Strongly agree but we have a strange new media world in which a person can be very much present without anyone taking him or her seriously. By her I mean Palin, who ran around for a year or two making headlines amid serious speculation about presidential ambitions when it was clear to anyone with a lick of sense she was a lightweight who couldn’t hang. Trump continues to be bad news for the party, sure. He continues to have a severe personality disorder, and he continues to talk and gnaw on his resentments and fantasies of vindication. We’d have to define relevance to make a final pronouncement, I suppose, but given that we both have a pretty good idea what it means in practical terms we seem to agree it’s not a good word for what he is right now. I know one thing: I wake up every morning knowing Trump remains an unpleasant private citizen who lives in a big stupid house in Florida. I don’t think he’s an elder statesman, a kingmaker, an influential person. Mitch McConnell is influential. Mitt Romney too, and Liz Cheney, despite Zeus’s thunderbolts. Just the way things are. 
Agreed again. Which is the source of the kind of unholy fascination at the way the GOP is (to all appearances) tearing itself to pieces trying still to deal with him. It’s almost like they’re trying to misdirect our attention while they pull nasty shit elsewhere…
Yeah almost. 
Nothing wrong with a little healthy paranoia, especially as regards those gangsters, grifters, and fanatics on the Other Side of the Aisle.
Why is TPM giving him the attention he craves?
Because it’s an ongoing and rackety feud between the former president and the most important member of his putative party in Congress.
Bingo.
True…McConnell is a stone cold loser but he was the only thing that has kept Trump’s fat ass from a federal lockup for the time being…
Sen. Cronyn seems to miss those proud sassy Trump years …
I think we will have to wait till after the midterms to evaluate T****'s political relevance. If he can appear to deliver votes to republican candidates he will remain relevant. I am in the basket that says he cannot and has not delivered votes when he is not on the ballot. I do not think the MAGAts will stick with the whole voting thing. I fear they may.
‘Dumb Son Of A Bitch’
Well I have to agree with Trump on this one. The k9 ancestry of Mitch is hard to refute.
…and lives in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction with everything.
I really wouldn’t want to live in his head.
People commenting with ire on why TPM keeps this alive are forgetting forum members who kept the ‘Why Hilary Lost’ debate alive for over a year.
6 more months of 45* arguments? You don’t even have to break a sweat.
Sure, I mean, most of my expressed opinions are hunches I’m drawing from a lot of sources; obviously none of us know for a fact how relevant he is or will be. Me, I think it’s been years, maybe decades since he was capable of anything like work as most people understand it. I don’t think he’ll campaign for GOP candidates in any way we’ve seen before. He might try to boost the chances of people primarying his perceived antagonists. But if he really wanted to be relevant, to be influential, there are things he’d be doing right now and I don’t see him doing those things. He just turned off a whole roomful of donors. Real movers and shakers would have known how to play that. Trump doesn’t and never did.
If he can keep his physical health together enough to totter on stage he’ll be selling his endorsements to whoever is willing to pony up $ for his to shuffle to the podium, say
“____is a helluva guy!” give a thumbs up and his smug, grating smile and then be hustled off.
These are very comforting words and true, in my mind. My fears have their own (il)logic and so I will wait and see. It doesn’t hurt our side if we are strongly motivated to get out and do the work.
I saw a pretty good piece the other day on why this idea that you can starve the beast of oxygen isn’t actually valid. I forget how the argument went but it’s generally pretty futile to lecture a crowd about Monsanto or shark-hunting or ignoring Trump of whatever your concern is.
Plenty of people are doing that year in and year out. I think about them every time somebody complains that the feckless Dems won’t FIGHT. Those people making phone calls and sending out flyers, knocking on doors in years when that’s a thing, those are the ones who are really fighting. I remember helping to set up a campaign office the next year, in 2017. Nobody said a word about the former guy the whole afternoon. It was more like “Hey, how’ve you been?” and “Where do you think this desk should go?” It’s fun to talk here. But that’s the stuff that wins elections.
Yea, even tr**p speaks the truth sometimes, I have to admit.
OT but I am very much enjoying T**** as a signifier for the MoFo. I remember Vonnegut’s revelation that * is a picture of an asshole.