How much you wanna bet that no more than a handful of MAGA cultists have bothered to read the federal indictment that unmasks their sun god as a traitorous thief of nuclear secrets? Or that they’ve even looked at the photo of stolen docs piled high in the poop room? Or that they’ve indeed studied those photos and cognitively processed what they saw with their own eyes?
A Georgia cultist, speaking for many, told CNN June 12: “Ah think it’s a buncha bullsh*t. Ah wouldn’t waste mah time on a phony indictment.”
Nothing new there. These pitiable people prefer to breathe Trump’s fetid stench and live far beyond the reach of rationality. As reality-based conservative David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter, lamented over the weekend, MAGAts are “lost and trapped … in a labyrinth of lies.” When we learn, via the latest CBS News poll, that 75% of likely Republican primary voters are still loyal to Trump despite (or because of!) the federal indictment – including 14% who now say they like him even more – our first response is to grieve yet again for how far we’ve fallen and to fear for the future of this country.
But let’s look at the upside! Because there is an upside. I think.
Trump will always have his nitwits. Fine. But let’s talk practical politics. How likely is it that swing-voting independents, having favored Joe Biden over Trump by nine percentage points in 2020, will somehow be inspired in 2024 to cast ballots en masse for an espionage criminal defendant (and potential criminal defendant for his Jan. 6 insurrectionism, plus his attempted theft of Biden’s victory in Georgia)? How likely is it that Trump, if nominated by a cult apparently bent on political suicide, can woo a sufficient share of Americans who dwell in the mainstream?
That CBS News poll doesn’t look so dire when you dig into the numbers. Respondents were asked whether the thief of nuclear secrets is a “national security risk.” Only 38% of likely Republican primary voters said yes. But 80% of non-Republicans (what the pollsters called “rest of country”) said yes. That right there is a stinging indictment of the party that, once upon a time, branded itself as the guardians of our national security.
A new ABC News-Ipsos poll confirms this pattern. While only 38% of Republicans believe the federal indictment charges are very or somewhat serious, 61% of Americans overall – including 63% of independents – recognize that stashing stolen classified documents in a ballroom and beside a toilet is indeed very or somewhat serious.
The bottom line is that Trump’s federal indictment (made possible because Trump aides and lawyers have sung like canaries) is further radicalizing and infantalizing the Republican base – thus further alienating the party from the suburban voters (especially women) and independents who will ultimately tilt the ’24 balloting. How many sane swing voters will be swayed by the likes of Laura Loomer, the far-right MAGAt who said this weekend, “I’m voting for the guy who has the most arrests and indictments”?
The party’s leaders are making matters even worse, natch. (I’m wrong to use the word leaders, because in truth they just follow the mob.) Kevin McCarthy, who by all accounts detests Trump in private, declared, before the indictment was even unsealed, that the Justice Department was guilty of a “brazen weaponization of power.” Marco Rubio, who in 2016 said that Trump could not be trusted with nuclear materials, now says the DOJ is “shredding faith in the institutions that hold our republic together.”
Sucking up to the MAGA base won’t win a national election. As reality-based conservative commentator Jonah Goldberg wrote the other day, addressing Republican leaders, “What the f–k is wrong with you people?”
History reminds us that there has always been a nutty minority. After Richard Nixon quit in 1974 on the cusp of being impeached for Watergate, 38% of Americans told Gallup that he should be pardoned for whatever crimes he may have committed. The big danger today is that the nuts have been amped up, in fervor and in numbers, by a uniquely gifted demagogue who knows, by dint of his primal instincts, how to market anti-institutional paranoia. David Frum worries that even a serially indicted Trump can “alienate his supporters from their own society. What consequences will that alienation in inflict? I cannot foresee.”
The only solution is to tamp down the danger by defeating it at the polls. I refuse to believe that this nation will elect a 71-count criminal defendant whose count total will likely be higher when the balloting begins. Let the MAGAts marinate in their willfull ignorance. There are more of us than there are of them.
Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net and is distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Email him at dickpolman7@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, July 1-15, 2023
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