Donald trrump

Ultimately, I suspect, John Durham will break your heart. At least, he will if you think, as I once hoped, that he was going to get to the bottom of the soft coup that was the Russia Collusion Hoax. I admit that I have been bucked up, somewhat, by Durham’s three indictments. Why only somewhat? First, I remember the many long months of silence. He didn’t call, didn’t write. I began to think he didn’t care. Then, in August of 2020, the radio crackled briefly to life. Amazing! John Durham, who had initially been presented as a sort of super Canadian Mounty, a prosecutor who always got his man, had come in from the cold with that scary facial hair and flashing spectacles with a real, honest-to-goodness indictment. At first blush, anyway, it seemed like a choice one.

Glenn Youngkin’s victory over Terry McAuliffe is a loud wake-up call for the Democrats, who attempted to fuse the GOP candidate for Virginia governor to Donald Trump’s hip and failed miserably. Joe Biden won the commonwealth by ten points a year ago — yet Youngkin beat his Democratic opponent by two points. A slew of other Republican victories in key states have led to frantic analyses on cable news and soul-searching postmortems about why the Democrats proved so unpopular. Sure, anti-incumbent sentiment and Biden’s historic disapproval ratings haven’t helped, but one clear takeaway has emerged: the Trump boogeyman no longer works.

Eventually, November 2 will be seen as a key date in American history. I am not thinking of November 2, 2021, however, the day of Glenn Youngkin’s stunning, delicious, gratifying victory in the Virginia gubernatorial race. Important though Youngkin’s victory was and is, it was prepared for and defined by a preceding triumph. The date I am thinking of is November 2, 2020. That was the date on which Donald Trump signed the executive order establishing the 1776 Commission, the purpose of which was to “encourage our educators to teach our children about the miracle of American history and make plans to honor the 250th anniversary of our founding.” 1776, mind you, not 1619.

As much as former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe would like voters to believe it, Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin is not Donald Trump. Yet Youngkin has inspired the same level of desperation and hysteria as the former president from his opponents and the media. The Lincoln Project celebrated Halloween a few days early this year by sending young Democratic activists to a Glenn Youngkin rally dressed as white nationalists. They came clad in the Charlottesville special: white button downs, khaki pants, camo hats and carrying tiki torches. Images of the trick initially spread on social media with the allegation that the individuals were Youngkin supporters.

Heavens to Betsy! It seems that Tucker Carlson has gone full truther. Or, if you prefer, disinformer about the tawdry events of January 6, when a motley crew of Trump supporters and Oath Keepers, who often appear to be one and the same, somehow took it into their heads not simply to protest the outcome of the presidential election but to storm the Winter Palace. The trials of the perpetrators are ongoing. A House committee, which includes Liz Cheney as well as Adam Kinzinger, is investigating. And most Republican politicians, at least the ones with their eyes on regaining a congressional majority, are trying to put the episode firmly in the rear-view mirror. Not Tucker.

Last weekend brought some minor internet drama courtesy of Amanda Moore, a progressive activist who outed herself as having spent the past year “infiltrating” right-wing groups. On Twitter, she posted pictures that she'd taken with various luminaries of Trumpworld such as General Michael Flynn, MyPillow founder Mike Lindell and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. She also claimed to have been given a counterfeit vaccination card from a member of a QAnon conspiracy group and to have worn a wire the whole time, recording the details of her meetings and chance encounters held under false pretenses. “We were literally at the same events,” she crowed at a photojournalist who sent a somewhat vulgar tweet mocking her.

Delaware used to be Cale Boggs country, almost as much as Massachusetts belonged to the Kennedys. Boggs served as governor, congressman and twice as Delaware senator, so in late 1972, when he was seeking a third term, the race looked sewed up. But as summer turned to fall, his 28-point lead evaporated. Voters started paying attention to Boggs’s rival, a Democrat youngster with fire in his belly and a spring in his step. Anti-Boggs ads said his best days were behind him. According to his fresh-faced opponent, Boggs was a ‘helluva nice guy’ but, after decades in power, he had ‘lost that twinkle in his eyes’. On election day, Boggs lost by a margin of 3,000 votes. The people of Delaware sent to Washington a 30-year-old thruster named Joe Biden.

In the waning months of the 2020 campaign, President Trump cast himself as the defender of the suburbs. It didn’t work. Suburban voters made Joe Biden president. But although Trump lost that election, the pro-suburb talking points he popularized didn’t go away. Last month, after California legalized duplexes statewide, the outrage came roaring back. Tucker Carlson fumed that soon 'drug-addicted vagrants’ would be terrorizing innocent American suburbanites. Right-wing Twitter personality Auron MacIntyre perceived a plot to destroy the wealth concentrated in single-family homes and force everyone to live in the 'urban decay’ of 'the favela’.

Last Wednesday, Rep. Liz Cheney seized the opportunity during a House Armed Services Committee hearing to apologize to Gen. Mark Milley. She went on to assail the 'despicable' questioning of her Republican colleagues, who wanted information about phone calls Milley had made to a Chinese official last fall, in which the general had assured him that, were President Trump to launch a nuclear attack against China (presumably out of sheer frustration, or perhaps idle curiosity to learn what the result would be), he would tip him ahead of the fact. This, of course, was a direct affront to the 70 percent of Wyoming citizens for had voted for Trump in 2020. Several days before that, Cheney had confessed to 60 Minutes that she had been wrong to oppose gay marriage in the past.

It went virtually unnoticed in April when Donald Trump recruited Susie Wiles to oversee his fundraising operation and create a system for issuing endorsements. Wiles is a veteran political consultant in Florida, having worked for Sen. Rick Scott and Gov. Ron DeSantis and helped with Trump’s campaigns there. 'The president tells everyone around Mar-a-Lago that Susie is now in charge,’ an adviser told Politico. Despite media narratives of Jared Kushner’s withdrawal from Trump’s affairs, one source with knowledge of Mar-a-Lago’s inner workings said Wiles serves a 'buffer to give Kushner distance’. Wiles currently works with Kushner confidant Bill Stepien on endorsements. According to broadcaster Stew Peters, Wiles isn’t taking a paycheck for her work.

There used to be an old joke that there were more members of the FBI who were members of the American Communist party than there were actual believers in rule from Moscow. Something like that seems to have occurred with the much ballyhooed 'Justice for J6' rally in Washington DC. Justice, schmustice. Much as I had expected, almost no one rallied to the rally. A grand total of two people were arrested. Seldom has Washington seemed more peaceful. The notion that DC was about to be stormed may have given a lascivious pleasure to those liberals convinced that the enemy is not just at the gates but within them already. But that was never in the cards. Having been caught napping on January 6, there was no way a repetition of those sanguinary events would recur.

All eyes are on the flyover state of Ohio as the fight for the future of Trumpism unfolds. In January, Ohio Republican Sen. Rob Portman announced he was bowing out of politics for good. His vacancy has set up a rare primary between two candidates offering two different versions of Donald Trump's amorphous ideology. One believes the former president's rhetoric should assimilate with bygone Tea Party-era politics and contemporary culture war talking points. The other is running on the populist rollercoaster that slung Trump into the White House. Rust Belt boy wonder Josh Mandel, who served in the statehouse and was state treasurer for almost a decade, touts a pro-Trump campaign 'to protect the Judeo-Christian bedrock of America.