Hoping for Trump

By BARRY FRIEDMAN

Any day now (and it may have already occurred), Donald Trump will announce he is willing to lead the country on a return trip to Mordor — though those may not be his exact words — and run for president again.

The news, for those not courtiers and pimps and apologists of the Sauron of Queens, will be like getting a shot of heroin, saltpeter, and the Monkeypox vaccine in one dose.

But what if it’s the best we could hope for? What if Donald Trump is exactly who we want the GOP nominate?

Stay with me.

For starters, who among the Republicans who have any chance of receiving the nomination if Trump — and let us pray to all the Gods, it’s an indicted Trump — decides not to run?

Most of the potential GOP candidates out there are 30 years younger than Biden — and won’t that be a pretty picture: a then-82-year old man with a stutter against a fire-breathing political arsonist who hates government, stays on point, and has a full mane of black hair.

Speaking of oily sanctimonious salesmen, would you really prefer Florida Governor Ron DeSantis over Trump? This is a man, aside from his ebullient racism — he accused his black opponent when running for governor of planing to “monkey up” Florida and referred to the heritage of New York Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as “whatever she is” — whose greatest hits include pushing legislation establishing a statewide security office to monitor non-existent voter fraud and a bill requiring Florida state schools, which he called “socialism factories,” to survey and collect the political affiliations of their teaching staffs.

(He also got under Disney’s floppy ears by taking away its cushy tax status, but it’s tough know for whom not to root in that contest.)

You could argue that Trump, too, supports all that — and you’d be right — but the difference is DeSantis is a conniving, dark and humorless figure who doesn’t have Trump’s need to be loved.

And that doesn’t augur well for a nation on the brink of the brink.

There’s Ted Cruz, of whom former Senator Al Franken said, “He’s the guy in your office who snitches to corporate about your March Madness pool and microwaves fish in the office kitchen.” Cruz isn’t liked by the people who like him and is the same guy who read “Green Eggs and Ham” while filibustering Affordable Care Act funding, and voted against a Senate Resolution honoring Ruth Bader Ginsburg. He also supported Donald Trump’s bid to overthrow the election of 2020 and sucked up to him even after Trump dissed his wife and father.

Would you really breathe a sigh of relief if that’s the guy accepting the GOP nomination on a Thursday night in Milwaukee in the summer of 2024?

Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, who said he is laying down the foundation to run for president, got some credit recently for saying Trump was “morally and politically” — though not criminally — responsible for the Jan. 6 attacks on the Capitol. But he also signed an anti-abortion bill in Arkansas that didn’t include a rape and incest exception. Subsequently, he said he would have “preferred” if it had included that language and “hoped” that omission would be addressed in the legislature in the future.

Leadership.

Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie wrote speeches for Trump, helped him with debate prep in 2016, ran his transition team (until Jared got rid of him) and even occasionally ran out and got the man cheeseburgers, does occasionally squawk at Trump’s involvement in the Jan. 6 insurrection, but still won’t rule out voting for Trump in 2024 if Trump runs.

Lovely.

Additionally, there are Senators Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) and Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas), smarmier, self-satisfied human beings than which you will never meet.

(George Will said Cotton could bring the country together, which is reason enough to stop Will’s food.)

Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, who banned critical race theory from state schools that wasn’t being taught, is a kinder and gentler Trump —just ask him — but only because the Democratic Party controls the Virginia Senate. Youngkin has to play ball if he wants to get anything done. Imagine, though, a United State House of Representatives and Senate, Justice Department, and SCOTUS controlled GOP and GOP forces. Youngkin’s tousled hair won’t seem nearly so cute.

The moderate wing of the GOP — and let’s stretch the word to the point of disfigurement — which includes Youngkin, Christie and Hutchinson, reminds me of the smartest thing Bill Maher ever said: “In America, the Left moved to the Center, the Center moved to the Right, and the Right moved to an Insane Asylum.”

But these “moderates” aren’t going to get the nomination anyway. If Trump decides not to run, you can bet your yacht that a new round of Republican tax cuts will help you buy, it will come from the party’s wormwood.

None will write as many incendiary, grammatically challenged tweets as Trump, none will fill 20,000-seat arenas the way Trump did (if he, in fact, did), and none will be so clunky as to allow themselves to bark in unison, as Trump did, with the infidels and seditionists who look think the American president should talk and act more like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Russia’s Vladmir Putin.

But the GOP candidates waiting in the corporate-sponsored wings all possess the one quality that makes them infinitely more dangerous than Donald Trump.

They’re smarter than he is.

The other reason to hope Trump is the GOP nominee — the most important. Biden proved he can beat him.

Barry Friedman is an essayist, political columnist, petroleum geology reporter and comedian living in Tulsa, Okla. In addition to “Funny You Should Mention It,” “Road Comic,” “Four Days and a Year Later” and “The Joke Was On Me,” his first novel, “Jacob Fishman’s Marriages,” a book about the worst love story ever, was published by Balkan Press in February. See barrysfriedman.com and friedmanoftheplains.com.

From The Progressive Populist, August 15, 2022

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