Back in 2016, Ann Coulter was widely mocked for calling the presidential race for Donald Trump just days after he announced that he was running. On the eve of the election, she declared him her favourite politician in history.
So, when Coulter calls out Trump’s woeful contribution to the midterms and, just days before he announced his 2024 run, tells him to “shut up forever”, it’s worth paying attention.
Why did one of Trump’s most vociferous backers turn so hard? Because, she says (and not without foundation), he failed to keep his promises. He “directly” betrayed his political base of “Americans waiting their whole lives for someone to care about them”.
Dispute that as you might, it’s hard to dispute that Trump’s contribution to the midterms was mostly destructive. It’s as hard to see his effect on the 2024 presidential campaign being any better for the Republicans.
As Coulter points out, the biggest Republican winners in the midterms were Ron DeSantis and Brian Kemp: “the two Republicans Donald Trump hates with the hot, hot hate of a thousand suns.” The biggest losers were his hand-picked candidates, Doug Mastriano, Herschel Walker and Dr Oz.
Sure, it might be argued that some 90% of Trump endorsed candidates won — but endorsed is not the same as hand-picked. Mastriano, Walker and Oz were all specific Trump captain’s-picks. Two of them were clobbered, and the last lost narrowly to a vegetable.
In Georgia, we got both types of Trump’s electoral wizardry: the bad and the horrendously bad. First, after narrowly losing the state in 2020, he went on a jihad against the Republican governor, Brian Kemp, and secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger […]
Trump so hated Kemp that he finally dipped into his $100 million political PAC to fund something other than his own businesses and rallies, giving a half-million dollars to Perdue.
Primary election results: Kemp trounced Perdue 74% to 22%.
Raffensperger — the Georgia secretary of state who Trump bullied because he refused to scare up 11,780 more Trump votes in 2020 and who he accused of committing “a criminal offense” — won his primary by nearly 20 points.
I think Georgia voters were trying to send a message: Please just give us a normal Republican.
Hand-picking Walker was even worse.
Senate candidate Herschel Walker is 100% Trump’s baby.
It’s not as if running for the Senate had been Walker’s lifelong dream. It was Trump who decided he would be the nominee simply because he’d played for Trump’s (now-defunct) United States Football League and had appeared as a contestant on “Celebrity Apprentice.”
This is how Trump picks candidates.
Still, the race should have been a cakewalk.
In the same state, in the same election, non-Trump candidates from the same party romped home. Walker, on the other hand, is headed for a run-off.
Trump is on track to screw that one up too, by announcing that he’s running for president, so he can make it all about himself again.
One inescapable lesson from the mid-terms is that the GOP can’t just rely on “Brandon Man Bad”. Democrat voters will vote for a potato if they’re told to, but Republicans are clearly slightly more discerning.
If Walker loses, let the record show that this will be the third consecutive Georgia Senate seat Trump has lost for Republicans.
When the Republican governor of the second-largest state wins his reelection by 55% and the Republican governor of the third-largest state wins by 60%, the GOP doesn’t need another one of its moronic “autopsies” of the party, promising to be just like the Democrats. The only thing we need now is an autopsy of Trump.
Takimag
Most notably that it’s clearly time for him to put his ego to one side and leave a clear field for DeSantis in 2024.
