New Orleans The House of Representatives January 6th committee’s second public hearing offers a key lesson that anyone should learn by heart, if they didn’t know it deeply already: when your key people tell you, “it’s over”, the odds are clear, that’s it’s over, and time to go. In a lifetime of somehow miraculously getting over, former President Trump was never paying attention in the class of life, when this lesson was taught so clearly. Now all of us are being taken to the back of the class to hear how many times the various folks, including his family and devoted staffers, told him he had lost, and he refused to hear.
Former Attorney General Barr, who is on nobody’s list of good guys over recent years, found the claims of voter fraud and election day shenanigans totally unsubstantiated. He thought Trump was detached from reality. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, and Barr is right as rain on this one!
His last campaign manager described himself as being the head of “team normal”, as the insiders called folks who still had their feet on the ground rather than somewhere in outer space. He claims to have advised Trump directly and repeatedly that he was losing, that votes against him were still coming in from states where was losing, yet Trump still insisted on claiming he was winning and had won, ignoring the votes and the facts of the matter.
The committee produced a cattle call of truth tellers, rather than soothsayers. Trump, as we know, refused to hear any of this. He seems to have listened to only one man, and that man may have been drunk, if you believe any of these witnesses and their speculation. That man was Rudy Giuliani, formerly of New York City, and now seemingly from Planet Who Knows, next to the bright star, Make Believe.
Giuliani is a piece of work. Some biographer is going to have problems keeping his life story less 500 pages in length. The only real question will be if anyone will be willing to read it, since his relationship with Trump over recent years has found him so far off the rails, even though Trump has been more than ready to ride merrily along with him. His handiwork in Ukraine managed to get headlines in Trump’s first impeachment hearings. Now, his work during and after the election is so preposterous and unhinged as the chief enabler of the big lie by the big liar that it is fair to say that if he doesn’t have a bad reputation, then he has no reputation at all.
Trump has been like the “Creature from the Black Lagoon” who somehow keeps emerging from the swamp. He will keep trying to come back, but there’s no dry land ahead for him. He still doesn’t want to believe it’s over, no matter how clear that must be to everyone else, both then and now. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t have some support and true believers, but as each shoe drops and each day goes by, his base is shrinking smaller and smaller. It’s over, and if the Republicans somehow nominate him in 2024, he could be beaten by anyone, including an old mangey dog. I’ve been wrong before, but, mark my words, I’m right about this.