Half a trip to the American lunatic fringe came with Donald Trump’s unlikely flirtation with the idea of running for president nearly a decade ago. Now the second installment of the overall lunacy is here with withdrawal of the man who beat him when he ran again after the pandemic. The reason for the this upheaval? Encroaching senility. All this just after an assassination attempt against Trump many have cast wholly into the realm of conspiracy theories.
Madness?
In God We Trust, you bet.
The new Democratic candidate, a smart but untested lady, now has Trump all to herself, and a running mate conjured out of near nowhere.
Trump insists he now has a better chance of winning but some disagree. In wild card city, anything can happen.
What is certain is that the Democrats miscalculated badly in not insisting Biden step aside a year ago, when cracks in his mental armor had already begun opening, soon revealing wholesale fissures.
As always, the party tarried, praying all would somehow hold together through 2024. It was an error, call it laissez faire, that may soon exact a dear price.
Time now to buckle up for Trump-Harris, the loudmouth warrior and a priestess wrenched from the tame vice presidency and tossed into trench warfare.
The reason Biden should have been removed earlier, willingly or by twisted arm, was a simple one: lunatic fringe Force 1, Trump, who demonstrated early that revenge was on his mind, and no one does revenge as thoroughly as Trump, a veteran of decades of nastiness.
As senior Democrats patted Biden on the back, Trump launched trenchant attack after trenchant attack on Biden – calling him the worst president in history – while making it clear to all who wished to pay attention that this second run, indictments notwithstanding, would be fifty shades of ferocious.
He could be convicted a dozen times and still run to win.
This the Democrats ignored.
He could be openly disdained by global leaders, a great many of whom begged Biden to stand tall.
But Biden could not comply. In many ways he never could, winning on the strength of the anti-Trump 2020 groundswell – much the way Barrack Obama won in 2008, as the “Yes We Can” for all those weary of the eight Bush years and endless war. Simply for winning, Obama was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, the first time the award was conferred on someone who had yet to do a thing.
Long ago, the Democrats should have stipulated Biden’s as a one-term affair, given his age, at times dubious lucidity, and the desperate need to reinvent the party, girding for a second Trump swoop-in.
But good soldier Biden and his party waited and waited and waited, and presto! It is now nearly too late.
The Democrats are great organizers, he wrote, but awful at recognizing the handwriting on the wall and acting on it. That would be too illiberal. Too non-hopeful. Too pragmatic. Theirs is a let’s wait and see approach.
So the waiting was done.
Welcome today to the See.
If Trump is a madman, those who run his opposition troops are just as mad, though the insanity is more spread out.
Time now to buckle up for Trump-Harris, the loudmouth warrior and a priestess wrenched from the tame vice presidency and tossed into trench warfare – two rockets launched from opposite ends of the lunatic fringe now on a collision course.
Maybe it was meant to be, but seen from afar – I am in Rome – it seems like an episode of the old “Game of Thrones,” in which counting the dead is a spectator sport.
