Everything Trump Touches Dies

As irritating and demoralizing as it can be to watch an entire political party give its collective soul away to a vile would-be caudillo, there are some entertaining and even strategic points to observe in the ugly process. It seems only fitting that these points were mostly provided by none other than John Fucking Bolton.

The most superficial point has been watching the F Troop of slapdicks at Fixed Noise scramble themselves into a frenzy, trying hastily to excise Comrade Bolton from the photos and narrative of the People's Soviet, lest Comrade Von Clownstick be enraged or even inconvenienced by seeing a hint of Bolton's Cap'n Crunch facial hair. I don't know which frontal-lobe-impaired sliver of codgers in their withered audience is going to buy that truckload of horseshit, but Bolton was Trump's handpicked National Security Advisor, and the very same Fox hand-puppets crowed and snorted at all the libturds crying about Dear Leader's wise choice.

Ever heard of YouTube, motherfuckers? They can try to paint Bolton as a trouble-making commie all they want, but there ain't no memory hole anymore. The only people still buying Fox's tripe need it to stay alive now, to offset the possibility they walk too slowly past a mirror, realize what they support and what they've become, and blow their worthless brains out.

Which, honestly, I am surprised that mainstays like Lou Dobbs and Alan Doucheowitz and the morning-zoo crew haven't already done. You can see it in their eyes now. They know what they are -- and worse yet, they know that we know. Let them live with that, long and hard. This isn't business anymore, assholes. They're openly supporting the open betrayal of their country, hooting and yukking it up.

But that's small potatoes compared to watching #MoscowMitch's dopey gang of treasonous shitheads. They were sure as hell going to railroad this shit through, right up 'murka's poop-chute, and the Dummycrats were just going to have to sit there and take it, like Paul Manafort with his cellmate. McConnell was enjoying the prospect, you could see the evil gleam in his soulless eye-holes. He was getting off on it. He was going to get it over with before the SOTU speech, just the way Dear Leader wanted, and then they could get back to bamboozling the cult loons just long enough to make it to November and renew the prospect of looting the many for the very few.

They even brought in the most cynical team of dipshit "lawyers" imaginable:  the main White House counsel, who literally lied during his arguments on the Senate floor (which is grounds for disbarment); a professional "Christian" who is currently being investigated for (surprise!) embezzling millions of dollars from his megachurch (when he's not playing drums with a couple of discards from the band Kansas); Ken Starr, a sanctimonious, hypocritcal scumbag who would be tarred and feathered in any decent society; the drunk frat girl who took $25k from Trump to not investigate his fraudulent "university" in America's Wang. Like something out of central casting in a fourth-rate Animal House knockoff.

(Side note:  I have honestly lost track of how many times in the last few years some weird instance or assemblage of goofballs has occurred, where I seriously thought, If you wrote this in a treatment or script and pitched it, they'd kick it back for being too on-the-nose.)

So it was all set to go down, in the most humiliating way possible, and here comes Bolton -- and with him, a set of flash polls all showing that even a majority of Republican voters want to hear witnesses and evidence now. Turns out that even people who disagree passionately about the nature of the thing currently occupying the office of chief executive, still agree on the basic principle of if he's innocent, he shouldn't have a problem with presenting testimony and evidence that show how perfect the call was and how he did nothing wrong.

People who are old enough to recall the O.J. Simpson trial from a quarter-century ago remember that moment immediately after the bodies were found, the LA media copters hovering over the white Bronco, futilely trying to escape to Mexico. Certainly innocent people get railroaded and unjustly convicted sometimes, but only guilty people immediately assume that everyone else will assume they're guilty. You follow me?

The innocent person's initial instinct is almost always, Hey, I know I'm innocent. I have the truth on my side, and nothing to hide. I'll just tell them what I know, and go on about my day. Again, sometimes things don't work out that way once investigations and procedures get their wheels set in motion, but that's the initial response.

And of course the guilty person has the opposite response just as reliably. Their first -- and usually only -- instincts are to conceal and/or to escape, if they can. Since Trump cannot escape, he has to conceal, which is what he's done at every possible turn. He's had a million opportunities to straighten this whole thing out; the Democrats have pleaded with him to present all this evidence of how perfect everything was, to refute the sworn testimony provided last month by his subordinates that directly implicated him and Mike Pompeo, among others.

And at every opportunity, he's refused the chance to do so, angrily, insultingly. He thinks his sub-Nelson Muntz taunts of "Shifty Schiff" and the like are going to do anything but make Adam Schiff -- a trained prosecutor who's dealt with organized crime figures and competes in triathlons -- more dogged and determined to stuff that burger-hoisting garbage pail into the nearest jail cell, and strip him of every dollar they can find.

(Incidentally, this is just one of many reasons why intelligence really does matter to some extent. You should at least be sharp enough not to poke the people who can actually harm you.)

So everyone knows he's guilty -- the public, his own supporters, and the Republican members of Congress. The last two groups have made their own calculations about how and why they keep supporting someone whom they know is corrupt, and again, this is something they get to live with for the duration. They've rationalized themselves this far, you can be sure they'll continue to do so.

But it's that third group's calculations that become interesting in the strategic sense. Baked into the cynicism of the McConnell gang is the assumption that the general public will forget because they're easily rolled dupes, their own supporters will get ginned up over whatever bullshit they concoct for them in the fall, and they can all cruise to re-election. But throughout, they know not only that he's guilty of the bare minimum that he's being impeached and tried for, but that there's almost certainly plenty more shit that just hasn't bubbled to the surface yet, and that any or all of it could start coming out all through the rest of the year.

It was the only move they had, really, sticking with him at this point. You're all in or all out, bottom line. "The "heads on a pike" line may or may not have actually occurred, but does anyone seriously doubt that that's really the case? It's what his supporters like about him. It's why dozens of Republican House members, even from safe districts, have abruptly quit, finding suddenly that they no longer possess the intestinal fortitude to continue betraying their country day after miserable fucking day.

So the GOP Senate assholes had no choice. It was a sizable gamble, and it may be starting to backfire on them now, thanks to Bolton (who, again, let's be clear, is not motivated by any illusions of "patriotism" so much as an overweening arrogance and sense of self-regard). Because it turns out that Trump knew Bolton had a manuscript ready to drop -- and didn't even warn McConnell. So now they know that not only is more of his fuckuppery going to trickle out and stain all the carpets in the coming months, but there isn't even any honor among thieves.

What they've always said about Trump and "loyalty" is true, and can be empirically observed over decades of him never shutting the fuck up about anything (other than his money laundering):  The loyalty only goes one way, from you to him. It is never mutual, except as a matter of convenience to him.

So it is immensely entertaining to watch these genuinely despicable people find all this out the hard way. They richly deserve to be tossed out on their asses as soon as electorally possible, and then shunned for the remainder of their lives, and then rendered destitute by lack of further prospects, karma, worsening health, etc.

It won't happen, of course -- this is, after all, the nation that still allows a glowering pustule like Newt Gingrich to not have to live in a needle-filled alley sucking diseased cocks to feed his drug habit, like he deserves -- but there is at least a chance for them to lose at the ballot box, and they're starting to realize that. Nothing ever gets better with this guy, none of the scandals ever turn out to be less than initially thought. Always worse; always more. They're starting to realize that as well. More and more incriminating, stupid stuff is going to come out, and they're all going to be up to their necks in it.

Because they're accomplices, in the end, and even some of their own constituents, the ones not chugging the kool-aid and asking for thirds, are getting that as well.

They decided to have a Jersey Shore cult rally last night, and the Hoarse Whisperer has a very entertaining live-take thread of the festivities. I didn't (and wouldn't) watch the rally, but like Hoarse, I did watch some of them back during the campaign, all the way through, mostly to get a sense of why people were falling for this ridiculous grifter so hard, and what sort of nonsense was resonating with them, that sort of thing. They were just what you think they were -- amazingly dumb, hopelessly repetitive, demoralizing in that you realize that no matter how cynical you've ever been about the stupidity of people, it wasn't nearly enough.

And what Hoarse observes from tonight's rally is what I'm seeing lately in general, this kind of low-octane, lukewarm support. Don't get me wrong, they'll still vote for him, but the passion is fading, the novelty is wearing off, the "vote for change" excuse from before is no longer valid. You know what he's about, so you can't talk about "change" anymore -- you're either with this spiteful idiocy, or you're not.

I saw a lot of links today crowing about how all the hotels in Wildwood sold out in anticipation of the rally, all the crowds, blah blah. So here's the deal about that:  Wildwood has a population of a little over 5,000. That's five thousand. It's a resort town, so they do have more and better accommodations than most towns that size, but it's still barely more than a village in size. And Trump's rally promoters have been infamous in recklessly overselling these events. The convention center has a capacity of 7,000, which means they probably gave out 30-40,000 tickets, maybe more.

It has been their deliberate attendance model to pack the parking lot as well as the venue, which for a small resort town means traffic nightmares for a couple days around the event, and probably the stretching of the town's police resources, and definitely a security bill that Cheapskate McFrightwig will refuse to pay. All for a relative handful of suckers who think they want to be used as stage props for a traveling medicine show, who think they're pwning libturds by driving for hours and waiting for more hours out in the January cold of a Jersey Shore seaside town.

And then they get up there and realize they're really just there to hear the greatest shits, to chant USA and Lock her up! when prompted, like the barely-trained farm animals they really are. To spend an entire day waiting around, hoping above all else to get into an arena with a bunch of strange, sweaty groper types, to listen to a demented old man rant about dishwashers and how he'll fix their health care, while never really explaining even the broad strokes of how.

Clearly these are not the sharpest tools in the shed -- all you have to do is listen to them rattle for thirty seconds in any random YouTube video to see that -- but it may be starting to dawn on them finally. They're not really rubbing anyone's noses in anything, if they still can't afford health care, if they still have to work two jobs to survive, if they still live in crappy, boarded-up towns where the smart kids have left, the others are stuck or dead, and all those boarded-up lots are squatted on by out-of-town owners who don't care if the property ever re-opens or helps the town turn a buck.

And fuckin' Jim Jones up there at the podium in the high-school gym, with all the colorful insult-comic lines they can sing along to by now, like some discount Don Rickles, after the jokes are done and the circus has left town and they're back to their opioids and fast food and boredom, he's not going to do anything about any of that. Because he doesn't really care, not even a little bit. Shit, his dick-waving just got four dozen military personnel hospitalized with traumatic brain injuries, and he laughs it off as headaches. Walk it off, you pussies!

The schtick wears thin after a while; like any drug, the user has to chase more and more of it just to get anything out of it, never quite approaching that original euphoria. I think there is a very real cultural thread from Duck Dynasty to Trump, and as popular as that show was, it was done in five years. I mean, they basically beat everyone over the head on a constant basis with 130 "episodes" (I once caught one to see what all the fuss was about, and seriously felt stupider by the end of that interminable half-hour) and an unholy barrage of promotion and advertising and Wal-Mart swag and all sorts of cheap shit like that, but it wore out its welcome.

The human brain, no matter how dull and desensitized, can take daily barrages of nonsense and cognitive dissonance for only so long. And then it's old. If Trump knew how to give it a rest, or if the media knew how to change up their coverage a bit, it might be different. But they are all one-trick ponies, and maybe the American public is starting to get a bit war-weary. People are exhausted, and the one-liners are long past their sell-by date.

And even the most die-hard cultist has to wonder at some point, if Crooked Hillary is so crooked, and Republicans are in charge right now, then why haven't we actually locked her up? What's the hold-up here? Even the cynic has to wonder to themselves why they continue to sing along, if they know it's bullshit.

I make no predictions; my observations on the messiness of human nature are what they've always been. But the patterns are clear from an operational perspective, and from a perspective of how a rational actor would craft a strategic response to save their job and reputation:  the boss is erratic and impulsive and dumb and cruel, and would incarcerate every loyal minion and nuke the entire Midwest if it would make him a buck or save his worthless hide. Everything that is politically bad for them now is only going to get worse, never better. What do you do?

Either they hang together, or they hang separately. They know that. All it takes is for a few key players to break, though, and the floodgates will open. It is enormously fun to watch these mendacious shits twist in the wind.