(Dobbs) Inmate # P01135809 for President?
It’s an indignity, not just for the ex-president if he’s even capable of the embarrassment, but for America.
This is the guy for whom six of the eight presidential aspirants who showed up for the GOP debate Wednesday night in Milwaukee disgraced themselves.
Of course typical of his arrogance, he didn’t show up. Instead he disgraced himself 24 hours later at the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta, becoming America’s first president, current or former, to be immortalized in a mug shot. Now, he is not just former and wannabe future president Donald J. Trump. He is inmate # P01135809. It’s an indignity, not just for the ex-president if he’s even capable of the embarrassment, but for America.
In fact the whole flow of the once proud Republican Party is an embarrassment. At the debate, when Fox anchor Bret Baier posed the question to the candidates, “If former president Trump is convicted in a court of law, would you still support him as your party’s choice?” and asked for a show of hands, six hands shot up. Four went up immediately. Ron DeSantis spent a couple of seconds testing the waters, looking to his right, then his left, before joining the shameless crowd. Mike Pence jumped in a second later.
Yes, they were saying, we will support him no matter what. As Bulwark editor Charlie Sykes said the morning after on NPR, “It was a pathetic moment.” It’s as if they’ve decided that in spite of the 91 criminal counts against Donald Trump, the old axiom that goes “When there’s smoke, there’s fire” doesn’t apply here.
It’s getting scary.
What’s scary is that despite all the trouble Trump’s in, he and his bull-headed base still have these guys cowed. I’ve got to believe that there was a time in most of their lives, probably in all of their lives before they were corrupted by their political ambitions, when they would have condemned the serious and seditious crimes that Trump is charged with committing. With recordings and witnesses to corroborate Trump’s culpability, the criminality is pretty obvious, whether he’s actually convicted of any of the 91 charges or not.
What’s scary is that when Chris Christie, who did not pledge to support Trump, spoke to that point during Wednesday night’s debate, saying, “Whether or not you believe that the criminal charges are right or wrong, the conduct is beneath the office of President of the United States,” he was booed.
What’s scary is that the guy who seems to have gotten the biggest lift from his debate performance was the 38-year-old billionaire entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who works the hardest to out-Trump Trump. Charlie Sykes explained it: “He speaks fluent MAGA.”
Maybe the Trump crowd in the debate hall who cheered for Ramaswamy and jeered at Christie don’t represent a decisive block of American voters. As Christie said in a post-debate interview, “Not every Republican primary voter in America was in the arena.” But what’s scary is, Trump’s still the easy frontrunner in the race for next year’s GOP nomination, so maybe his devotees will make a decisive difference.
What’s scary is that behind that scowling face and angry eyes in the mugshot, there are dollar signs. Before Trump’s plane had even cleared Georgia air space, his campaign was fundraising off his arrest, fundraising off the first presidential mugshot in the long history of this nation. An email to Trump’s millions of gullible givers called the mugshot “a symbol of America’s defiance of tyranny.”
It just looked like a symbol of humiliation to me.
But Trump stuck with his strategy of no contrition, no remorse. “If you challenge an election,” he told reporters on the tarmac in Atlanta, “you should be able to challenge an election.” Of course he left a few things out…. like…. you should be able to challenge it within the law. That would mean no conscious lies, no conscious extortion, no conscious schemes to subvert the election.
What’s scary is, my personal instinct that Donald Trump can’t possibly be his party’s standard-bearer in 2024, because all he’s done since losing in 2020 is darken his reputation and defile democracy, might be wrong. An Axios headline early this week about the latest presidential polls said, “Trump seems bulletproof among GOP voters.”
A national Quinnipiac poll showed that an astounding 85% of Republicans don’t think he should be prosecuted. And his popularity actually grew after the most recent indictment in Georgia. According to the polling average compiled yesterday by the website FiveThirtyEight, Trump commands the support of 51.6% of Republicans.
What’s scary is, Donald Trump’s not going away. His true believers aren’t going away. If we don’t want him returning to the most powerful office on earth, we’re going to have a real fight on our hands.
Last night after being booked and released on bond, the former president phoned into the ultra-conservative television network Newsmax and called this “a very sad day for our country.” That’s the one thing he got right.
Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
While you are absolutely correct, the (i hope) final debasement of the party of Lincoln will occur next Nov in a democratic sweep of the exec and Congress giving Biden 2 years to fix Scotus.... question for me is what will replace the republican party after that?
Try to imagine what would have happened if President Obama had acted exactly like trump, if he had lost the election. All of those who now support trump with such fervor would have called for a lynching. Where has our national sanity gone?