Chill out, Mr. President.
You never let the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune get to you before. Stop taking the bait now. Ron DeSantis is not Jeb Bush. Glenn Youngkin is not John Kasich.
Sometimes nicknames stick, sometimes they don’t. You’re on a cold streak right now. Ron DeSanctimonious is not Crooked Hillary. As for Glenn “Young-kin – sounds Chinese.” What the hell was that all about?
So what if they’re coming after you. They’ve always been coming after you. Every knock a boost. Self-pity is not good box office. All the old sayings apply here.
Don’t worry about your fellow Republicans as much as these mail-in ballot schemes that are being enacted into law in more and more blue states.
The lesson of 2022 is that unless or until the GOP can get the election process back into some manageable, fraud-proof shape – or at least figures out how to game the system as cynically as the Democrats do – they’re not going to win any more national elections.
No Republican will ever take the presidency again, not even you, Mr. President.
Josef Stalin once supposedly said, “It’s not who votes that counts, it’s who counts the votes.”
Or to quote gangster Johnny Rocco (Edward G. Robinson) in the movie Key Largo, describing how he stole elections in Chicago: “I’d get my boys to bring the voters out, and then count the votes over and over until they added up right.”
Has anything changed, except for the worse?
The Democrats thought demography was destiny, but they were wrong. Mail-in ballots, ballot harvesting and all the rest – that’s looking like the real game-changer in American politics. Just ask Adam Laxalt, Dr. Oz and Kari Lake, just to name a few of the more high-profile victims in this cycle.
The reason Florida remained red – went even redder in fact – wasn’t just that DeSantis was a successful governor. The Sunshine State isn’t mailing out millions of ballots willy-nilly to the dearly departed and “Current Resident.”
The first thing DeSantis did as governor was to start cleaning up the mess in Broward County, where the 2018 election was almost stolen from him and now-Sen. Rick Scott.
You know this – you even mentioned it in your Thursday-night blast against DeSantis. You even took credit for halting the Johnny Rocco recounts that the Democrats were running in Fort Lauderdale.
Talk about the real “existential threat” to democracy – it’s this new system of election month, and ballot harvesting and then endless counting until the votes… add up right. Like they’re doing in Clark County.
One other thing I would beseech you to do, Mr. President, is to turn off Fox News Channel and cancel your subscriptions to The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post.
You were right Thursday when you said that in 2015 that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. was for Low-Energy Jeb (another great moniker). And Murdoch (or his sons) do want to take you off the board.
But this isn’t exactly a revelation, is it?
Paul Ryan, who always hated you, is now a big shot on the News Corp. board. He started ripping you even before Nov. 9, while you were still on the hustings, basically saying ABT – Anybody But Trump.
So the mid-terms go badly, and the Wall Street Journal, the more cerebral branch of the Dirty Digger’s organization, comes up with an editorial calling you the “big loser.” Then they run a bunch of anti-Trump op-eds from the usual suspects – the likes of Peggy Noonan and Karl Rove, a fixer for Low Energy Jeb’s brother.
All of which is immediately followed by a barrage by the Journal’s tabloid sister paper, the New York Post. The Post put Ron DeSantis on the cover as “De Future,” and followed it up the next morning with a front-page cartoon of you as “Trumpty Dumpty.”
Then every host on the Fox News Channel holds up the Post front page on camera and says, “Wow!” like everything’s on the level and their paychecks aren’t all signed by the same billionaires.
Next, Youngkin’s lieutenant governor comes on Fox and – surprise, surprise –she puts the knock on you too. Which is when you come back with the “sounds Chinese” tweet, er Truth Social.
Then there was your gloating over Joe O’Dea’s loss in Colorado. And you tore into Don Bolduc because he backed off the 2020 election fraud rhetoric, scolding, “Had he stayed strong, he would have won, easily.”
You said that if DeSantis runs, “I would tell you things about him that won’t be very flattering – I know more about him than anybody – other than, perhaps, his wife.”
This is some crazy bleep.
Then another bunch of the usual suspects started tweeting out the usual crap about you. Maggie Haberman said you blamed Melania for convincing you to endorse Dr. Oz.
You denied it, and I believe you, but the only reason Haberman has any credibility is because you keep talking to her, not matter what she writes about you. Ditto, Bob Woodward.
Of course the Murdoch mob smelled blood. You of all people should understand how that works. Friday afternoon, they had paparazzi pictures of you frowning with your daughter Tiffany at Mar-A-Lago at her wedding rehearsal.
First headline was “Grumpty Trumpty.” Then they switched it out to “Bride and Gloom.” Mr. President, they’re making sport of you, and you’re letting it get to you. Never let ‘em see you sweat – still true today, isn’t it?
In your long screed about DeSantis, everything you said was true. You did save his career. And now he does want to run for president. That’s politics. When JFK was first running for Congress in 1946, his campaign was run by an older cousin of his, who told Jack that politics was nothing more than a smash-and-grab.
Somebody throws a brick through the shop window, and then everybody grabs what they can and runs off before the cops arrive.
It was true then, and it’s true now.
Please, Mr. President, take a few days off. Postpone the press conference. Say you’ve come down with COVID – hey, that excuse always works for Democrats, doesn’t it?
And lastly, the next time your fingers are getting itchy, recall Ronald Reagan’s 11th commandment, from his very first campaign back in 1966:
“Thou shalt not speak ill of any other Republican.”
At least not until they’re running against you in 2024.