The Dems need to get serious about defeating Trumpty Dumpty
In the last several months, the chips have been falling in former U.S. President Donald Trump’s favor to a level that probably astonishes this convicted felon. Consider the following:
1. Three of the four serious state and federal criminal lawsuits have been delayed by Trump’s lawyers and judges, so it is unlikely there will be trials until after the November election. The one case in New York where the jury pronounced him guilty of 34 felonies is awaiting the presiding judge’s sentence on July 11. The betting in legal circles is that he won’t even sentence Trump to a short prison term.
At the same time, Trump used his conviction to motivate his loyal supporters to send his campaign over $52 million within 24 hours after the verdict. In his ego driven, long, and repetitive speeches, Trump takes no responsibility for his crimes and mocks the rule of law.
Trump pays no political price for his omnicidal “drill baby drill” cry for coal, oil, and gas interests to further the present and coming climate violence.
2. Month after month, Trump is leading President Joe Biden in the six swing states, except Wisconsin. The Biden campaign, still vulnerable to another Electoral College defeat despite winning a majority of votes nationally, is facing the risk of a dangerously large number of voters staying home on election day. Trump attacks Biden daily, slanderously, and with the usual nickname “crooked Joe Biden,” repeated and reliably reported by the mass media. Where are the Democrats’ nicknames for Der Führer, the dangerous, unstable, lying, convicted felon aka Donald Trump? Biden once did use “Sleepy Don” to describe Trump’s drowsy state during the trial in New York.
Joe Biden and Democratic operatives need to re-double their meager efforts in the name game. Trumpty Dumpty gets a free ride: There are no “lock him up” chants at Democratic rallies.
So rare is anyone high on the Democratic Party ladder giving blowhard bully Donald his own medicine that when one politician, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, does just that, he is featured in TheNew York Timesas an outspoken maverick. (See New York Times, June 13, 2024, “This Top Democrat Is Leading His Party’s Attack on Trump as a Felon”.)
3. Fox News, which Trump castigated for not being Trumpian enough, has fallen fully back in line. The rest of the mainstream media reports his lies (often corrected to no avail) and repeats his bombastic, delusional self-evaluations and grandiose promises.
The “Trump Media & Technology Group” (DJT stock), which features, Truth Social the social media platform, is listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange. DJT is the ultimate meme stock with tiny revenues, huge debts, propped up by his fan investors, giving him a share value of some $2-4 billion (though restricted for another four months from sale.)
4. Trump pays no political price for his omnicidal “drill baby drill” cry for coal, oil, and gas interests to further the present and coming climate violence. He’s gone so far as to ask a group meeting of energy barons for a billion dollars in campaign contributions as a payoff.
5. The labor unions continue, with few exceptions, to lie low, fearing the third of their members who are Trump supporters. The deafening silence of labor leaders continues, not withstanding Trump’s active hatred of labor unions and multiple anti-labor policies as a failed businessman and as president, including freezing the $7.25 per hour federal minimum wage and corporatizing OSHA, the Labor Department, and the National Labor Relations Board.
6. Hoping for a repeat of Trump’s 2016 Electoral College presidential campaign victory, several big money contributors from Silicon Valley to Wall Street, including some big bankers, are lining up to support Trump. Worse, Trump is picking up small extra percentages in the polls from Black and Hispanic voters who have been devastated by Trump policies and largely excluded from Trump’s government appointments during his tenure as president.
7. Last week insurrectionist Trump returned to Capitol Hill to a triumphant display of obsequious hand-kissing including from Republicans who were stand-offish and sharply critical of the presidential outlaw and inciting election denier. Among them were sleazy Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), and Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).
8. It is worth noting that not all Republican voters are MAGA Trumpsters. A large number are traditional Republicans going back generations who would vote for any Republican nominee, even if he were, as Michael Bloomberg once said, Leon Trotsky. So inbred is their hatred of the Democrats, that, in his worst moments, Trump could not provoke them to defect from the GOP nominee.
9. Despite Trump’s ongoing shafting of all Americans in their roles as workers, consumers, parents, students, patients, children, women, seniors, and targeted voters he wants blocked from voting, Trumpty Dumpty’s base, still in the minority of likely voters nationally, sticks with him, as he adds more new adherents.
When asked why? The answers come fast and furious. “He is a strong leader,” “He’s rich so he can’t be bought,” (but he could be sold) “I like his stand against abortion.” Other conservative voters like his tax cuts for upper-income people and big corporations, never mind the massive deficits piling up as a result on their descendants. “He wants to protect our borders from hordes of immigrants.” “He will fight inflation.” Really? According to ProPublica, “The growth in the annual deficit under Trump ranks as the third-biggest increase, relative to the size of the economy, of any U.S. presidential administration, according to a calculation by a leading Washington budget maven, Eugene Steuerle, co-founder of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.”
Have they forgotten his disastrous mocking inaction early in the Covid-19 pandemic that cost over 350,000 American lives?
Women who support Trump forgive or don’t care about his serial abuse of women, his infidelities, or his anti-women economic policies. “I don’t support Trump to learn my family values,” said one fervid woman backer, neglecting to recognize how Trump destroys family values.
Much of the business community likes Trump’s relentless tax cutting, advantageous to his own family of course, and his radical deregulation of critical consumer, labor, and environmental protections. Big Business CEOs want their profits even as more of them experience the ravages of megahurricanes, uncontrollable wildfires, rising sea levels, and unbearable heatwaves. They want Trump’s rubber-stamp approval of corporate mergers, and they want to “defund” the federal cops on the corporate crime, fraud, and abuse beat. They also want to muzzle agencies such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal Trade Commission.
Trump boastfully rejects the rule of law. He repeatedly said, “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” This often-repeated dictatorial declaration doesn’t bother his supporters who say all presidents break the law. Many presidents have broken the law, but none have broken as many laws, including obstruction of justice and defiance of congressional subpoenas, as often as Trump. And none have been indicted on felony charges for working to overturn the results of a presidential election. Remember, Trump encouraged the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 and tried to block the peaceful transfer of presidential power.
So, it will all come down to two things: One, who gets the most non-voters (there are estimated to be as many as 100 million non-voters this year) to the polls, especially in the six or so swing states, and two, who will motivate their voting base to show up in big numbers.
Instead of wasting huge amounts of money on unmemorable TV and radio ads, which net their corporate-conflicted media consultants a rich 15% commission, the Democratic Party leaders would be well advised to read Bishop William Barber’s just published book White Poverty and learn how his ground game can get out more votes from low-wage workers.
