The Felon/GOP Are Running Out of People to Blame

A year and a half into the Felon's second regime - after campaign promises to lower consumer prices and no foreign wars - prices and interest rates remain high, oil prices are surging again, and economic growth has slowed.  Meanwhile, America finds itself trapped in the Felon's war of choice with Iran with no exit strategy other than surrender. The other alternative is an endless war. In the face of their own disastrous policies, the Felon and his bootlickers in the GOP accept no responsibility for what they have wrought and seemingly can only blame Joe Biden and/or claim Democrats are communists. Insanely, one cabinet member this week expressed surprise at gasoline prices, ignoring his boss' war of choice as the obvious cause and leaving one to conclude that the individual is either stupid or a liar.  In addition, the Felon has just levied more tariffs against Canada (which will retaliate) that will only serve to drive prices even higher.  Given the Felon's abysmal poll numbers, sane Republicans - admittedly a rare species nowadays - are flailing in the blame game and are simply running out of others to blame for way the economy has been damaged.  A piece in Salon looks at the desperate position of many in the GOP:

Now that Donald Trump no longer has a White House press secretary with a ready cherubic smile and a ton of snark, we can all see that the paint is peeling off his delusional presidency.  I’m not just talking about the Reflecting Pool.

Republicans like Rep. Byron Donalds, now the GOP nominee to succeed Ron DeSantis as governor of Florida, has habitually and enthusiastically repeated and amplified Trump’s whims and still claims with a straight face — as he did on Fox News this week — that Democratic policy and the actions of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are responsible for the horror under which we currently live. Never mind the fact the Democrats currently hold no power in Washington and can’t implement any policies of any kind.

At least Republicans are finally, if obliquely, admitting that things aren’t so good in the country. Trump, however, isn’t ready to concede that. . . . We hear many in and out of government saying that his [the Felon's] presence ensures the outcome he predicted the Democrats would visit upon us all.  Like I say, the paint is peeling. 

On Wednesday, Trump was seen on the South Lawn praising a brand of fertilizer made by a company that, as he noted, had given him a sizable campaign contribution. Trump says it’s great stuff. Hey, they paid. He played. Very often, he is exactly as transparent as he claims to be. At the end of this live commercial he said that this fertilizer made for “happy grass.” He sounded like he’d been smoking some of that stuff. 

On the one hand, this is incredible corruption, but if you’re a CEO, having the president push your product directly in front of the White House isn’t a bad thing. You can’t blame business for doing what business does. You can blame the rest of us for not stopping it before it got this bad.

To overcome the absence of departed pep secretary Karoline Leavitt, Byron Donalds and the rest of Trump’s puppets have been dancing long and hard lately. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson told reporters the economy had taken off and was on its way into the stratosphere until we experienced this little detour “called Iran.” You could say he unwittingly justified every American’s anger over a pointless, useless war that is making all our lives more difficult and more expensive. He was trying to back up his leader, but accidentally threw him to the wolves. But was it really accidental? 

The key point here is that the GOP has been in charge in D.C. for more than a year and a half. Republicans control the Senate, the House, the Supreme Court and the presidency. They vowed they’d fix the economy and have only moved the needle backward. . . . Republicans are screaming about socialism ruining the country while those so-called socialists are pushing free healthcare. Who do you think the American public will listen to? The GOP’s pitch was, roughly speaking, that they could use extreme methods to take care of the cleanup on aisle seven. They have obviously failed. . . . If you got elected to fix the system and nearly two years later everything is much worse, then it’s time to hire a new plumber — and not the Richard Nixon type.

Making a sale to the electorate as a Republican this year is a difficult task indeed. Even the disorganized Democrats might be able to crawl over that low bar. We can’t say a GOP victory is impossible, but it seems conditional on a variety of narrowing possibilities, especially considering the accused criminals, domestic abusers and otherwise morally bankrupt candidates they are offering us. Then there are the Democrats. All the Republicans can do is accuse the party that’s out of power of somehow wielding the power, and doing so as part of a sinister communist conspiracy.

Trump’s gift in the past was the ability to sell an alternate reality. He now does that very poorly, and by asking the proper questions we might be able to clarify this country’s predicament — as if many of us haven’t already come to the conclusion that we’re terminally screwed.  

What could be more symbolic of the depths of depravity we’ve hit than a president literally giving a paid testimonial on the White House lawn for fertilizer? While the punchlines write themselves, I never had that on my bingo card. I never even imagined such a possibility. It’s a criminal act and an empty and meaningless prostitution of the office. It demeans the entire nation, and adds to the instability in the world.

And what can your average White House reporter do? Not much, beyond watching the turgid, disconcerting vomitorium we call politics with a jaundiced eye, careful of the manipulations and machinations of those who are out to feed their own greed while screwing the rest of us into the ground. It helps if we can laugh about it.  As we can clearly see this week, the paint is peeling and we have no way to fix it.