UPDATE: Mayor Sylvester Turner and County Commissioner Rodney Ellis have decided to take no shit from P.  They’ve written a joint letter to HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge requesting she “…halt all GLO actions associated with the current State Action Plan pending HUD’s review for appropriate and equitable distribution of funds to protect our city and region and build resilience as we adapt to an uncertain future.”  Looks like P overstepped here, and hopefully he’ll get sent to the woodshed for being a partisan asshole.  More to come.

ORIGINAL STORY: No, “P” hasn’t announced his run for the WH, but he’s most certainly started in that direction.  Since April, he’s been floating a run against criminally indicted Ken Paxton, who has somehow avoided trial for the last 5 years for securities fraud.  A demonstrated weirdo who has managed to be on the wrong side of every issue, Paxton has become weakened by scandal and become a target for being primaried, and it looks like P has him in his political sights.  P’s also been trying to shore up his conservative creds, even now pandering to the Texas GOP base which is all in on Trump, The Big Lie, and wishing death on everyone who disagrees politically.

P’s latest allocation of federal emergency funds for flood control in Texas counties is the hard evidence that exposes his pandering to the base.  In a $1 billion flooding mitigation grant from the federal government, Houston, which experienced 50% of the states’s damage from Harvey, received exactly…wait for it…zero.  That’s right, Houston which went for Biden in 2020 and continues to vote Democratic, was punished for voting against those who are supported by P’s base.  P has joined the deplorable wing of the GOP, happy to inflict suffering on fellow Texans, just to burnish his image for being an asshole for his base.  They think its funny.  Those who are suffering don’t.  Oh, and his spokesman lied, saying that they followed federal guidelines for distribution, but that’s bullshit, just like everything else coming out of P’s office.

The Bush’s are carpetbaggers, being New England bluebloods, but they’ve not generally been destructive to their adopted state.  W was stupid, manipulated by the corruption of Dick Cheney and others who duped him into invading Iraq.  HW was a milquetoast, but was a traditional diplomat who accomplished getting Saddam out of Kuwait. Jeb, also a milquetoast, got bulldozed by the Orange Menace.  What P is doing is more sinister…he’s playing to everything that’s bad about Americans, especially those who are all-in on Trump bullshit and corruption.  Urinating on the shoes of everyone in Houston is just a start.  It’s going to get worse.

John Cornyn this week:

“The president is not doing cable news interviews,” Cornyn said on Twitter. “Tweets from his account are limited and, when they come, unimaginably conventional.”

That’s right – Cornyn’s not happy that Biden isn’t acting like a narcissistic screwball Trump.  I know that sounds stupid, but that criticism has gained serious traction along with the usual “Biden is feeble” and “who’s in charge?” insults.  This one, though, plays to only one demographic – Trumpists.  Trump is still the hijacker, holding the entire GOP hostage, even though his primary weapon, Twitter, has been taken away from him since January, and there are few chinks in his armor against challengers.

Also this week, the Washington Post published a report that Biden is doing exactly what he said he would do during the campaign, to not be continuously top of mind for Americans.  His calm demeanor and low key political style has calmed the waters in American political life. As measured by studies of Google searches, Trump is fading in the American consciousness and Biden has not replaced him.  Since the inauguration, the number of searches using the terms Trump and Biden have declined.

But even as the attention of the American people on the presidency has diminished, attitudes towards it are much different.  By a large margin, Trumpists and Trump leaners believe that Biden has made communication to the American people MORE negative than when Trump infested the WH.  They actually liked Trump’s loud, abusive, and confrontational style, and now criticize, like Ccornyn, that Biden is too normal and not bombastic enough.  A lot of that is the constant torrent of vitriol that they are fed by rightwing media and Republican politicians trying to keep the spotlight on themselves.  The other is that much of Trump’s base is actually attracted to over the top rhetoric along with the childish bullying and insults.  In short, Biden’s not a big enough asshole to suit them, and probably could never be.

The GOP is so subverted that just being normal is now viewed as weakness.  The Crazy Train to 2024 is already full and pulling out of the station.  It promises to be a weird trip.

First, here’s the good news – since the election, CNN is beating Fox News in average viewers.  Now the bad news – Fox and CNN both are losing to Newsmax.  Why?  Fox isn’t “Trumpy” enough for the red hats, but still unwatchable for normal people.  Newsmax and an even worse OAN have taken over the alt-right folks who are abandoning Fox in droves as more of their anchors have acknowledged that Trump has no chance of stealing the election from Biden.  If you’ve never watched Newsmax and OAN, don’t bother.  By way of description, if Fox News is manure, Newsmax and OAN are nuclear waste.  They have created a Superfund site of toxic and deadly conspiracy theories, gross exaggerations, and freeform lying.  And Trumpists lap it up. Since the election CNN has averaged 1.73 million viewers, more than double a year ago. Fox News Channel averaged 1.56 million and MSNBC 1.53 million viewers.  More important, Newsmax, a safe haven for delusional Trumpists to hide from gravity and arithmetic, Newsmax beat Fox for the first time ever.  Newsmax commentators, even today, continue to peddle the lies that Trump is going to prevail over Biden.

Newsmax and OAN (as well as some remaining Fox programming) engage in prodigious lying, creating toxic propaganda that has now made it impossible for normal people to engage their viewers in any kind of productive debate.  In recent days, I’ve attempted discourse with several people, and it’s like arguing with an audio recording that’s running backwards.  These folks have bought in to the Dominion fairytale, the suitcases full of ballots narrative, and even the new “Office of the President-Elect” story ignoring the decades of the use of that term.  Even talking to these folks is exhausting because you simply can’t make any progress.

Even though Trump will soon be hiding at Mar a Lago and fighting criminal and civil charges in New York, the damage he inflicted and made recovery of our democracy even more remote.  I personally don’t see a route to recovery.

Last night I extricated myself from a FB conversation.  Yes, it was one of THOSE conversations, started by one of my conservative acquaintances who has become a Never Trumper.  A couple of days ago, he asked what act would turn his Trumpist friends against The Orange One.  The answer (nothing) was predictable; what was shocking was the nonsense they spewed in a continuous stream to justify that.  Intellectually, we all sense that Trumpists are unbalanced and misinformed.  When it’s laid out in plain English on social media, it makes your hair hurt.

One Trumpist would deflect all questions about Trump to Biden and his son, Hunter.  He would simply not address any of the issues about Ukraine or the thousands and thousands of easily disproven lies from Trump.  His source is Sean Hannity and he actually begged me to watch his show to “get the facts” that were going “to bury” Biden and his son.  He would only gloat about how Biden is “cooked” and would not even address the question.  Another Trumpist resorted to immediate grade school name calling and wanted to bet all comers $2,500 that Trump would not be impeached and that he would again be elected president.  He didn’t like I said I didn’t believe I wanted to bet on the level of stupidity of Trumpists.

One Trumpist kept quoting the Bible.  One even quoted Shakespeare, which I found entertaining.  One kept quoting the lies of Peter Schweizer, author of Clinton Cash, one of those fact free “investigative” books that makes people’s brains soft.  One said he would only vote against Trump if “he was convicted of a crime”.  He seemed puzzled when I said that was impossible since DOJ policy didn’t allow a sitting president to be indicted for crimes they committed.

The one who took the cake?  The QAnon Trumpist.  I have never had a social media conversation with anyone as unhinged as this one.  These folks are obsessed with pedophilia, and have this weird article of faith that the “Deep State”, whatever that is, is somehow covering up Hillary’s pedophilia ring that has “pedavores” as members.  I have no idea what a “pedavore” is, and don’t want to know.  This person was so unhinged that even the most Trumpist of Trumpists paused their ranting momentarily, one even saying, “I don’t even know what that means.”  I burst out laughing at that one, almost spilling my Jack on the rocks on my keyboard.

What I learned during this exchange was that to a person no level of corruption, criminality, or misconduct would cause a Trumpist to think again.  The really disheartening lesson was that how thoroughly these people are brainwashed with pure unadulterated bullshit.  We knew that the Hillary nonsense is encoded in the DNA – but right alongside those lies, the lies about Biden and his son have already been ingrained.  The facts have no bearing on these opinions; none.  I have finally given up even trying to talk to these people because I make no progress.  The message framing, as defined by George Lakoff, a linguist and retired professor of language at Berkeley, is perfect.  This message framing hits all the emotional buttons of fear, belonging, and Them vs. Us.  Once that kind of messaging becomes encoded, it’s almost impossible to alter it, and that’s what we’re witnessing.

These people are beyond reach of reason and critical thinking.  The only way they can be beaten is to neutralize them at the voting booth, and that requires the engagement in massive numbers of normal people who haven’t been brainwashed.  That is a huge task.

#CovingtonLittleShits

Most of us normal people regularly ask the question, “What is it going to take to get Trumpists to turn against him?”  Thousands of lost jobs from his trade war didn’t do it; his sucking up to Vladimir Putin and other despots didn’t do it; North Korea caught building more nukes didn’t do it; roller coaster markets didn’t do it; his continuous lying didn’t do it;  his globally embarrassing performance at the Paris Armistice Day ceremony didn’t do it; not showing up for Veterans’ Day ceremonies at Arlington National Cemetery didn’t do it; his incessant sophomoric tweeting didn’t do it; 22 indictments, 5 guilty please, and 8 convictions of his cronies didn’t do it;  it’s seems that NOTHING gets through.

Until yesterday.  Yesterday, Trump, while visiting wildfire ravaged California with Gavin Newsom and Jerry Brown,  Trump babbled really stupid shit about Finland and raking forest floors.  He made these idiotic statements on national television in the wake of thousands of destroyed homes and businesses, over 70 confirmed deaths and more than A THOUSAND people missing.  Apparently, we’ve found the limit; doing that is what it takes to turn Trumpists against him.  Kirk Ellsworth, whose family suffered catastrophic losses in the destruction of Paradise, California, responded to Trumps idiocy, saying:

“My kids lost everything. I voted for him – and now? He can kiss my red ass.  What he said was ridiculous. It hurts my heart. A lot of us voted for him and he [talks] down to us?”

There you have it.  Apparently for Trumpists to see the light, they (and their families) have to suffer catastrophic personal losses before the scales fall from their eyes so they can see the light.  Such is the totality of the delusions of the Trumpist hoard.