Wow, has it really only been a little more than two-and-a-half years since I enthusiastically voted for Donald Trump for president?
There’s a guy named Donald Trump running for the 2024 Republican nomination, but he bears little resemblance to the Donald Trump I liked back in the day. For example, he does things like insist that Andrew Cuomo’s COVID response was better than that of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. That would be the same Andrew Cuomo whose response sentenced New York’s elderly to death en masse.
Trump must have also forgotten that the Democrat advocates in the mainstream media spent much of 2020 holding up Cuomo as an example of how to handle the pandemic while deriding virtually everything he did.
I don’t want to get too deep into the weeds about all that Trump’s been doing that perplexes me because I’m going to be recording a video discussing some of it as soon as I am done writing this. The video was already on my schedule for this evening, but then I saw this:
That’s an actual press release from the campaign. I first saw it on Twitter and thought it might be a Photoshop by some hater, so I checked my work email, and sure enough, there was the release.
What Trump is trying to accomplish here is beyond me. Yeah, it fires up the people who ARE ALREADY GOING TO VOTE FOR HIM, but it’s not making a case to anyone who might be on the fence. The United States of America is teetering on the brink and Trump’s vision for saving it — at this point, anyway — is a fourth-grade playground taunt. A rather nonsensical one at that.
Truth Social is a big part of the problem with this new Trump. What he babbles over there should wither there. Now the voice in his brain is telling him that the babbling should become press releases. He’s dealing with an audience on Truth Social — one of the dumbest names for a social media platform in history — that’s going to love whatever he says. It’s reminiscent of someone who wants to try stand-up comedy but has only ever been funny for his friends. Nine times out of ten, whenever a person like that hits an open mic night for the first time, the jokes that crack up his friends die an immediate and hideous death.
Again, this isn’t the Trump I like. And I’m not one of those pinkie-extended Republicans who have sensibilities that are easily offended. I wrote in January that I would love to see Trump get another term and go scorched earth on the Swamp. Here’s what I said about Trump’s demeanor in that column:
A lot of people in both parties complained about all of Trump’s rough edges when he was in office. I always thought they were features rather than bugs. If he is heading back into office in January 2025, I hope they’re even rougher.
Those rough edges used to produce biting attacks that were not only effective but endlessly entertaining. Rambling about the pronunciation of DeSantis’s name makes it seem like he went to the Kamala Harris Academy of Public Speaking. The “DeSanctimonious” thing is really pathetic. That’s a joke that only the open mic-er’s friends are laughing at. When he first started saying it, I said it didn’t have any of the sharpness of the kinds of derogatory nicknames he came up with off the cuff in 2016 and 2020. It sounds more like something that branding executives workshopped for focus groups for six months and whiffed on anyway, like “The Cleveland Guardians.”
I know that this will annoy a lot of the faithful, but I don’t care. Again, he’s got my vote if he’s the nominee. I’d prefer not to have to keep addressing incoherent nonsense like this, however. And to all of the “Thou Shalt Not Criticize Trump!” people out there, I’ll just say this: at some point you have to admit that, while the emperor may still be wearing some of his new clothes, he’s begun to disrobe during the procession.
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