The Runback: Trumpism Is Dead. For Real This Time.
This time, the hole Trump has dug for himself just feels different.
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News and Politics
How The Hell Else Did You Think This Would End? While a Republican Red Wave sweeps most of the country, Dan Cox ushered in a bloodbath of predictable proportion
Cox Beaten Hard Across Maryland: Dan Cox Underperformed Statewide, proving that nominating good candidates is important.
Dan Cox Underperformed Larry Hogan Everywhere: Fun fact: running competent campaigns is important.
Schifanelli Headlines Slate Running for Maryland Republican Party Leadership: Collection of failed candidates attempting to lead state GOP.
Peroutka Refusing to Concede: Yeah, we're all shocked that the guy who thinks the South Will Rise Again can't accept defeat.
Baltimore County Sheriff Candidate Refuses to Concede: Republican Andy Kuhl trails by 15%, but that's not stopping him from veering into election denialism.
Nicole Beus Harris Running for Maryland GOP Chair: Wife of Congressman Andy Harris is the second announced candidate.
The Maine Legislature, by the numbers: A deep dive into the 2022 results
Sports
Jeff Saturday? Really? Is this is a stroke of brilliance or the last act of a desperate owner?
Culture
TABoose Rocks CCCC: Unique collaboration revisits old haunts
A Salute to Gallagher: Let’s smash a watermelon, together.
My life, Man…..
Great Near Miss Predictions in History
“They couldn't hit an elephant at this distance.”
- Gen John Sedgewick during the Civil War, seconds before he was killed by a Confederate bullet at the Battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse, 1864
“stock prices have reached 'what looks like a permanently high plateau.”
- Irving Fisher, economist, 13 days before the Stock Market Crash of 1989
This guy, last week:
The Monday Thought
I’ve declared Trumpism dead before. But this time, I think that Republican voters are ready to wash their hands of it this time.
This was one of the more amusing things I read the morning after the election.
Oz wasn’t the only Trump candidate that went down hard:
Candidates who’d won tough primaries with Trump’s support under-performed in races around the country, with some losing seats that the party expected to win. In places President Joe Biden had won by single digits, they did no better than Trump had two years ago.
Bo Hines, a former Yale football player who shopped around for a North Carolina district to run in, lost to Democratic state Sen. Wiley Nickel in a seat Biden carried by just 2 points. In Michigan, ex-Trump administration official John Gibbs successfully primaried one of the Republicans who’d impeached Trump, Peter Meijer. Gibbs lost his Grand Rapids district by 13 points, running well behind Trump’s own 2020 margin.
In Ohio, Trump-backed candidates J.R. Majewski, who was plagued by reports that he misrepresented his military service, and Madison Gesiotto Gilbert, lost House seats that had been drawn to go Republican in a decent year for the party…
….In New Hampshire, where U.S. Senate nominee Don Bolduc and House candidate Karoline Leavitt had claimed the 2020 election was stolen, both did far worse than expected, struggling in reliably Republican towns like Derry and Rochester where more moderate candidates, like Governor Chris Sununu, had won easily.
"They repeated Trump’s lies so much that not only did they believe them, they accepted the same level of conspiracy around themselves,” New Hampshire Democratic Party chairman Ray Buckley told Semafor. “They believed they were winning when they never were winning.”
And that doesn’t even take into account the obvious losers that Trump endorsed, a fact that Trump tried to gloss over
Trump referenced an “amazing” statistic multiple times on Wednesday, touting that 216 of his endorsed candidates won their races this week, compared to just 19 who didn’t. “While in certain ways yesterday’s election was somewhat disappointing, from my personal standpoint it was a very big victory,” he boasted. But the vast majority of those 216 candidates were incumbents or generic Republicans who would’ve won with or without his support; in some cases, Trump endorsed them only after they won their primary. From Dr. Oz and Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania, to Tim Michels in Wisconsin and Tudor Dixon in Michigan, the former president played a much more direct role in selecting the 19 losers.
Dan Cox was one of them.
Candidates who did get his endorsement intentionally forgot about him, like J.D. Vance.
Trump didn’t just fade to heat to his wife and others close to him. He is blaming….Mitch McConnell.
Of course, in the above Trump’s blatant racism also makes an appearance.
Trump, of course, still thinks he should run for President. A thought that even some of Trump’s closest allies and supporters think he should put the brakes on.
Trump is losing whatever grip he has on the base of the Republican Party, and he knows it. Beyond his outbursts and boasts, however, nothing better proves he realizes his political peril more than this:
On the day of the 2022 general election, Donald Trump sent a very clear 2024 message to Ron DeSantis: Stay out of the race or else.
“I would tell you things about him that won’t be very flattering – I know more about him than anybody – other than, perhaps, his wife,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News Digital.
(Trump, a Florida resident, did say Tuesday that he had voted for DeSantis for another term as governor.)
Trump’s rhetoric is the most open threat he has made against DeSantis in recent weeks. At a rally in Pennsylvania over the weekend, Trump referred to DeSantis as “Ron DeSanctimonious.”
Trump is feeling the heat of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s potential campaign for President. Can’t imagine why.
DeSantis is the frontrunner for the Republican nomination. He’s been on our list as the frontrunner in our power rankings for most of 2022. And it is within his ability to force the GOP to dispatch with Trumpism once and for all. He may not ultimately be the Republican nominee in 2024. But DeSantis can certainly take out Trump and end this charade once and for all.
We’ve all written off Trump before. In 2016, when the Billy Bush tape was released. His first impeachment. January 6th. His second impeachment. But this time, this time it feels a lot different. And hopefully, for the benefit of the country, it is.