By Lisa Senecal
That’s right. Just relax, everyone. Whatever the latest thing is that Trump has done or said that some elected GOP’ers are being asked to comment on is obviously just silliness. It’s clearly the pro-democracy coalition and mainstream media trying to make it appear that Trump’s harmless, playful “locker room talk” or “jokes” about assaulting protestors or being a dictator or not accepting the 2024 election results…it’s all a conspiracy to misrepresent his seriousness. It’s gotcha journalism intended to put this…well, sure, deeply flawed guy, an otherwise hunky dory American patriot in a more negative light than he deserves.
It simply confounds the Republicans in elected office that so many of us haven’t caught on to this yet and ceased our endless handwringing. Haven’t we all reached the point when we stop worrying that all the bluster and bullshit of Trump is anything more than bluster and bullshit? Again, it’s just Trump being Trump.
The problem, however, isn’t that we don’t believe that everything Trump says or does is “just Trump being Trump”; it’s that we do believe it. It is Trump. It is who he is. All of it.
That’s the f*cking problem!
Everything he plans to do and everything he’s said or done over his lifetime is “Trump being Trump.” There is so much “Trump being Trump” that it’s impossible to make an exhaustive list here, but I’ll name just a few: overturning Roe and supporting the prosecution of women, attacks on the LGBTQ community, mass immigrant detention camps and mass deportations, family separations, abandoning NATO allies, more guns in schools and fewer rights for women, spreading great replacement theory, countless conspiracy theories, inciting insurrection, implementing policies accelerating climate change, cutting taxes for billionaires, a dictator on day one, denying the 2020 election and laying the groundwork to deny 2024, trying to strongarm to get fictitious votes in Georgia and subvert a presidential election outcome, assaulting women, intentionally walking in on nude and partially nude teenaged girls, “allegedly” stealing and refusing to return highly classified documents, elevating murderous dictators and authoritarians, denigrating the military, denigrating America and democracy, pretending to believe Putin over our security services, calling developing nations “shithole countries” and yes, he meant majority black countries, attacking the justice system, undermining the rule of law, sending the military to disperse peaceful protesters, selling out the presidency and Supreme Court to Christian nationalist…
But really, how do we know this is Trump being Trump? Because this is who this menace has been his entire life. Let’s not forget his continuing to publicly attack the wrongfully convicted “Central Park 5” after they were exonerated, denying apartment rentals to people because they were black, cutting off a family member from health insurance who was a child AND disabled to punish other family members in an inheritance dispute, cheating people through Trump University, stiffing small business owners, defaulting on loans, inflating the value or deflating the value of his assets to get loans or avoid paying taxes fraudulently and so much more...it's all Trump being Trump.
So, I ask elected Republicans who claim they don't follow Trump's social media, read or watch interviews with him, listen to stump speeches, read newspapers, watch the news, or in any other way learn anything that would make them politically aware of current events, or in a recognizable conscious state, my question is why the hell aren't you paying attention? It was an excuse these electeds could get away with in 2015 & '16 because Trump was still an unknown punchline who just seemed to say shit he didn't mean - remember all the predictions of when Trump would become "presidential" both before and after he became president? - but this is 2024.
We know Trump being Trump doesn't mean Trump just saying things with no thought or intent behind them; we now know that Trump broadcasts exactly what he intends to do, which should terrify even the most jaded of political opportunists. As we've learned, part of "Trump being Trump" is that eventually, when a toady has outlived their usefulness to him, no matter the degree to which they bowed, scraped, degraded themselves and their families, and abandoned their moral compass in service of this monster, the monster will turn on them and eat their political faces off.
And they will deserve it.
