Dumping Trump

Borepatch, for one, has seen quite enough, thank you.

In which I de-Endorse Donald Trump for President
I have been at least a luke-warm supporter of Donald Trump for years. Heck, there are over 200 posts there, mostly talking up his virtues. Go, read, if you don't believe me.

But I am no longer comfortable posting about how Donald Trump would make a good President, because I do not any longer think that he would.

The Donald has come out against Ron DeSantis, not that this is surprising - after all, they are opponents for the Republican nomination. I don't have a problem with that. What I do have a problem with is the dishonest way that this opposition has come out.

Donald Trump's people attacked Ron DeSantis for (a) not slavishly following The Donald's massively damaging lockdown recommendations and then for (b) being entirely correct in doing so.

Let me be clear: Ron DeSantis saved Florida's economy by ignoring advice from Donald Trump's administration. I was here. I saw this. I had just moved here from The Democratic People's Socialist Republic of Maryland and know people whose lives were destroyed by the Covid lockdowns imposed by a Republican Governor there. So where are the "Trump War Room" objections to the Covid-19 lockdowns from (Republican) Governor Larry Hogan?

[crickets]

Go ahead.  Amaze me.

[I'm waiting]

Yeah, that's what I thought. Someone who was all up The Donald's butt is a-OK, but someone who did something positive for his State (even though it went against your flunky's advice) is the Worst Thing Ever. Quite frankly, I'd have more respect for this if (a) their advice was worth a plug nickel and (b) if your flunkies weren't trying to undermine you at every step and if (c) you had had a damn clue about (b).

You didn't, and still don't seem to. Quite frankly, this is the biggest knock against you - you brought your enemies into your inner circle, and you won't recognize allies if they don't kiss your butt.

Ahh, but is there more, you ask? Oh, you just betcher there is.

Brian Kemp, Georgia’s Affable Culture Warrior
The governor who defied Trump to reopen during Covid was also ahead of DeSantis in combating woke corporations.

In April 2020, businesses in Georgia were shuttered by government decree as in most of the rest of the country. Mr. Kemp was hearing from desperate entrepreneurs: “ ‘Look man, we’re losing everything we’ve got. We can’t keep doing this.’ And I really felt like there was a lot of people fixin’ to revolt against the government.”

The Trump administration “had that damn graph or matrix or whatever that you had to fit into to be able to do certain things,” Mr. Kemp recalls. “Your cases had to be going down and whatever. Well, we felt like we met the matrix, and so I decided to move forward and open up.” He alerted Vice President Mike Pence, who headed the White House’s coronavirus task force, before publicly announcing his intentions on April 20.

That afternoon Mr. Trump called Mr. Kemp, “and he was furious.” Mr. Kemp recounts the conversation as follows:

“Look, the national media’s all over me about letting you do this,” Mr. Trump said. “And they’re saying you don’t meet whatever.”

Mr. Kemp replied: “Well, Mr. President, we sent your team everything, and they knew what we were doing. You’ve been saying the whole pandemic you trust the governors because we’re closest to the people. Just tell them you may not like what I’m doing, but you’re trusting me because I’m the governor of Georgia and leave it at that. I’ll take the heat.”

“Well, see what you can do,” the president said. “Hair salons aren’t essential and bowling alleys, tattoo parlors aren’t essential.”

“With all due respect, those are our people,” Mr. Kemp said. “They’re the people that elected us. They’re the people that are wondering who’s fighting for them. We’re fixin’ to lose them over this, because they’re about to lose everything. They are not going to sit in their basement and lose everything they got over a virus.”

Mr. Trump publicly attacked Mr. Kemp: “He went on the news at 5 o’clock and just absolutely trashed me...the local media’s all over me—it was brutal.” The president was still holding daily press briefings on Covid. “After running over me with the bus on Monday, he backed over me on Tuesday,” Mr. Kemp says. “I could either back down and look weak and lose all respect with the legislators and get hammered in the media, or I could just say, ‘You know what? Screw it, we’re holding the line. We’re going to do what’s right.’ ” He chose the latter course. “Then on Wednesday, him and [Anthony] Fauci did it again, but at that point it didn’t really matter. The damage had already been done there, for me anyway.”

The damage healed quickly once businesses began reopening on Friday, April 24. Mr. Kemp quotes a state lawmaker who said in a phone call: “I went and got my hair cut, and the lady that cuts my hair wanted me to tell you—and she started crying when she told me this story—she said, ‘You tell the governor I appreciate him reopening, to allow me to make a choice, because...if I’d have stayed closed, I had a 95% chance of losing everything I’ve ever worked for. But if I open, I only had a 5% chance of getting Covid. And so I decided to open, and the governor gave me that choice.’ ”

At that point, Florida was still shut down. Mr. DeSantis issued his first reopening order on April 29, nine days after Mr. Kemp’s. On April 28, the Florida governor had visited the White House, where, as CNN reported, “he made sure to compliment the President and his handling of the crisis, praise Trump returned in spades.”

Three years later, here’s the thanks Mr. DeSantis gets: This Wednesday Mr. Trump issued a statement excoriating “Ron DeSanctimonious” as “a big Lockdown Governor on the China Virus.” As Mr. Trump now tells the tale, “other Republican Governors did MUCH BETTER than Ron and, because I allowed them this ‘freedom,’ never closed their States. Remember, I left that decision up to the Governors!”

Uh huh. Well, with all due respect, sir, not according to Brian Kemp you didn’t.

All this, without even touching on Operation Warp Speed and the deadly Trump “Vaccine” at all.

I remain dead certain that Trump has no chance whatsoever of “stopping the steal” and regaining the White House, unless he does so with a cpl-three million armed MAGA insurrectionists behind him—REAL insurrectionists, that is, not the overhyped J6 kind. But at this point, I’m starting to wonder if he even has enough “ooomph” left to win the GOPe nomination.

Borepatch is hardly alone in his Trump Fatigue. All the melodrama; the schoolyard-level insults directed at those who should by all rights be his natural allies; the unfulfilled promises from his first term; the shockingly poor hiring decisions; the obstinate refusal to acknowledge the mistakes he made with Fauci, Wray, Birx, Comey, and so many others—all these things have added up to a big, fat deal-breaker for a lot of people who once were staunch Trump supporters.

I’m not even remotely likely to vote in any more presidential “elections” unless and until real, sweeping “election” reform is enacted, which is clearly not on the Uniparty menu. So I can’t fairly say I have a dog in the Trump vs DeSantis vs Pence  *gag* vs whothehellever fight, really. Be that as it may, I’m not immune to a twinge of Trump Fatigue myself with each new boast, each new declaration of what-all he’s by God gonna do “when” he retakes the White House in 2024, after doing none of those things back in 2016-2020 when he had the chance. Nowadays, I find myself about as likely to groan in exhausted ennui as I am to laugh along with him as I was still doing only a year or so ago. Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice? Not happening, sorry.

In Trump’s defense, it’s as I’ve said so many times, dating all the way back to the 2015 announcement of his candidacy: the dumpster fire in Mordor On The Potomac was not set alight by one president in one term; it took many decades of assiduous stoking, spanning many presidential administrations both Demican and Republicrat, to get the conflagration really roaring. That being so, it is wholly unreasonable to expect that one president might be able to put it out, particularly with the entirety of the Deep State apparatus and every critter in the Swamp sneakily turning off the hydrant and poking holes in the hose. Trump managed to dig out a decent firebreak to slow it down, but that was the extent of it. And even then, the fire jumped the line and continued on as before, the very day he left office.

The greatest service Trump did for his country, or ever could have done, was to pull back the curtain fully on the ugly realities of just what kind of central government we now have. Full props to him for doing so; it took great courage, devotion, and patriotic fervor to lay it all out on the line like he did, and I salute him for it. The responsibility for fixing it, however—assuming such is even possible at all—now rests entirely upon We The People. We’ll soon see whether or not we’re up to it.