Every donation to the Republicans is now a donation directly to Trump’s pocket.
I suspect that they’re purging some of the very people who have the most experience at lining up those donations, though. Here’s hoping that their general habits of mismanagement and pettiness disrupt RNC operations and efficiency enough to limit the gains from the takeover.
Rather, I fully expect that we’ll be seeing $10k+ podiums, expensive “researching location” trips, and countless other expenses for the RNC elite in addition to countless expense increases in fundraising efforts based around the paying Trump for permission to use his likeness.
IE the grift will intensify.
Apparently the RNC purge extends to more than 60 staff persons across the organization’s political, communications and data divisions. Contracts with several vendors will also be severed. The Trump campaign will then merge its existing operations into the RNC.
Republicans deserve exactly what they’re about to get out of this – Trump and his army of leeches will absolutely suck the RNC dry through inflated salaries, vendor contracts to companies they own, etc. Meanwhile Republican candidates for other offices can go pound sand.
But meanwhile the uneducated, ignorant, stupid and violent will brainlessly continue following and supporting them.
It’s frightening.
So ends the GOP turned into another Trump dependency to ruin and walk away from when he can get no more from it. Best hope here is that the Miller/Bannon MAGA faction will find themselves holding the bag for the ruin, rather than their hoped-for final takeover of the country itself.
Yeah there’s no other Republican candidates that are getting a single solitary penny from the RNC this year. The orange a****** might decide to trade some money for some loyalty and if someone grovel’s hard enough in public he might throw them a couple of dollars but the vast majority are going to have to go it alone for this election.
Republican Party 1854 - 2024 (good riddance)
MAGA Party 2024 - ?
(As a humorous aside I mostly use my phone for posting, and when I used the talk to text it recorded “go it alone” as “go get a loan” which is one of those situations where the typo might actually be more appropriate than what I originally intended on.)
Here’s a Kos story on the topic:
Hoo boy. They are going whole hog on the stuck pig, ain’t they?
I don’t, however, think it affects my thesis; rather, it makes the consequences even worse for the GOP when they find they have a candidate they can’t pick up without him dissolving through their fingers.
Trump is degenerating so quickly that he just won’t be able to run. Meanwhile, the GOP is making it so that they won’t be able to pivot to another candidate with any level of plausibility. Worst of all possible worlds.
Meanwhile, Biden kicked ass with the SOTU and the polls are definitely looking up (though they are bullshit either way).
“I’d buy that for a dollar” said the guy in Robocop. I will too!
You know, best case scenario (something I don’t indulge in often these days) Trump’s takeover of the RNC is complete AND he becomes un-concealable senile while running. Those who still support Trump, including those dependent upon him (including the new RNC) are unable to gel around a new candidate, and the the downstream effects (being unable to release money to new candidates and down-ballot candidates) while the Trump team tries to use the money to continue to stave off Trump’s legal issues (especially after he defames Carroll and eveyrone else a few more times in his increasing madness) means a minor blue wave.
Trump finally gets hospitallized, but his RNC team keeps the money for his ongoing issues (those lawsuits aren’t just going away) or instead tries to pivot to one of the spawn as the heir apparerent, all male versions of which have the charisma of toe fungus. So we get at least 2-4 years of absolute financial chaos in MAGA land.
I think worst case is more likely, but a person can dream!
I don’t see anything in this that is unrealistic.
Mostly, I think my threshold for unconcealably senile is much higher than yours: 90+% of those voting for Trump are getting their information from Fox or even more extreme sources. And they’ve been trained to believe what they’re told, NOT what they see and hear.
If all Fox shows is soundbites, and a team-member takes over the Xits and Twuths, he could end up in office while completely off his rocker, with sufficiently complicit support, which he’ll have.
I think I said it upthread, but in my opinion the breaking point for Trump isn’t senility, but literally losing the ability to speak. At the moment, his rally speeches already feature a decent chunk of deeply incoherent word salad, and another large chunk of “extemporizing” that’s just him remixing the same stuff over and over again on autopilot. The rest is a mix of actual off-the-cuff griping and reading from the teleprompter.
The further he dips into senility, the more he’ll lean on those autopilot remixes. The incoherent word salad will increase as a total percentage of his speeches, but not enough to change any minds.
So long as the MAGA-controlled GOP can wheel him in front of a microphone and turn him loose to blow his dogwhistles and bitch about Hillary and lawsuits and whatever, he’ll be the face of the party.
You folks better pray hard that what you’re saying comes true.
Because I suspect Trump is going to be president again, and this time it’s going to get REALLY ugly.
All this talk about Trump’s mental state reminded me of the story about Reagan back in the '80s having dementia and it not being widely known because it was hidden? I’m not exactly sure how the story goes. Born in 81 so the Reagan years are largely a historical thing to me as I wasn’t paying attention to politics until the 90s.
If Trump’s mental States truly does degrade to the point that people are positing in this thread they would do everything they possibly could to hide it for as long as they could.
There’s long been speculation about this, and one of his sons (Ron) has claimed that his father had Alzheimer’s while he was in office – a claim that his brother, Michael, has strongly disputed.
Reagan was not officially diagnosed with Alzheimer’s until 1994, five years after he left office, and was apparently not ever diagnosed with any cognitive issues while he was president. The article above mentions that a NYT medical writer talked with Reagan’s White House doctors in 1997, and found no evidence of any dementia while Reagan was in office.
However, none of that has stopped people from speculating.
Ah yes, it was Alzheimer’s not dementia. I got that detail wrong.
And yes I’ve always treated it largely as an urban legend. There just isn’t any hard evidence out there it’s all just speculation from different sources.
Incorrect. And did you say that you’re not from the US?
Agreed, but only in a completely literal sense. If he just cannot make sounds with his larynx, and his docs cannot fix it, his political life will indeed end.
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Re Reagan, Alzheimer’s is a fatal disease, and he died fifteen years after leaving office. It’s possible to live that long with Alzheimer’s, but average from diagnosis to death seems to be 5.8 years. So — his diagnosis ten years before death is unlikely to have been a late one.
It’s my opinion that many of you are whistling past the graveyard. I hope beyond hope that I’m wrong.
And yes, I live in the apartment above the crack house that currently has a smouldering fire in the living room couch…
NM. On review that was a tacky response.
Still, I’m curious what your comment about the apt above the crack house, etc is supposed to mean.