There Are As Many Folks With IQs Under 100 As There Are With IQs Over 100...So The GOP Base Is Solid

The Real Clear Polling average for Iowa looks pretty dismal for anyone not named Donald Trump:

• Trump- 46.0%

• Meatball- 24.7%

• Nikki Haley- 4.7%

• Mike Pence- 3.7%

• Vivek Ramaswarmy- 1.7%

• Asa Hutchinson- 0.7%

• Chris Christie- 0%

And nationally, the polling is even worse for the not-Trumps:

• Trump- 53.2%

• Meatball- 22.4%

• Haley- 4.4%

• Pence- 3.8%

• Ramaswarmy- 2.6%

• Tim Scott- 1.6%

• Christie- 1.0%

• Glenn Youngkin- 1.0%

• Chris Sununu- 1.0%

• Larry Elder- 0.5%

• Hutchinson- 0.4%

So why are these candidates running, even while understanding that they have no chance? Trump is old and his skin is cold. He could die. They all hope he will. Or, more likely, he can get indicted. Or… he has been, twice so far. And he could be on trial during the election and unable to focus and lose supporters. It’s unlikely that the trial could go quickly enough to see him in prison before November, 2024. But it’s what all the candidates hope.

Friday, The Atlantic ran a column by David Frum, first with the title

"Republicans: Quit Pretending To Be Mad" and a few hours later with a new title: An Exit From The GOP’s Labyrinth Of Trump Lies, both off which are identical and make the point that the candidates and other GOP expressing fury that Trump has been indicted are all full of shit. “Who believes,” asked, “that Governor Ron DeSantis— so badly trailing in the polls behind Trump— is genuinely upset by his rival’s federal indictment? Or that Speaker Kevin McCarthy— so disgusted by Trump in private— does not inwardly rejoice to see Trump meet justice? The Fox News talkers have been trying for months to sideline Trump and promote DeSantis. Now they have a turn of events that promises both to help their corporate political agenda and to stoke controversy and ratings. They must be positively ecstatic at the network’s New York headquarters today. So many in the Republican and conservative world wish Trump off the stage. So few possess the courage or integrity to say so aloud.”

How they react to the indictment is tricky. Like I said, they all want to see Trump in his casket or in a prison uniform... but they have to pretend they don’t. How strongly they pretend is the problem. If they pretend too hard, they could cause a violent riot or discourage hardcore MAGAts to not vote at all.

Frum wrote that “The conservative world in the age of Trump has coiled itself into a labyrinth of lies: lies about Trump’s victimhood, lies about Trump’s popularity, lies about Trump’s election outcomes, lies about Trump’s mental acuity and physical strength. The architects of the labyrinth presumed that they could always, if necessary, find an exit— and that their keys could someday turn the exit’s locks. Instead, they have found themselves as lost and trapped in the labyrinth as the deceived people they lured into it. As a result, they have failed to take each opportunity to escape: the first impeachment, the November 2020 defeat, the January 6 crimes, the second impeachment, the end of the administration, the 2022 wipeout of swing-state election-denying candidates, the first indictment, and now this second indictment. Along the way, these architects have taught tens of millions of Republican voters and conservative believers to regard the labyrinth of lies as their proper political home. Why escape at all? Escape to where? The ironic outcome of all this is that the deceived followers now block the exits for the deceptive leaders.”

Trump himself may imagine that the deceived are numerous enough, and militant enough, to topple the American constitutional system for his sake. On that, he’s deceiving himself. One of the important lessons of January 6, 2021, was the marginality of Trump’s hard-core support. Another lesson was the strength and endurance of the American legal system when it’s allowed to function. And with Trump out of the presidency, he’s no longer empowered to sabotage it.

But what he can do— and what his adversaries are perversely helping him do— is alienate his supporters from their own society. What consequences will that alienation inflict? I cannot foresee. Perhaps the mania loosens its grip over time, and some number gradually recover their faith in democracy and the rule of law. Perhaps some number become radically demoralized and quit participating in politics altogether.

Or perhaps American society must contrive to bump along with some important minority of the population passively disloyal to the governing authorities, as happened with the white South in the decades after the Civil War. The rebellion had been subdued, but for the rebels to reconcile themselves to the defeat of their cause would take decades.

One thing that would help: for leading Republicans and conservatives to stop positioning themselves for selfish immediate advantage and end their denigration of the legal process. Thanks to the appointment of hundreds of judges, the Trump presidency bequeathed the country a federal judicial system sharply tilted in a conservative direction. As a result, Trump is often playing in front of his own chosen referees. He’s still mostly losing. And he’s losing because he’s in the wrong.

DeSantis, McCarthy, and the others must be well aware that Trump is in the wrong. They do not insist that Trump is innocent, only that it’s improper to hold him to account. The law is being weaponized, they say, to pursue a party leader (their party leader).

These Republican leaders expect to extract some short-term advantage from their double game. Maybe that’s a plausible calculation. But it is likely to prove, ultimately, a self-harming one.

The big post-Trump choice for conservatives is whether they rejointhe mainstream of American life or wander ever further away from it, toward outright rejection of law and democracy. Voluntarily breaking with Trump is one way to make that choice. Few conservatives have dared to do so at all, and even fewer have dared to consistently.

Now federal prosecutors have opened an easier way. Republican leaders need not explicitly make that break. They need only repeat the standard formula about any pending criminal investigation: “I have no comment at this time. Every accused person is presumed innocent until proven guilty. The law will take its course.” That’s it. Problem solved.

This is the right thing to do. It’s the prudent thing to do. And any other course of action points to horrible dangers ahead: a future in which the conservative-minded people who should be America’s strongest bulwarks of law and constitutional order mutate into an enduring malcontent faction willing to subvert that order.

At around the same time, David Axelrod was writing that as stunning as the indictment is, Trump’s diabolical genius for selling his supporters on an alternative version of reality might see them just disregard it. A classic authoritarian in many ways, Trump admits that he denigrates and discredits the media so that, “when you write negative stories about me,” he told Leslie Stahl, “no one will believe you.” Not no one— just not the low-IQ MAGAts. “If you can successfully cast doubt on facts and the people whose mission it is to report them,” wrote Axelrod, “you have tremendous latitude to set your own narrative and do as you please. Over time, Trump has worked to discredit and demean any institution that raises inconvenient truths or seeks to hold him accountable for his actions— not just the media, but law enforcement and the election system itself. His latest target is the special counsel’s office.”

He consistently paints a picture of himself as “the victim of his political enemies and a corrupt system, intent on sidelining him and his movement.” Is anyone stupid enough to believe him? 74,223,975 voters (46.8%) were in 2020, just 7 million fewer than those who didn’t fall for his claptrap. “As remarkable as the charges in this indictment are,” wrote Axelrod, “anyone who predicts with confidence that this will diminish Trump’s standing with his supporters has a short memory. Throughout his career, he has survived scandals that would have leveled other politicians.”

True to the revelatory comments he made to Stahl, Trump has created a frame by which anything negative said about him— even if it comes in a court of law— is the equivalent of “fake news,” malicious lies told to try to thwart him. In his telling, Trump is the avenging angel, battling a corrupt “deep state” and a rigged system on behalf of aggrieved citizens.

“I AM AN INNOCENT MAN,” Trump declared on his Truth Social site last night, in his signature DEFCON 1, all-caps mode minutes after announcing his indictment. “THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION IS TOTALLY CORRUPT. THIS IS ELECTION INTERFERENCE & A CONTINUATION OF THE GREATEST WITCH HUNT OF ALL TIME.”

…Up until now, Trump’s sophistry has proved effective. Two-thirds of Republicans continue to embrace his election lie, and a large majority of Republicans believe his claim that the charges brought against him by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg in the hush-money case were politically motivated— a message eagerly amplified by House Republicans and right-wing media.

No signs emerged in the hours after the new indictment that this support would waver. House Republican leaders and even DeSantis— Trump’s chief rival for the Republican nomination— once again rallied to his defense. “It’s unconscionable for a President to indict the leading candidate opposing him,” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy wrote on Twitter, echoing Trump’s conspiratorial claim that Biden had orchestrated the indictment to silence him. “I, and every American who believes in the rule of law, stand with President Trump against this grave injustice.” DeSantis stoutly decried what he called the “weaponization of federal law enforcement.”

Many establishment Republicans, including backers of DeSantis, are still hopeful that Trump’s mounting legal woes will erode his dominance in public polling. They seem to believe that enough of the party’s voters, 80 percent of whom still give Trump a favorable rating, will sober up and buy into the argument that the embattled former president would be a liability as the nominee in 2024 and a loser in the race to unseat Biden. The stunning details of the new indictment might put that theory to the test.

Yet we have seen that kind of magical thinking ever since Trump descended the golden escalator at his eponymous tower in 2015 to upend American politics. How often since then have so many misjudged this serial and brazen flouter of rules, laws, and norms? How often have we said, “Well, he’ll never get away with that”?

Trump has survived until now because, to many of his supporters, his flamboyant defiance and the trail of controversies and allegations that follow him are less a cause for concern than an emblem of authenticity. The scorn of elites and myriad investigations to which he has been subjected are, for his faithful, merely certifications of his potency and independence, a reflection of the threat he poses to a corrupt order.

Maybe in the coming months, the sizable bricks that are piling up will prove too much for Trump to bear. Eventually, during or after this campaign, he presumably will have to reckon with truth and facts and 12 voters in a jury box, in settings in which he won’t get to make or flout the rules. Trump’s appeal to a Republican base that feels culturally besieged is rooted in his indomitability. If that aura crumbles, his appeal might, too.

But for now, it is at least an even bet that the World According to Trump will continue to hold power in the Republican nominating contest.

So we get this kind of thing at the Georgia GOP convention yesterday from failed MAGAt Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake: “If you want to get to President Trump, you’re going to have to go through me, and 75 million Americans just like me. And most of us are card-carrying members of the NRA. That’s not a threat, that’s a public service announcement.”