This piece by Tim Miller made me laugh. He’s so right:
Brokeback Party
The Republican party has barely tried anything in their effort to move on and they are already out of ideas. After a few bad weeks in the polls for Tiny D, the party poohbahs are throwing in the towel and getting back aboard the Trump Train.
Whether it’s a pheremonal attraction to his rakish, devil-may-care persona, an addiction to the small donors and the retweets, an unquenchable desire to be invited to a disgusting dinner in a gaudy dining room, a cowardly fear of being shouted down at the airport by obese hillbillies, a boner for making the libs squirm—or a little from columns A, B, C, D, and E—the GOP grownups are signing up to Do It all over again. Like the besotted Jack Twist staring at their mountain man, these Republicans just don’t know how to quit Trump.
In just the past week, the former guy has received endorsements from both the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Steve Daines, and Lee Zeldin, the Republican nominee for governor in New York in 2022.
I think it’s important to step back and appreciate how insane these endorsements are, because these guys are not random backbench MAGA morons.
Zeldin was reportedly set to be a “top official” in the DeSantis campaign before he signed on with Trump. (Ouch!) This guy was puffed up as a future party leader by establishment favorite Tom Cotton on the Sunday shows and he was the secret candidate that “closet normal” Republicans were trying to recruit to take over the RNC from Ronna “Don’t-Call-Me-Romney” and the Trumpers after the midterm disappointment.
As for Daines, it is his job to manage the campaign committee that has as its entire purpose the election of GOP senators. The sole individual responsible for tanking that mission in 2022 was Donald Trump—whose endorsed candidates crashed and burned in every competitive race.
Not to mention that seven of Daines’s colleagues voted—just three years ago!—to convict Trump over his attempt to overthrow the government, a vote that carried with it the consequence of prohibiting him from being elected to federal office again in an unprecedented rebuke of a president by members of his own party. (Four of the seven GOP “guilty” votes are still in the Senate, and one of them, Mitt Romney, is up for re-election next year.)
In what world does it make sense for the guy who is ostensibly in charge of winning elections for the GOP to throw in with Trump after all that? There’s still ten months until the voting begins! And Daines decided to announce his endorsement on the disgraced, twice-impeached president’s nepo-baby’s podcast.
This is fucking madness!
In any sane world, endorsing Trump on Don Jr.’s Triggered pod would be grounds for replacing Daines with someone, anyone, who was awake in 2022. It should be a disqualifying act. Politico should be littered with pieces sourcing privately concerned Republicans on background about how they are worried the NRSC chair has lost his mind.
And yet news of the Daines endorsement was met with nary a peep from his colleagues, who are spending their time these days either hyperventilating over Bud Light or cowering in the corner in fear of a Trump bleat. Today, the big-foot Politico column about accepting a Trump nomination quotes a “shrewd” GOP strategist content to “go into the basement, ride out the tornado,” which raises the question, when exactly did you leave the basement, gimp? Yesterday, it was revealed that when the RNC looked at why they lost in 2022 they were too scared to even mention Trump’s name.
These are just the latest pieces of evidence that the number of politicians left in the party who haven’t been completely corrupted by Trump can be counted on one hand. And while the fingers of their affection might be tiny and pudgy, Ennis does have those dreamy blue eyes . . .
As every writer has written more than once: “they just can’t quit him.”