Why is Trump playing golf when he should be saving us?

Why is Donald Trump playing golf, peddling “baseball card”-type keepsakes, and endorsing Kevin McCarthy for Speaker of the House?

Fair questions. I’ve addressed this in other posts without specific reference to Trump, but here’s a take I’m not seeing from the various luminaries inside or outside the MAGA ranks. Time therefore to say what nobody else seems to want to say. 

Trump, whose impulse is always to action, is keeping a low profile to make a point. Several points in fact, all of them important.

The expected (hoped for) Red Wave did not happen. Cheating and stolen elections? Yes. Nothing new there. But it’s hardly the whole story. Thus explaining why so many, even Trump intimates and allies are tempted to blame him for losing a golden opportunity. Which is nonsense on the face of it. He did what Trump does. He fought for votes, fought hard, this time from a position of no official authority whatever. 

Blaming him for the losses is far more interesting than his relative silence since. It’s indicative more than anything else of an infantile expression of abandonment by those who have been taught to look exclusively to Trump in every crisis and hardship. Who fell short? The electorate fell short. Republican leadership fell short. Republican candidates fell short. The collected (so-called) conservative media fell short.

It’s time for all these important participants in the political process to receive the kind of very close attention Trump has received throughout the period of his candidacy, presidency, and tenure as a former President. More capable of self-discipline than anyone wants to give him credit for, Trump knows that maintaining his customary visibility as an irresistible magnet for everyone’s attention should not be sucking the air out of the room right now.

There are things he want us to see, maybe for the first time, directly and not through the lens of Donald Trump. He wants us to examine the body politic, including politicians and institutions. He wants us to take a harder look at the nation as a whole, from trends to priorities to the role of citizens. He wants us to see that he won’t always be here to fight for us and that as yet he has no worthy heir, which is concerning given that even  if he were to be elected in 2024 he’d already be pushing 80 and a lame duck not eligible for reelection.

THE BODY POLITIC.  Trump repeatedly told his audiences in the Midterm rallies that the incessant ruthless attacks on him were aimed at them through him. He said the heat against him would abate if he himself would simply withdraw from the battle. But when the Red Wave puddled, many of his supposed allies in the Republican Party immediately began to blame him personally and suggested that Trump’s own provocative behaviors were responsible for the unending witch-hunts (which, face it, would never end…) and had now become an impediment to eventual victory. Time for new blood. Ron DeSantis. And more recently, Trump’s relative silence on the public stage has also drawn criticism, even within the ranks of his most ardent MAGA followers. But that silence has been instructive in ways new Trump fighting words would not be.

In a very real sense Trump is quietly telling us, “Your turn.” You want a fight? Fight. The election outcomes were not his fault; they were his vindication. Yes, elections are routinely and outrageously stolen. You don’t need him to tell you that. What’s more, the stealing is not just orchestrated by Democrats but by senior Republican leaders and even past members of the Trump administration. While the new DeSantis gang is happy to criticize Trump’s personnel mistakes (too many turncoats he mistakenly trusted😡), they are blithely overlooking the evidence that the Swamp is far bigger, wider, deeper, and more devious than anyone could have known. The miracle is not that Trump got away for so long with hurting so many feelings and trusting too many wrong numbers; no, the real miracle is how much he accomplished as a candidate, President, and former President in the face of so many criminally unscrupulous attacks on him and his family.

A small thing I’ve been noticing during the past year that is not really a small thing but a signal of how concerted the war against Trump has been. Press, pundits, even Trump loyalists have incessantly referred to “six years of attacks” as the gauntlet Trump has had to run. But six is the wrong number. The right number in 2022 was seven. Seven (going on eight) years that began the moment he stepped off that escalator on June 16, 2015, to announce his candidacy for the White House. The derangement syndrome that took years to materialize against Bush 43 towered into life almost immediately against Donald Trump, first within his own party then more quietly but in far deadlier fashion by the Democrats. The Hillary campaign and her undercover ops in the Justice Department spied on the Trump campaign, not just illegally but treasonously. The federal courts were accomplices in framing and slandering Trump, as were media, illustrious academics, show biz celebrities, and career politicians and civil servants who happily jumped into the clusterfuck for Hillary against a man who had no political record to expose or investigate.

From there it never stopped, never slowed down, never paused for a moment between one crushing defeat and the onset of the next act of lying, ethics-free political lawfare. Which is now, since November 8, somehow some way, you know, essentially Trump’s own fault. Forget Trump. We need DeSantis, who leaped so quickly into the ace reliever role that he revealed himself as a Swamp Critter of the next generation UniParty. He’s happy to save the day in his infallible forties, and the body politic is right there with him, cheering him on. No doubt that he’s been a great governor. A great governor of the biggest, richest backwater state in the Union, belonging to a relatively small club of states who have never elected a President of the United States. He’s a little more than half Trump’s age, the youngest if elected of anyone but JFK, whom he doesn’t happen to be. But he’s a ready enough pup, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Could he withstand eight years of DeSantis Derangement Syndrome, which is certain to begin the exact moment he wins the Republican nomination? You tell me.

Except for what we should have been learning from the great instructive quietude of Trump. The hot war against him HAS abated since the midterm election. The Mar a Lago offensive has virtually disappeared from view. It was an election stunt. The Jan 6 inquisition has been mostly silent, quietly withdrawing their dramatic subpoena of Trump himself. It was an election stunt. The idiotic civil suit brought by the moron Attorney General of New York has slipped from the headlines. An election stunt that’s been in the works for years. The Supreme Court, lavishly touted as a far right subversion of minority rights, has invisibly forgotten the grossly illegal internal leak that turned the Roe decision into the only campaign issue Democrats had in the Midterms.  A brilliantly conceived and executed election stunt that also gave the supposedly conservative court cover for mutely handing Trump’s tax returns over to the cherry-picking scoundrels of the Jan 6 Committee. A post-election day stunt designed to occupy Trump when he MIGHT have been raising a ruckus about the similarity between 2020 and 2022 election shenanigans. 

All the hateful ruckus surrounding Trump  has been turned down from from Volume 11 to Volume 2 or 3. Even the UniParty undercover agents at Newsmax and Breitbart News are working more discreetly. For example, every Tom, Dick, and Harry Breitbart News headlined in the campaign season as seers of Imminent Trump indictments has returned to their hobby pursuits on Reunion/Reenactment committees for veterans of Watergate, the Al Gore election protest, the Obama race-warmongers, the Hillary Campaign, the Steele Dossier, the Trump Impeachment conspirators, member of the UniParty Shadow Cabinet who worked against Trump while they worked for Trump, and the black-ops organizers of  the January 6 riot (who still meet secretly with Epps once a week for poker games under a highway overpass tucked away between DC and Chevy Chase). If you cock an ear, you can hear the occasional snickering from their various hiding places.

Upshot? The body politic is deeply sick, diseased in fact, and the biggest Mistake Trump has a DC newcomer was not realizing just how far gone the republic already was when he took office. The Supreme Court is a joke, physically intimidated to passivity by the DOJ’s refusal to protect them from very real death threats. The Department of Justice is Himmleresque, the media and social networks are Goebbelsesque, the ascendant medical despots are Mengelesque, the corporate billionaires are Farbenesque, the elected politicians are mostly Chamberlains, Quislings, or Hitlers-in-waiting (when they’re not just drugged vegetables), the mass of federal civil servants are Eichmanesque, and even the ones who are supposed to be true believers in the nation and it’s Constitution don’t have the balls to stand up to threats and political blackmail from the rest of their peers.

And who are we? We are the Nation.

THE NATION. We are a country in sharp decline. Why? We have allowed ourselves to be reduced from individuals to blocs of victims rights constituencies. We have stopped informing ourselves of days when it was different. We have stopped reading, stopped thinking, stopped having conversations that go beyond text message trivialities and trashings. We are not citizens but consumers, of things — sex, drugs, or whatever we define as pleasure — and government largesse. 

We have given half the nation’s professional class — you know, the class responsible for upholding the ethics of business, legal, medical, academic, and creative disciplines — to an Affirmative Action gender which has been trained to look to government first for solutions and to minimize the acceptance of risk or responsibility in exchange for money and titles on the door. 

We are illiterate about history, literature, music, art and architecture, and worse we are innumerate, meaning we lack even the most basic understanding of math (even arithmetic these days), statistical probabilities, economics, finance, and the physical sciences that govern the border between what is possible and what is fantasy. We don’t know how physical things work, how to fix them when they break, what they’re good for and what they aren’t, and we have reached, collectively, the absurdly monstrous error of blaming our physical and other woes on the very people who keep everything running. All those engineers, factory workers, machinists, electricians, plumbers, auto mechanics, construction workers, road builders, linemen, truckers, railroaders, fishermen, farmers, well drillers, sanitation workers, police, fire, military, and other mostly white men who do the hard, heavy, and dirty stuff all week, then go home and watch the NFL while drinking a bunch of beers. Are they in charge? Are they the oppressor? No. They’re just easiest to blame because they’re too busy watching the game to tell us the real rules of life and living honestly.

THE FUTURE. The future is an incipient Dark Age, which has been slowly gathering momentum at an accelerating rate, merely interrupted by the visionary hopes of Donald Trump, who cannot save us unless we are as brave and committed as he has been on our behalf. But he can’t do it alone.

OURSELVES. Well, that would be up to each and every one of us individually. Take a hard look inside. Do you want to be saved? Do you want the nation, the republic, the Constitution, and the Judeo-Christian tradition which has undergirded most of the great accomplishments of civilization to survive? I venture to say Trump doesn’t know your answer to that question right now. He certainly can’t answer them for each and every one of you personally. All he can do is step aside during this lull in the storm and hope that we start taking some responsibility for ourselves. Where do you stand on that?