Cruz, De Santis, Pompeo, Pence, and, of course TFG have all taken their seats on the Crazy Train to 2024.  Two notable new passengers?  Losing candidate for AZ governor, Kari Lake, and party switcher, AZ senator Kyrsten Sinema.  Sinema, you ask?  I don’t think she’s running for president any time soon, but she earned her seat on the Crazy Train by dumping the Dems the day after Raphael Warnock cemented in a solid majority in the Senate by defeating former football star and closeted werewolf, Hershel Walker.

Why did Sinema switch?  That’s pretty easy –  she lied to the Democratic party when she ran in 2018 as a Dem, and then stabbed them in the back, serving as a tool for the Republicans on any number of issues, including filibuster reform which killed a new voting rights bill, improving healthcare, and infrastructure.  She’s the Judas Goat of the Democratic party, doing the bidding of her donors rather than actually helping her constituents.  Her problem, of course, is that her chances of being nominated for re-election are about the same as a Dairy Queen sundae not melting in the Texas August sun.  Early polls for the 2024 primary have her trailing badly behind progressive, Ruben Gallego, and her only chance for re-election in 2024 is avoiding a primary by running as an independent, which is a long shot at best.

Kari Lake’s seat on the Crazy Train, though, is a little more subtle.  Lake, a former Obama supporter, jumped on TFG’s Big Lie campaign in 2020 to run for AZ governor.  She’s been one of the loudest voices about nonexistent voter fraud and earned TFG’s endorsement, which virtually guaranteed her loss.  She indeed did lose against AZ SOS Katie Hobbs by almost 20,000 votes, and she’s now suing, challenging the election result.  Her chances of winning that law suit are about the same as that same DQ sundae, but that really doesn’t matter.  Having lost the AZ race for governor, she’s now running to be TFG’s running mate in 2024.  That’s why she’s in the front car of the Crazy Train and why she’ll lie about her election loss from now until the cows come home to maintain TFG’s support.  I wouldn’t be the slightest bit surprised if that wasn’t already a done deal.  She’ll end up like all the others, though, reputation destroyed and facing a lifetime of disgrace.  See: Hershel Walker.

The Crazy Train is picking up steam.  With any luck, it will go over the cliff at full steam.

In a Truth Social post this week, TFG signaled to the public that reality has set in at Mar a Lago.  Not only is there now a special prosecutor hot on his trail, his announcement a few weeks ago that he’s running for president again went over like a fart in church.  These facts emphasize that not only is his ability to take back the White House is in serious jeopardy, his chances of even being nominated are greatly diminished.  Only his rabid supporters are still behind him, and Republicans in Congress are desperately trying to help him get elected to extract pardons for themselves for their participation in the insurrection before and after January 6th.  All of this is as obvious as pink ballet slippers on a bull rider.

At this point, TFG’s only chance of avoiding criminal prosecution for any number of crimes is to actually be the occupant of the Oval Office.  Since the chance of him winning in 2024 are very slim to nada, reality has set in; this is why he’s gone full Daniel Ortega, calling for “…the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” repeating his lies about non-existent massive fraud in 2020.  Knowing that he can’t win in 2024, he’s doubled down on negating the lawful outcome of Biden’s win and calling for  “installing” himself as president by suspending the Constitution and all federal election law.  Left with little else, he’s Fat Elvis, playing his hits from 2020 for his decrepit fan base trying to stay relevant and keeping the spotlight on himself.  He’s even taken an assist from Elon Musk who is leading the field for first prize in Worst Investment of 2022 after his purchase, and subsequent trashing, of Twitter.  Musk has threatened the release of the “Twitter Files” which reveal supposed “free speech suppression” by former management by refusing to allow conspiracy theories about “Hunter’s laptop” during the 2020 election on the platform.  Hard to tell what Musk is trying to do besides setting a world record for destroying $44 billion of wealth in the shortest amount of time.

TFGland is in full frenzy about now with every resident frantically trying to stay out of jail.  Like all other radical movements, this one will soon collapse.  The sooner the better.

We saw the crack in the dam of invincibility a few days ago when the RNC confirmed they’ll stop paying TFG’s legal bills after he declares for the presidency.  Today, total waste of oxygen, Mick Mulvaney (who is inexplicably now a CBS News “analyst”) said that “[TFG] is the only Republican who can lose in 2024.”  Granted, he told that truth only after telling the whopper that election denial is a “both sides do it” problem, with the caveat that in order to come to that conclusion, you have to ignore January 6th.  LOL.

Mulvaney is a clown, liar, and partisan hack who most certainly has no place taking up time on national television; but he is a measuring stick for the Red Tide, and when he goes against TFG (and he’s been moving there for a time) that tide is clearly going out for him.

Today, the dam holding back all political challengers, critics, and investigators of TFG cracked.  And it cracked big time.  The RNC responded to his non-announcement announcement the other night where he said he was “…very, very, very probably” going to run.  Obviously, that non-announcement announcement pissed off the committee, especially since it is just a few days before the mid-term elections, and uncharacteristically, the committee pushed back hard, stating publicly that if he announces for president, they’ll stop paying his legal bills.  Up until today, the RNC has had its nose so far up TFG’s ass they couldn’t see daylight, and they have continued to use donor money to cover these bills, even two years after he left office.  The RNC’s rationale to keep paying, which is complete bullshit, was that they were for the investigation and subsequent lawsuit from NYAG Letitia James calling it “political”, and not for the fact that he and his entire family of arrogant shitheads who have been engaged in questionable shenanigans for years, cheating on everything from taxes to financial accounting.

For over 6 years now, the RNC has been all in for TFG, understanding clearly that he controlled their base of mouth-breathing, gun-toting screwballs who see a dark skinned bogeyman behind every corner and who are worried to death that their kid is going to be indoctrinated with nonexistent CRT propaganda and books about kids getting along with others.  Apparently, they see him (what took so goddam long?) as weakened by the mountain of the scandals, especially the federal document theft case, which clearly holds a whole raft of felonies that have in the past sent a lot of people to prison for a long time.

Is the TFG dam of intimidation finally going to break?  Clearly the RNC no longer sees him as the all powerful Oz (no pun intended), and this is a brush back pitch to tell him, “Not so fast, buster, we have an election, and then primaries for 2024.”  TFG pissing off Ron DeSantis yesterday didn’t help his case.  DeSantis is the GOP’s greatest hope to take back the White House in ’24, and he wants TFG out of the way.

This one will be a real soap opera to watch.  I’m popping popcorn.

Texas has been in the iron grip of Republicans since 1995.  The results are obvious – total corruption of state leadership including a talk radio host and bar owner on the verge of winning yet another election for lt. governor, the top law enforcement officer who’s been under felony indictments for over 5 years headed for re-election, and hyper gerrymandered state house and senate districts that are non-competitive.  In the 27 years of GOP leadership in the state we have slid from US leadership in personal rights, education, science, healthcare, and livability to 49th, according to CNBC’s latest livability study.  Not surprisingly, Texas was ranked as 5th for business.

And, if people don’t turn out to vote, it’s going to get worse.  Texas Republicans, like those in over 30 GOP controlled states, have passed dozens of laws to suppress the right to vote and even take away the votes of millions if the party doesn’t like the result.  Using The Big Lie as an excuse, they’ve enacted crushing laws that make it harder to register, harder to vote, both in person and by mail.  In Arizona right now, armed thugs are “guarding” ballot drop boxes intimidating voters and following them home.

Texas won’t be saved from actual fascism if they don’t start voting.  I really don’t give a damn if they vote Dem or Repub, but they need to vote.  Single party control has never worked, and never will.  Texas and the US will never survive without a vigorous democracy that includes lively debate based on facts.  You can’t reason with radicals.  You have to just beat them at the polls.

Since Monday, I’ve been cogitating on the FBI’s search of Mar a Lago and why TFG would’ve so stupidly taken potentially top secret documents from the WH to hide in his basement in Florida.  What was he doing?  What was he thinking?  As all of us have experienced, TFG does lots of things without thinking, and being a malignant narcissist, everything is always about him and his effort to gain some kind of advantage over his perceived enemies.  What was this about?

My first thought was that TFG was going to release documents throughout his next campaign trying to impugn his enemies and using them to back his false claims that there is an effort by the “deep state” to take him down.  But as more information comes out about this sorry episode, it now looks to me like he was intentionally trying to provoke the FBI into doing exactly what they did.  Since it was discovered that he stole secret documents when he finally vacated the WH, he and his lawyers have been playing games with the FBI which lead to a search back in June after he virtually ignored a subpoena to disgorge the documents they sought.  Since then, he and his lawyers have been slow-playing the agency, and they acted on Monday after apparently a TFG insider “ratted” him out by confirming the location of the documents.

“During the search on Monday, TFG took to Truth Social and public statements to rage about the “raid” and the FBI “breaking into” his safe.  The facts so far haven’t supported his claims, especially since the Secret Service let the agents in and one of Trump’s lawyers was present during the search.  Almost immediately, TFGland went to DEFCON 1 and started firing up the rage machine. One of the main accusations, lead by his allies in congress, was that the FBI was “planting evidence” to take him down.

Well, there it is.  It appears, and I believe that this is true, that TFG’s plan all along was to provoke the FBI to act against him personally so he could claim the “deep state” was out to get him.  I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised that the “rat” was someone TFG picked to be the informant.  We’ve all heard about Schedule F, TFG’s plan to unravel the federal government by firing thousands of career public servants and replacing them with his loyalists at all levels of the federal government.  Part of this plan is to empty out DC, moving agencies out into the heartland like he did the USDA, which he moved to Kansas City.  The agency has struggled to recover, having lost thousands of career employees who quit rather than move.

Call me cynical, call me a conspiracy theorist, but I believe that all of this is TFG and his enablers creating a new reality for his supporters as part of his relentless campaign to take over the US government for himself.  It’s already working; thousands of his supporters are raging on social media and in their be-flagged jacked-up TFG Train trucks, and one nut has already been killed after trying to break in to the FBI field office in Cincinnati.  I can only hope that Merrick Garland is one step ahead of him; my fear is that he’s not.