Let’s call the whole thing off.
The GOP presidential race is over, can we all agree on that? Spoiler alert: Trump won. It wasn’t even close.
Yeah, I know the old saying, it’s never over ‘til it’s over, but you know what? It’s over.
Could anything have been clearer after the Wednesday night debate on the RINO Fox Business Channel that nobody watched among the also-rans, has-beens and never-weres?
What did the headlines all say about the seven – seven! – candidates who showed up at the Reagan library in southern California?
They “sparred.” They “duked it out.” That’s the lede reporters write about a debate when nobody stood out and nothing happened to change the trajectory of the fight.
And it’s not like the race was very much in doubt before the debate.
As Trump’s spokesman pointed out afterwards, if you took the poll numbers of the other seven candidates and added them all together, they’d still be 20 points behind Orange Man Bad.
The political scrubs and jay-vees all went into that debate understanding those numbers. It was like the series last week between the Red Sox and the Yankees. The only thing at stake was avoiding finishing dead last in the division. (Another spoiler alert: the Red Sox lost.)
In California, the seven dwarfs were trying to limp towards the next one, to somehow meet the RNC requirements to make the third debate, whenever it is, wherever it is.
Nobody wants to be the next… Asa Hutchinson. Who will be eliminated next? Mike Pence? Krispy Kreme Christie? Whatisname – the governor of North Dakota?
It’s humiliating to be the first cut in either training camp or the presidential campaign. You want to be Trump’s last sparring partner – this cycle’s Ted Cruz. It means a bigger contract to become the token Republican in the green room on one of state-run media’s cable networks.
Maybe that’s why Dana Perino asked the stupid “Survivor” question. Ron DeSantis shot her down, just as he demolished the Charo-sounding Colombian leftist who was imported to ask some questions direct from the ESL School of Broadcasting, like “Why have you fleeped?”
So you had one of the three moderators from Great Britain, another from a failed Third World narco-nation, and one native-born citizen who worships the ground all members of the Bush family walk on.
No wonder the candidates didn’t get asked any questions about issues Americans actually care about, say, Bidenomics, or the Afghanistan debacle, or the sinister connections between COVID, the CIA and Fauci….
Somewhere Wednesday night, Candy Crowley and Chris Wallace were smiling. They couldn’t have done a better job themselves of sandbagging Republicans!
Incidentally, it wasn’t just Trump who counterprogrammed against Faux during that sad two-hour debate. Bill O’Reilly went on Tucker Carlson’s Twitter feed to discuss the parlous state of American media.
“They’re all afraid,” O’Reilly told Carlson. “Talent’s scared across the board.”
But as long as you try to make Republicans look bad, you’ll probably get another contract. That was another one of the lessons from the debate, so-called.
If this GOP campaign were a boxing match, the referee would have already stepped in and stopped the fight – TKO, technical knockout.
The winner wasn’t even back in his own corner when he won. He was three time zones away, in Michigan, addressing an audience of auto workers.
And yet Trump still delivered the best lines of the night:
“The only time Joe Biden has ever gotten his hands dirty is when he’s taking cash from foreign countries – which is quite often, actually.”
“Crooked Joe Biden is back like a wretched old vulture trying to finish off his prey.”
“Joe Biden only cares about enriching his own family. I care about enriching your family. That’s why I did this.”
Why can’t any of the other Republican candidates come up with soundbites like that? Is it that difficult? As Casey Stengel used to say of the 1962 Mets, “Can’t anybody here play this game?”
Speaking of baseball again, if the debate had been a late-season game, the headline would have been:
“Seven candidates mathematically eliminated after latest loss.”
For months now, Faux News has been trying to prop up one or another of the GOP pretenders. For a while it Sen. Tim Scott, flush as he is with Larry Ellison’s millions. But his campaign is DOA. Then it was Nikki Haley, but she has a very low ceiling in the polling.
Occasionally the Faux RINOs try to resuscitate Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is, let’s face it, a victim of circumstance in this fight. But no matter how much the Murdochs try, they can’t seem to get DeSantis any traction either.
So now they’re again floating the name of VA Gov. Glenn Youngkin. Virginia has off-year legislative elections, so he’s out of pocket until at least Nov. 7. But, just as the Jets need a new quarterback, the never-Trumpers desperately need a new candidate now.
Update: as I write this, Youngkin has materialized live on Faux, doing commentary of the House impeachment inquiry. He’s sitting right there in the D.C. studio with one of the innumerable blonde anchor cupcakes.
Will Youngkin be the next… Brock Purdy? Maybe, but for every Brock Purdy, there’s a dozen bust-outs. Joe Louis used to fight the “Bum of the Month.” Will Glenn Youngkin be Trump’s next Bum of the Month?
Stay tuned. Or, if it’s like the Wednesday night debate, do what everybody else did. Don’t stay tuned.
(Order Howie’s new book, “Paper Boy: Read All About It!” at howiecarrshow.com or amazon.com.)