Trumpworld has taxed my vocabulary. I mean, how many ways can one say, “I just can’t believe it,” or, “Is there no bottom?”
The newest challenge— but indisputably not the last— comes from Trump’s White House physician-turned-Texas-congressman Ronnie Jackson.
So what’s so hard to believe? Jackson’s tweet about a conspiracy theory that he concocted after the new “omicron” variant of the coronavirus showed up last week and travel restrictions tightened up again. His only comment on Covid— remember, this guy’s supposed to be a doctor whose obligation under the Hippocratic oath is to help people understand how to stay healthy— was, “Here comes the MEV - the Midterm Election Variant!”
If you don’t understand what he’s getting at, read on: “They (the Democrats) NEED a reason to push unsolicited nationwide mail-in ballots. Democrats will do anything to CHEAT during an election - but we’re not going to let them!”
A Fox News host named Pete Hegseth then ran with the ball himself: “Count on a variant about every October, every two years.”
You see their baseless point here: so many citizens, scared last year because of the pandemic to cast their votes in public places, used absentee ballots instead and that’s why Trump lost. Which is why, according to the twisted logic of Trumpworld, so many suppressive voting laws had to be enacted in so many Republican-controlled states.
By the way, just in case you need reminding, Trump didn’t lose because so many people voted. He lost because so many people voted against him.
And remember, this off-the-wall theorist Ronnie Jackson is the same one who gushed in 2018 after Trump’s annual physical, “He has incredibly good genes, and it’s just the way God made him.” It sounds like when he tweets today about Covid, he still relies on the sound science-based medicine he used at the White House.
No, I just can’t believe it.
Then of course there’s Colorado Congresswoman Laurent Boebert’s latest— but again, indisputably, not the last— affront. Make that, “affronts." Two videos have surfaced of the gun-toting legislator crudely amusing supporters at two different events by telling a tale about getting into a Capitol elevator with a staffer and running into Minnesota’s Muslim Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. “It was just us three in there,” Boebert said, “and I looked over and I said, ‘Well, looky there, it's the Jihad Squad. She doesn't have a backpack, she wasn't dropping it and running, so we're good’.”
Just when it seems these people have dug to the bottom, they dig even deeper, for Boebert also said at one of those events that Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who is gay and recently became the father of twins, was “still at home trying to figure out how to chest feed.”
To say that’s low-class for a member of Congress isn’t nearly strong enough.
Congresswoman Omar, by the way, says that she and Boebert never even had an encounter in an elevator, that Colorado’s QAnon cultist, no slave to the truth, made the whole thing up. Boebert’s unsurprisingly unrepentant response has been to berate Omar further: “I will fearlessly continue to put America first, never sympathizing with terrorists," she said on social media after a phone call between them failed. "Unfortunately Ilhan can't say the same thing and our country is worse off for it."
What’s hard to believe here is not that there are bigots like Boebert out there in plain sight— ever since Donald Trump traveled down the Trump Tower escalator and said he was running for president, we’ve known that— but rather, that the bosses of their party don’t denounce them for how they behave.
Then again, the bosses and the bigots have their own rifts to overcome. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia made this complaint last week about House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who on a daily basis talks out of both sides of his mouth: “He doesn't have the full support to be speaker… conservatives like me, Paul Gosar, and many others just constantly take the abuse by the Democrats.”
Paul Gosar, in case you already have forgotten in the pandemonious pace of the news cycle, is the Arizona congressman who was censured for putting out an animated video showing him slashing the throat of liberal New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (and who, after the censure vote, put the video out again). And Greene made her comments on the podcast of the accused pedophile congressman from Florida, Matt Gaetz.
I really can’t believe how deep their bottom goes.
As for the Trump-courting McCarthy? According to Greene, after she slung her arrows, he called to tell her about “what he has planned ahead.” He is spineless. She is mollified.
Then there’s the very heart of Trumpworld itself. Advisor Stephen Miller— he of the affinity for white nationalists— asserted on Fox, “If President Trump was still in office… we'd already have modified vaccines to deal with the new variant (omicron).” Forget the fact that this newest variant of Covid was detected and identified just last week.
And Donald Trump Jr.?
Also on Fox (which rolls out the red carpet for loonies like these), he praised “riots in Europe on a daily basis now against the vaccine mandates” and castigated Americans for “sitting there like sheep like, ‘Oh this is great we’ll just go along with’ what these guys who have gotten nothing right in the last two years tell us. It’s absolute insanity.”
If there’s any insanity here, it’s that two years ago, even just one year ago, Junior’s dad was the guy “telling us” things from the Oval Office. And that apparently young Trump thinks it would be awesome to have riots here like they’ve had In Europe.
There is no bottom and the scary part is, all of this disingenuous and dangerous drivel from Trumpworld is just from the past week. Which is why I’ve run out of other ways to say, I just can’t believe it.
For almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks, 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 and politics at home and international 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, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. Some of his writing also appears on a website he co-founded, BoomerCafe.com.