Famously, Donald Trump was recorded in 2006 saying he could do Anything because he was “a star”–including grabbing women by their genitals. This “Access Hollywood tape” became public ten years later, not long before the 2016 election, and many expected it to derail Trump’s chances.
But it didn’t. Many voters were “fine” with it.
There’s not much that bothers 2026 right-wing Americans. Not much that one of their candidates can do, other than offend their Dear Leader. But Dear Leader himself seems to get a pass on just about everything.
Is it possible that this could change?
(My bolding.)
There are two notable aspects of this story, and only one seems to be making waves: the “Donald hiding in the catering truck” aspect. Already there are tons of memes:
This is what’s catching on: the cowardice of a hiding-in-the-catering President.
To my mind the uglier aspect of this story is the “decoy” one. As many have pointed out, there was no need to turn Air Force One into a decoy target. Instead, there could have been an announcement of a mechanical issue. The smaller plane actually containing Donald could have left and gotten to its destination and then a new announcement (that he was already on safe ground) and then Air Force One, now known to be empty of Presidents, could have taken off.
But Donald liked the idea of missiles going for a decoy. A decoy which contained not only Journalists (Enemies of the People!) but also jet staff and even many of Donald’s own aides. (You can imagine how thrilled they must have been to learn they’d been offered up for sacrifice…)
Still, it’s the ‘inside the catering truck’ part of the story that is grabbing people. A lot.
I am wondering if Donald can recover from this. It may be that we have finally reached the part of a Dear Leader’s life in which he is no longer Teflon. (Of course the hard-core white supremacists will stick with him no matter what. But it’s possible that many of his 2024 voters could…become disenchanted.)
Article on the Decoy story: much longer and excellent all the way through:
Unfortunately, comedic as this is, I think this catering-truck incident will have probably just 4 days of attention before everyone moves on to the next absurd thing he says/does.
But I watch with interest the combination of these “Coward” memes with the news that Iran has just said they won’t even bother negotiating again until Trump is gone.
He has to be having trouble putting this aside and Thinking Positively. So much of the news is about his being a scared loser. (Which for him is the very, very worst.)
Some TV pundit I heard earlier today was saying that, especially for the Republicans, bad behavior doesn’t really matter anymore. You’ve got Trump, of course, but the latest news with Max Miller, for example. To contrast with (as said by the pundit) somebody like Gary Hart or even just the photo of Dukakis in a tank. I’m sure we could come up with more examples from both parties if we tried.
I’m not sure hypocrisy really bothers the voting public anymore. Or if they don’t like it, they write it off as all politicians being lying corrupt hypocrites. For that matter, I’d say that’s more likely for why these sorts of scandals don’t stick as much anymore. If they’re all scum, pick the scum that’s slightly more on my side.
Kind of like the decoy bit of this story. I agree, even if there was a credible threat there was no reason to actually have the plane take off. Worst case a bunch of people are stuck in Turkey for a day until it can be reported that Trump is in Germany or wherever. But I also think a lot of people these days really hate large parts of the media and wouldn’t care if an entire planeload of them went down. And that it’s going to be far broader a cross-section of the public than you might think.
Few would argue with this. But that’s about “bad behavior” in the sense of being Aggressive and Dominating…which the right loves.
The right does NOT love Cowardly and Weak and Ineffectual. Not at all. And while Donald has been providing tons of examples of Ineffectual since he started to bomb Iran, his fans have been able to overlook it. Change the subject, lalalala!
But the photos of Donald crouching in the food truck are not so easy to ignore. And by tomorrow I would guess there will be hundreds of them.
Weakness doesn’t work for the right. They’re fine with vicious, but they don’t like cowering. That’s why I’m thinking there’s a chance this could stick around for a while.
Well, yeah. It’s plausible. The more that Donald is perceived as a lame duck, the better Iran will do.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard doing well is far from being something to celebrate. They are a brutal regime and the world would be better off with them out of power.
But the odds of Donald being the one to achieve this seem tiny to pretty much everyone in the world who’s paying any attention at all.
I wouldn’t be surprised if some on the right are actually spinning it the opposite way. “Our Dear Leader is facing such intense threat from America’s enemies, specifically Iran, that he was forced to take unprecedented measures to defend himself against a plot to shoot down his airplane. What a cunning ruse to fool the foes. What a badass. He faces such an intense threat that no other previous POTUS had to do this before!”
After years of observing the Trumpiverse, I’ve seen that almost nothing Trump does can’t be spun into some angle of “well, here’s the GOOD interpretation of why he did that…”
I was channel-surfing during dinner and Hannity’s opening was about the heroic actions Trump took in the face of Iran’s assassination attempt. I didn’t stick around to hear his justification for that point of view.
