The Week From Hell, MAGA Edition

Some weeks suck.

Some weeks suck more than others.

This week has been a howling vortex of suck for the MAGA movement and Donald Trump. Imagine a black hole in the profound interstellar vacuum in the cold emptiness of space, drawing all matter and energy into its brutal singularity, an ineluctable and final journey into nothingness.

That’s the GOP this week. It’s been bad and will get worse.

Trump’s Trial

It is going about as well as expected, which is not well at all.

First, Trump’s sleeping during the trial led to a million jokes at his expense, and rightly so. For a man who loves to brag about his energy and stamina, Don Snorelone was a moment of ironic laughter that likely means he’ll be jacked on Adderall for the rest of the trial. That should end well.

Jury selection is proceeding apace, and that means Trump and his minions will be threatening them in short order. That’s going to go well.

Trump and his strip-mall lawyers are already at loggerheads with Judge Merchan over Trump’s courtroom behavior. He can’t stop hitting the dopamine button during his 2 am Truth Social rants, and each time he does, he gets closer to being sanctioned by the court, either financially or with (oh please, oh please, oh please) a visit to Riker’s.

Trust me, I’m an order of magnitude tougher than Trump emotionally and constitutionally, and my visit to Riker’s in the early 2000s — as an aide to Rudy, not as a criminal — was deeply uncomfortable. It’ll never happen, but a boy can dream.

Trump seemed shocked that being on trial meant he couldn’t just zip off on his own schedule and live his life. He was denied the chance to go golfing and attend the graduation of his beloved son, what's-his-name, and as Father of the Year, Trump seemed surprised that the court has him in its power and not the other way around.

This gives Biden a key advantage: the ability to campaign in swing states. Trump’s trials are friction, and friction is bad in campaigns. The one asset every campaign has in equal quantity is time, and you can never get a lost day back.

The Failed Vibepeachment of Alejandro Mayorkas

Well, that went over like a wet fart.

It was always a performative joke meant to feed the Fox News production team with a steady drip of show ideas. Still, the impeachment of DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas was always on the thinnest possible constitutional and legal grounds.

Even the bothsides media didn’t take it seriously, and this week’s solemn clown procession from the House to the Senate as its impeachment managers — including noted idiot Marge Three Toes — was greeted in the Senate with zero enthusiasm.

The impeachment died before any of the House’s clown delegation could make their specious arguments, and even Mitch McConnell and Mike Lee’s condemnation of the Senate voting to kill the impeachment was dull and hollow.

The investment in time and energy the MAGA House put into this shenanigan was enormous, and it all burned to the ground in less than four hours.

Whoopsie.

Mike Johnson and Ukraine Aid

“Maybe he lives, maybe he dies,” was how a GOP Chief of Staff put it to me this week. “But Greene and Massie don’t even have Matt Gaetz on board.” Ponder that.

If you’re too nuts for Matt Gaetz…you’re too nuts.

Johnson’s move to push through the foreign aid bills for Israel, Ukraine, et al. may be late, may be less than we hoped, and may be amended into some nightmare form. Still, they’re coming, and it’s a sign at long last that some vestigial recognition of international and political risk slithered up from his hindbrain and warned him of doom.

Why did Johnson make the change? The source above told me that the logjam had been broken for three reasons. First, Johnson saw the same polling many of us did: Ukraine aid is popular in the GOP swing districts, and if he has any chance of holding on as Speaker, he has to win every one of those seats. (He won’t, but let’s keep that our little secret.)

Next, even in safe GOP seats, a plurality of GOP voters favor aid to Ukraine.

Finally, a vital data point shows the distance between Washington D.C.’s pro-Putin tendency among the Bannon/Trump/J.D. Vance axis and normie Republicans in the country: among conservative Republicans, Vladimir Putin has a 6% favorable rating. Among very conservative Republicans, he has a 9% favorable rating.

Republicans in the pro-Putin caucus fought tooth and nail to kill this package. Their delays cost thousands of Ukrainian lives and are a stain on their honor that won’t wash out.

But in the end, they’re going to lose.

Ukraine will get an aid package just in the nick of time, and we’ll still get to hang Putin around the GOP’s neck in this election.

Trump’s Money Problems Keep Mounting

I may seem obsessed with Trump’s penny stock, but there’s a reason for my interest. First, it speaks to the deeply flawed perceptions that have informed Trump’s base since the very beginning; their idea has always been that “Trump is a bidnessman and we need a bidnessman to run ‘Meria.”

They learned this from a decade and a half of watching the Apprentice and a decades-long branding exercise, but all of that took place in the pre-social media era. Trump’s concatenating series of scams, grifts, flim-flams, smothering lays, and various other mountebank carney shows were nothing compared to what Truth Social would have delivered, and in the era before the lidless eye of social media, he might have been able to claim he made $6 billion from the deal.

Not now.

Now, social media is filled with the wailing and lamentations of Trump fans who invested in Truth Social, only to see the brutal hand of the market curl itself into a mailed fist and hammer the hell out of the stock price. Trump can’t cash out yet, he’s desperate for income, and the misery he and his rubvestors are feeling is life-giving.

I’ve saved this tweet from one of Trump’s more fanatic followers:

Mike Crispi via Twitter

Arizona

Arizona tops every swing state list. It’s one of the few remaining states truly in play, and both sides are investing massively there. At TLP, we’re deeply invested in Arizona, and it’s the home of more persuadable Republicans per capita than anywhere else.

Donald Trump sees the state as fertile ground for his border and immigration scaremongering. Mitch McConnell and the National Republican Senatorial Committee saw the early math of a Kari Lake, Reuben Gallego, and Kristen Sinema race as favorable, and despite Lake’s massive shortcomings as a candidate, they boosted her as a possible pickup.

Since the decision by the Arizona Supreme Court to go back to their 1854 abortion law, the firestorm has roared across the political landscape, leading to a panicked Trump and Lake walk back on the state’s abortion ban. They had an escape hatch offered this week in the Arizona Legislature, and the AZ GOP proudly decided to stay stuck on stupid.

The Arizona GOP is making it harder and harder for Trump and Lake to win, and this is also beginning to ripple through legislative races there. We went up with a big media effort there this week, reminding AZ voters that Trump and Lake are lying about their newfound anti-ban position:

Stay tuned because Arizona and abortion are two issues having a massive impact in the national contest.

RFK’s Collapse Is Coming

It’s been a long time coming, but the Kennedy clan will take the stage today with Joe Biden to offer their hearty endorsement. Every living soul in the extended Kennedy political family will be there.

All of them except Junkie von Antivax.

We dropped our first RFK ad this week, and if I may say so myself, it’s a banger:

The Kennedy threat to Joe Biden will drop significantly today and will keep dropping as people understand that RFK, Jr. isn’t carrying on the family legacy of public service but is a spoiler for Trump.

The only easy day, as they say, was yesterday.

This has been the worst week for Trump and MAGa I’ve seen in a very long time, and it’s only Thursday!