn’t want to be blamed for McCarthy failing. He’s doing as little as he can get away with.

Frankly, he could have done what anyone else would have done which is simply say that this is up to the House and he doesn’t think it’s appropriate to weigh in. But he doesn’t know that and he can’t keep quiet even if someone advised him to do it.

I don’t think this means as much as some do.As I said, he’s never been particularly good at moving congress. He doesn’t understand how it works and he sees himself as more of a monarch than a president anyway. He certainly doesn’t care about “the party.” But it still has to hurt to see Matt Gaetz vote for him and not one other Republican follows him.

As I write this McCarthy is still losing. And the numbers haven’t moved. He has 20 hardcore insurrectionists voting against him and one nutball voting present for her own reasons. There is little sign that this is going to end well for McCarthy but he just keeps going.

This is happening:

Don Bacon on Fox News floats the idea of forgetting about the 20 anti-McCarthy House Republicans and negotiating with Democrats to elect a House Speaker pic.twitter.com/IfOOrTM4NC

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 5, 2023

If the Dems do this (which I doubt) they’d better extract some serious concession, particularly on things like the debt ceiling. Unfortunately, the Republicans are all liars so how do you ensure that they keep their word? I just don’t know …

I think Alexandra Petri’s take is the best:

Wow, this is embarrassing!

No, not the once-in-a-century mess around electing a speaker of the House! Not the fact that, on Tuesday, after three ballots, none of which succeeded in putting Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) in charge, the House had to adjourn speakerlessly. Not the fact that, again, failing to elect a speaker on the first vote has not happened since 1923! Not the fact that, if anything, the votes were trending further from McCarthy rather than closer to him when the House adjourned, and not the fact that a fourth and fifth and sixth vote failed Wednesday!

None of that is embarrassing at all! What’s embarrassing is that you were expecting anything else.

Honestly, we are a little confused you are taking this so poorly. This is like electing a bunch of clowns to office and being disappointed when they put on a magnificent clown show for you. Here is precisely the clown show you ordered! You shouldn’t be ashamed. You should be applauding. It is like ordering a decorative salad made entirely from Legos and being mad that you can’t eat it. It is like voting for Lauren Boebert and then becoming upset that a legislature that contains her is not productively working for the American people.

I’m sorry, what did you think you were getting? Did you really say to yourself, when you voted for Matt Gaetz, “Here is a man who is going to build coalitions and pass sensible, bipartisan legislation that will improve our lives?” No! You said, “I’m voting for Gaetz!”

Do you realize that this party contains Marjorie Taylor Greene? Actually, in this particular speaker scenario, Greene is the middle-of-the-road institutionalist, a sentence that is as surprising to us as it is to you! When you are counting on Greene as one of the founding blocks of your coalition, the writing is on the wall.

We thought you were serious about just electing people to be squeaky wheels, and specifically squeaky wheels that keep setting off the House metal detector because they are armed with guns for no clear reason. We said to ourselves, “If they wanted to move legislative priorities through Congress in a functional way, they knew whom they ought to have voted for: not us! We came here to make pointless noise and pass nothing, and we are never going to be out of noise!”

Get pumped for the debt-ceiling debate, when we are excited to maybe cause the country to default, which will be very bad for the economy but will allow us to showcase the distinctive brand of shouting to no purpose for which you’ve come to rely on us! We are not here to make the government better. We are here to investigate every member of the Biden administration six times.

To those few of you who voted for a Republican in a swing district who made some wild claim about governing or enacting any piece of legislation, we say, “Whoops! Next time, look at the whole party you’re putting into power when you cast your vote! Because we have a QAnon caucus now!”

Our party is always yelling that Washington is a broken, dysfunctional mess. What is embarrassing is that you thought we meant we were going to govern to change that. What is embarrassing is that you thought we were going to govern at all.

Yeah, this shitshow is just a preview. Buckle up.

This is real. He really posted this. I have no idea what it means. I guess he’s saying something about being the new Speaker but the gesture is just weird and surreal. What???

Meanwhile, this is happening:

Ali: “In the coming days I am going to reveal that MTG committed a crime. The House Ethics Committee will expel MTG when this evidence comes to light. Everyone will hear about your drunken nights!” https://t.co/fQlJmgKJm4

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) January 5, 2023

You love to see it…

You think he doesn’t mean it?

As president, Donald Trump weighed bombing drug labs in Mexico after one of his leading public health officials came into the Oval Office, wearing a dress uniform, and said such facilities should be handled by putting “lead to target” to stop the flow of illicit substances across the border into the United States.

“He raised it several times, eventually asking a stunned Defense Secretary Mark Esper whether the United States could indeed bomb the labs,” according to a new book by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman. White House officials said the official, Assistant Secretary for Health Brett Giroir, an admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, often wore his dress uniform for meetings with Trump, which led him to falsely think Giroir was a member of the military.

Sadly, I wouldn’t be all that surprised if Ron DeSantis and others agree with this one, at least in the campaign. It’s very popular among the right, particularly among those who think the support for Ukraine should be switched to some kind of war with Mexico because they say we’re protecting Ukraine’s border but not our own. In honest moments they will say that we should be like Putin and invade. I’m not kidding.

This is a real thing on the right. I don’t know how widespread it is. But Trump is making it clear that he, at least, is serious about using military action against Mexico.

This will be especially welcome to Ruby Freeman and Shay Moss who Trump has inexplicably decided to target again just this week in his usual grotesque fashion. This is from Tuesday:

Around midnight last night, for reasons that aren’t yet clear, Donald Trump used his social media platform to launch a new offensive against an old perceived foe. It started with this unfortunate missive:

“Wow! Has anyone seen the Ruby Freeman ‘contradictions’ of her sworn testimony? Now this is ‘BIG STUFF.’ Look what was captured by Cobb County police body cameras on January 4, 2021. … Now it gets really bad.”

Soon after, the former president published another item, accusing Freeman of election crimes, followed by a third missive, in which the Republican asked, “What will the Great State of Georgia do with the Ruby Freeman MESS?” Trump concluded that he’s battling “the evils and treachery of the Radical Left monsters who want to see America die.”

Both items referred to “suitcases” filled with ballots that Trump believes Freeman opened, all as part of the crime that was committed only in his imagination.

In case anyone needs a refresher, it wasn’t long after the 2020 elections when the nightmare began for a clerical worker in a county election office in Georgia and her mother. Trump and some of his rabid followers decided that Shaye Moss and her mother, Freeman, who had taken a temp job helping count ballots, were directly and personally responsible for including fake ballots in Georgia’s election tally.

In fact, unhinged Republicans claimed to have proof in the form of a video in which Moss and Freeman could be seen doing their jobs. What conspiracy theorists said were “suitcases” of bogus ballots were really just standard boxes used locally to transport actual ballots.

The video — which showed nothing nefarious or untoward — nevertheless made the rounds in conservative media and in far-right circles, with Republicans insisting that the images showed election fraud, reality be damned. Trump even put it on screen during one of his post-defeat political rallies. In fact, the former president went after the two Black women, by name, repeatedly, which in turn led Republican activists to threaten the women’s lives and show up at their homes.

Freeman, a retiree who started a small boutique business selling fashion accessories, was forced to flee her house, close her business, and move to an undisclosed location on the advice of the FBI for her own safety.

These women, who’d done nothing wrong, were terrorized because of a ridiculous lie. During the Jan. 6 committee’s televised hearings six months ago, the public had the chance to see their sworn testimony, in which they described their experiences in painful detail.

“There is nowhere I feel safe. Nowhere,” Freeman testified.

“Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States to target you? The president of the United States is supposed to represent every American. Not to target one,” Freeman added. “He targeted me. A proud American citizen who stood up to help Fulton County run an election in the middle of a pandemic.”

That was six months ago. Overnight, Trump decided to pick the same unnecessary fight with the same innocent woman all over again.

Making matters worse, the former president has already been told that his accusations are false — not just by reporters and fact-checkers, but by his own Justice Department. As Rachel noted on the show several months ago, former acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue told Trump directly that the matter had been reviewed and the accusations were baseless.

After one conversation in which the then-president referenced an imagined suitcase filled with fraudulent ballots, Donoghue told Trump, “No, sir, there is no suitcase. You can watch that video over and over. There is no suitcase. There is a wheeled bin where they carried the ballots. And that’s just how they moved ballots around that facility. There’s nothing suspicious about that at all.”

Trump, in other words, was told the truth, but he chose to tell lies that put innocent election workers in danger — and last night, the Republican decided to do it again.

He went on with it yesterday:

His obsession with this poor woman is sick and twisted.

Never did

If it was not clear before, it is clear now. The Republican Party, fueled since the Newt Gingrich revolution by the insecurities and grievances of white, Christian males in a changing world is reduced at long last to its essence (New York Times):

After two days of chaos and confusion on the House floor, Republicans have made it abundantly clear who is leading their party: absolutely no one.

From the halls of Congress to the Ohio Statehouse to the back-room dealings of the Republican National Committee, the party is confronting an identity crisis unseen in decades. With no unified legislative agenda, clear leadership or shared vision for the country, Republicans find themselves mired in intraparty warfare, defined by a fringe element that seems more eager to tear down the House than to rebuild the foundation of a political party that has faced disappointment in the past three national elections.

Revanchism is all that’s left. There is no positive GOP agenda. No vision of a better tomorrow. No city on a hill. Just power for power’s sake, power enough to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.

All those years when Republicans swore they would repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act with something better-liked by their donors came to nothing. They failed to tear it down. They had nothing with which to replace it anyway. The unveiling of Donald Trump’s better, cheaper ACA replacement was perpetually two weeks out over his entire term.

“Infrastructure Week” became a running joke during Trump’s term. But in Kentucky yesterday, President Joe Biden, flanked by Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and a bipartisan mix of lawmakers, touted his infrastructure package that will take pressure off the troubled Brent Spence Bridge over the Ohio River.

“For decades, people have talked about the Brent Spence Bridge,” Biden said. “Folks, the talking is over. With the bipartisan infrastructure law, we’re finally going to get it done.”

The Republican Party led by a reality show host who bragged of his success at building things succeeded only at building a portion of pointless border wall to appeaze his party’s xenopohobes.

But wrecking? They’re hell at wrecking.

That ideology of destruction defies characterization by traditional political labels like moderate or conservative. Instead, the party has created its own complicated taxonomy of America First, MAGA and anti-Trump — descriptions that are more about political style and personal vendettas than policy disagreements.

This iteration of the Grand Old Party, with its narrow majority in the House empowering conservative dissidents, represents a striking reversal of the classic political maxim that Democrats need to fall in love while Republicans just fall in line.

“The members who began this have little interest in legislating, but are most interested in burning down the existing Republican leadership structure,” said Karl Rove, the Republican strategist who embodies the party’s pre-Trump era. “Their behavior shows the absence of power corrupts just as absolutely as power does.”

Events reveal that Trump was not so much a driver of the breakdown as a catalyst. He stood on the shoulders of the decades-old, grievance economy powering Fox News and right-wing talk. He taught followers they could publicly vent racial frustrations over cultural changes they perceive cost them social status to non-white minorities, and do so without blowback.

Trump retains no influence over Republicans in the House. They give him lip service but obeissance no longer. When Trump asked the insurgent bloc to knock it off, they responded by blowing him off.

“Our movement is embracing the chaos,” said John Fredericks, former Virginia chairman of Mr. Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns, and a right-wing talk host.

“The movement has eclipsed its Trump leadership,” Mr. Fredericks said on Wednesday. “We found 20 new leaders.”

That’s a very different definition of a leader from the traditional image of a legislator muscling policy through Congress and reshaping American life. In the new conservative ecosystem, leaders are born of the outrage that drives news coverage on the right and fuels online fund-raising.

They are not interested in being legislators, the job for which they were hired, but influencers.

The greatest irony in coverage of this Speakership debacle is reporters asking Newtie where the fire came from. Anti-McCarthy Republicans, Gingrich said, are “playing with fire.”

“I think the guys in the House are doing substantial damage to the Republican Party and don’t even realize it,” said the man who in 1994 brought the matches.

pro tip: if you vote for clowns, don't act so fucking shocked when you end up with a circus

— Jeff Tiedrich (@itsJeffTiedrich) January 5, 2023

A whole lotta unitin’ goin’ on … or something

Amidst the chaos of the first days of Republican “control” in the House, none of the members have yet been sworn into office.

Rep.-elect Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) appeared last night with Stephanie Ruhle on MSNBC’s 11th Hour. Boebert and her fringiest Republican pals want Rep.-elect Kevin McCarthy to withdraw from the Speaker’s race. Who would she accept instead? Who would her faction accept who could possibly win the support of 218 Republicans? She can’t say.

Boebert insists she and her bloc want to unite the American people, etc., etc., and address the border, energy, and inflation, but not until they get their way first, whatever that is.

“We will handle these issues and conduct real oversight real soon …”

The line recalls a motivational speech from The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984). John Lithgow plays a Mussolini-esque “Red Lectroid” from another dimension.

Lord John Whorfin: Where are we going?

Red Lectroids: Planet Ten.

Lord John Whorfin: When?

Red Lectroids: Real soon.

They might as well be from another dimension.

https://youtu.be/YlZsrrQ4ep8

As we watch the GOP’s far right rabble destroy their party from within, I would like to draw your attention to a Representative who is commonly seen as the equivalent on the Democratic side. As you will see, the wingnuts are all immature jackasses by comparison. AOC, the avatar of the left wing of the Democratic party, is very, very good.

The Democrats are the adults in the room who see what’s happening with the Republican Party and understand the stakes. And if you look at what they accomplished in the last congress, it’s a testament to how much you can do if you keep your eyes on the prize.

“Conservatives in chaos” supplanted “Democrats in disarray” some time ago. It would be very nice if the media could at least acknowledge this from time to time.

Regardless of who ends up being the Speaker, he or she will be a Speaker in name only. The 20 Republican insurrectionists who have turned the party into a laughing stock will be in a position to do this over and over again:

Meet them:

More than half of the lawmakers who voted against Mr. McCarthy explicitly denied the results of the 2020 election, compared with about 15 percent of the 222 total members in the Republican caucus, according to a New York Times analysis. These Republicans said that the election had been stolen or rigged — or that Donald J. Trump was the rightful winner — even though Joe Biden earned seven million more votes and 74 more electors than Mr. Trump.

“President Trump won that election,” said Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, one of the five newcomers who opposed Mr. McCarthy’s speaker bid. Representatives Matt Gaetz of Florida and Andy Biggs of Arizona, who have emerged as ringleaders against Mr. McCarthy’s bid, have also called the 2020 election stolen.

Nearly all of the lawmakers who voted against Mr. McCarthy made statements casting doubt on the 2020 election, often repeatedly, not unlike the overall Republican caucus. At least 180 of the 222 House Republicans have questioned 2020, according to The Times’s analysis.

Most of the lawmakers who voted against Mr. McCarthy — at least 95 percent — are members of the House Freedom Caucus or were recently endorsed by its campaign arm. By contrast, just about a fifth of all House Republicans are estimated to be part of the ultraconservative caucus, considered to be one of the farthest-right groups in the House.

In the third round of voting on Tuesday, all 20 of the lawmakers defying Mr. McCarthy voted for Jim Jordan of Ohio instead. Mr. Jordan, who himself voted for Mr. McCarthy, is a founding member of the Freedom Caucus and has repeatedly cast doubt on the 2020 election. In the fourth and fifth rounds, held Wednesday, the same 20 lawmakers voted for Byron Donalds of Florida, also a member of the Freedom Caucus, instead of Mr. McCarthy.

Fourteen of the 15 incumbents who voted against Mr. McCarthy were among the 139 House Republicans who, on Jan. 6, 2021, voted to overturn the 2020 Electoral College results. Comparatively, fewer than two-thirds of House Republican incumbents were objectors.

Trump endorsed most of them:

At least 85 percent of the lawmakers who voted against Mr. McCarthy were endorsed by Mr. Trump before the 2022 midterm election, a higher share than the 67 percent in the Republican caucus as a whole.

Still, these lawmakers were steadfast in their opposition to Mr. McCarthy on Tuesday, despite reports that Mr. Trump had been lobbying on behalf of the California Republican, whom he has called “My Kevin.”

It’s fine. The Insurrectionists know that he needs them more than they need him now. They’ll mend their fences although many of them may just keep their powder dry on the nomination.

And I’m sure this will shock you:

Nearly half of the lawmakers who opposed Mr. McCarthy represent districts in three states: Texas, Arizona and Florida.

They aren’t going anywhere folks. They now hold the GOP House hostage. For the most part it won’t make a difference to the country — except for legislation like the debt ceiling that must be passed or the country will blow up. And God help us if we have another emergency.

Yes, the party is doing this but the question really is why. Jonathan Chait had a great insight that at least partly explains it:

The House Republican majority is currently paralyzed by an internecine power struggle that, like some ninth-century Byzantine religious schism, is simultaneously all-consuming to the participants and utterly inscrutable to outsiders.

Reporters attempting to discern the conflict have taken to describing the competing factions as “conservatives” (the far-right members opposed to Kevin McCarthy’s bid for Speaker of the House) and “moderates” (the much larger faction of Republicans loyal to him). But these labels do very little to clarify the strange mania devouring the House Republican caucus. If you define conservative in traditional terms — meaning loyal to the conservative movement of Goldwater and Reagan and opposed, in principle, to any new taxation or social-welfare benefits — the entire Republican caucus is composed of conservatives. McCarthy’s loyalists aren’t moderates and don’t describe themselves as such.

Indeed, the division has barely any real ideological content at all. What Republicans are fighting over is whether to accept the limits of sharing power.

One of the key differences between the two major parties is that Democrats accept the reality that their agenda is not going to move forward when the opposing party occupies the White House. Democratic partisans might grow angry at their leaders for failing to stop it, but members of Congress generally understand that there are limits to the power of the opposition, and even the most unrealistic Democratic rank-and-file voters don’t expect their leaders to actively advance liberal policy in the face of a Republican president. Progressive Democrats wanted to defend Obamacare from Donald Trump’s repeal attempt. They weren’t demanding that Nancy Pelosi somehow force Trump to enact Medicare for All.

Republican voters, by contrast, expect and demand that the conservative agenda be advanced even — perhaps especially — under Democratic presidents. The Republican caucus is routinely gripped by frenzied efforts to compel Democratic presidents to roll back the welfare state. Newt Gingrich shut down the government to pressure Bill Clinton to sign a capital-gains tax cut and reductions to Medicaid and Medicare. Republicans used both shutdowns and the debt ceiling to try to blackmail Barack Obama into repealing his signature health-care plan.

This is why Democrats tend to splinter when they hold power but unify in opposition while the reverse holds true for Republicans. Democratic demands expand when the party holds full control of government and contract in opposition. Republican aspirations paradoxically become more grandiose during Democratic presidencies, which draw Republican minds deeper into the fever swamps of hysteria, making them more insistent on demands for maximal confrontation. These demands are inevitably impossible, causing Republicans to turn, again and again, against their own leaders.

By way of illustration, take this op-ed by Representative Bob Good, one of the anti-McCarthy rebels. “We must elect a speaker who will utilize the power of the purse as leverage to restore fiscal sanity and defund the government tyranny we campaign against,” he writes. “For the good of the Republican conference, for the good of Congress and for the good of the country, let’s hope Republican leaders will listen to the will of their constituents and vote for transformational change on Jan. 3.”

Good believes that the Biden administration is imposing “government tyranny” and that the House will somehow bring it to an end through a funding agreement with the Biden administration. He believes the House should be a venue for “transformational change.” Many political activists and candidates have called for transformational change, but only on the right wing is it considered normal to expect this to happen while the other party controls the presidency.

Or consider this statement by Citizens for Renewing America executive director Wade Miller and reported in the conservative Daily Caller:

Kevin McCarthy is the essence of the uniparty swamp, where two parties pretend to oppose each other, offer show votes to demonstrate theoretical differences of opinion, but then always work together to advance and fund the woke and weaponized government leviathan that is leading the way in destroying our communities through the direct funding of incremental cultural Marxism.

The putative complaint against McCarthy’s leadership is that he advanced “incremental cultural Marxism” through government funding. Of course, no such thing exists, which means McCarthy has no way to redress the complaint. The far right is angry about the Biden administration’s continued existence and wishes to blame the leadership for this fact.

Because this anger has no productive channel, it returns again and again in the form of internal recriminations. The House caucus during Democratic presidencies for the last quarter-century has been an endless procession of coup attempts. Gingrich was deposed for failing in his holy mission of forcing Clinton to slash government. John Boehner and Paul Ryan were driven into retirement. The House Republican caucus will be a cauldron of rage, because the party, at its core, does not believe it should be forced to share power.

This is such a great insight. They live in a fantasy world and their fantasy is that they don’t live in a democracy that requires negotiation, compromise and sometimes, losing. This is one big reason they love Donald Trump. He not only tells them that they can’t lose, he takes it one step further and tells them they didn’t lose even when they obviously did.