WRONG! Anyone Who Says Trump Is Finished Because Of Speaker Chaos Is Deluded — And That’s Coming From A ‘HATER’

Political and media figures right left and center who have been writing Donald Trump’s final political obituary over his involvement in the chaotic Speaker of the House election aren’t just wrong, they’re dead wrong.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) tumultuous bid to become speaker amid a revolt from House conservatives has culminated so far with the Californian failing to secure a win in twelve consecutive votes.

That’s how I’ve been describing the chaos all week in news posts, but since this is an opinion article, I can get away with telling you how I really feel. Well, let’s find out. Like many liberals, I have been popping corn and enjoying this hot mess of a molten lava shitshow nuclear dumpster fire hot garbage Kentucky Fried Clusterfuck with equal parts amusement and…okay, it has been pretty much all amusement.

And I suspect that President Joe Biden, despite furrowing his brow and expressing concern for the state of democracy as it relates to the rest of the world pointing and laughing at the Republicans, probably not so secretly shares my delight. Nothing shows deep concern like congratulating Steve Holland for becoming the next speaker.

Among the many causes for amusement, like committed Trump loyalist Katrina Pierson tearing white Republicans a new collective asshole for exploiting Black Republican congressman Byron Donalds to try and borrow some of Democratic House Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ historical luster, and McCarthy rebutting that move by having another Black congressman renominate him, and then having Michigan Republican congressman John James brag that McCarthy doubled the number of Black Republicans in the House — without mentioning that the doubling was from 2 members — and then Rep. Pete Aguilar responding to that by pointing out that Hakeem Jeffries opposes The New Jim Crow Era, and other awesome aspects of this kerfuffle — hang on I lost my place.

Oh right, I was going to say it’s also been fun to watch people declare that Trump is finally finally finished! God, are these people wrong, and not just in the way that everybody who declares Trump dead after he gets into a feud with a Gold Star family or insults a sacred Republican war hero like John McCain or brags about grabbing pussies or inspires terrorist attacks or incites an insurrection or gets raided by the FBI or praises white supremacists or has dinner with a white supremacist or does a bunch of anti-Semitic things or says and does overtly racist things or has a bad midterm cycle or can’t get Kevin McCarthy elected speaker turn out to be wrong.

No, I mean they are wrong on a more fundamental level than that. But before I explain why that is, let me just tick through my anti-Trump bonafides, so as to make this take that much more interesting for people to point out and say “Wow even this harsh Trump critic thinks he’s still got power!”

I have said from day one, over and over again, and without the slightest flinching, that Trump is an overt racist who doesn’t succeed in spite of that fact, but because of it. Literally the day he announced his run for president by calling Mexicans rapists, I said that this sort of racism would catapult him to victory among Republicans because it is a party that has been building a foundation of white resentment for decades.

I am what Trump would call a “HATER,” and while I would never try to minimize how dangerous or harmful Trump is, I would also never want to diminish the degree to which Republicans have always been driven by the same vile impulses, the ones that were exposed when their hero Ronald Reagan was outed as an overt explicit racist — as opposed to the very thinly and poorly coded one we already knew he was — a couple of years ago.

This is the existential dilemma that Trump presents, because as an influential figure unencumbered by feelings of responsibility for mankind, he is an incredibly destructive force who causes real harm to people. But he also serves as a useful decoder ring for white independents who otherwise resist the notion that republicanism is based on white resentment, and still resist it to some degree in spite of Trump, but who would happily go back to ignoring it if Trump disappeared and Republicans just resumed their thinly-veiled pursuit of the same politics.

That’s why I unlike a lot of the chin-stroking media figures who fret about what a terrible message this dysfunctional battle for the speakership sends to the rest of the world, I am overjoyed at every moment these people remain paralyzed because neither side is going to do anything good. It’s insurrectionists versus other insurrectionists mixed in with the insurrectionist-curious, all of whom are committed to the same politics that Trump inherited from Reagan. I reject the notion that the quote-unquote chaos or dysfunction or whatever the media wants to call it, in and of itself, is what makes the Republicans bad. No. They are already bad, the fact that they can’t get their shit together is a good thing. If they got their shit together then they can get back to hurting people.

That brings us to this notion that Trump is a weakened and wounded creature who is basically finished. This has been brewing for a couple of months, ever since the midterms, but it’s just wishful thinking. Trump had less than half of the support he has now when he got started, which means he has more than twice as much power as he needs to win with Republicans again.

Yes, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has managed to creep closer in some polls but Trump is still the massive leader in almost every survey. And the thing that people are pointing to now, Trump’s inability to get people to vote for Kevin McCarthy, is just a colossal misreading of the situation.

The fact that Trump can’t get people to vote for McCarthy is actually proof of his power, not proof of a lack of power. The same pundits who say Trump has lost his mojo will, in the next breath, explain that these members are voting against McCarthy because he isn’t Trumpy enough. Trump did his job too well.

The closest run in I ever had with Trump was about 12 years ago, I think it was at CPAC in 2011. Up until then I had only known Trump as the idiot host of The Apprentice who hilariously managed to find even bigger idiots to humiliate themselves for a chance to bask in his gold electroplated glow. I was walking along texting with one of my editors, probably Colby Hall, and not at all watching where I was going until I ran smack into a bodyguard who had put his hand up to stop me from running into Donald Trump. I looked up and was like oh, that’s fucking weird. Then as I walked along, I looked back and realized that there was a crowd of CPAC attendees gathered around him like a Bible-era flock waiting for loaves and fishes to be distributed. Trump was standing there in a black cashmere overcoat and probably one of his cheap ties dropping God knows what pearls of wisdom.

And later, when Trump gave a speech, I was outside the ballroom and noticed that even in the hallways people stopped and stood transfixed staring at the monitors as he spoke, as if in a trance. This was before he became committed to being America’s most public racist, and so while it puzzled me, I chalked it up to Trump being the very model façade of the Republican idea of success.

The speech, which I didn’t watch at the time because I was roving around looking for good YouTube fights to get into, was heavy on trade isolationism, the currency of ’80s-era coded xenophobia. But he did devote a very brief chunk of the speech to a vague line of attack on then-President Barack Obama, and in what could has turned out to be a prophetic moment, paused to laugh at a heckler in the audience who slammed Obama.

Once he combined that grifter prosperity gospel with the racist Birther campaign he launched weeks later, the spell was complete.

I tell that story to illustrate the fact that the spell not only hasn’t been broken, it is the very reason McCarthy finds himself unable to be rescued by Trump.

But beyond that, it is the reason that Trump will steamroll over the entire Republican primary field. Right now, McCarthy is being stymied by 20 Trump die-hards, but the field of Republicans hoping to defeat Trump in a few months are going to run into a much larger problem. Multiply those 20 diehards by tens of millions and you get an idea of what DeSantis is up against, especially when his support is diluted in a field that will likely include the same kind of Mos Eisley cantina’s worth of Republican freaks, only this batch will be worse. How is DeSantis going to look in a debate with Trump and Kari Lake?

I think Maggie Haberman is closest to having this right, she has talked about how Trump is a diminished figure after this week, but that he still should not be counted out.

She is correct, Trump is a diminished and weakened figure… if you compare him to Donald Trump. He is weakened among whatever passes for an establishment Republican party these days. He is weakened among the American electorate at large. But Trump still has a 40 or 50-million-strong army of MAGA supporters who will never desert him, and Republicans have shown no aptitude or inclination to think of a way to overcome it.

The only thing that can keep Donald Trump from winning the Republican nomination is Donald Trump… or maybe a set of handcuffs.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.