Hump Day open thread: A tale of two presidents
As much as I hate using the word "president" when referring to Donald Trump, according the history books he will be counted as one. Therefor it is, occasionally, unavoidable.
On Monday, our current president, Joe Biden, signed into law the bipartisan infrastructure deal. You can go here to see how transformative it will be. For myself, expanding broadband to rural areas and building an electric vehicle charging infrastructure are my key pieces of the legislation. It's no exaggeration to say this is bigger than the New Deal, and bigger than the Great Society.
Meanwhile, Trump spent the weekend seemingly pretending that he was still president. He put out a statement he was sending his lackey Richard Grenell as his "envoy ambassador" to Serbia for some nonsense or other. Now, of course, this is an outright violation of the Logan Act. But the Biden-Harris Administration responded to Trump's foray into Balkan diplomacy with the derision it deserved.
Trump, who showed no interest in the basics of governance or diplomacy during his benighted four years in office, has, really, been sidelined in a way which we couldn't have imagined a year ago. He's relegated to issuing tweet-like statements which don't get the distribution that his tweets would have. He's off of Facebook. He's a sad and pathetic nonentity.
What power he has lies in the control of his base. Republicans face a conundrum because of that. His base is enough to win a primary, but not enough to win an election. Oddly, Virginia was proof of that, as governor-elect Glenn Youngkin—with the able assist of a scandal-mongering media—distanced himself from Trump as much as he could so that he could regain the frightened white voters which gave Joe Biden and Kamala Harris a ten-point win last November. But the miscreants coming down the pipe have no such compunctions about allying themselves with their senile Sith lord. And as the benefits of the infrastructure bill roll out, and as, hopefully, Pres. Biden's Build Back Better legislation makes it to the finish line, Republican candidates are going to remind voters who pulls their strings. The media, cratering in ratings, might finally decide to do Democrats a solid and feature Trump as the mover behind the midterm elections. (Nothing the media is doing now is working to attract viewership, so desperation may prevail.)
While Joe Biden is doing the work of a president and delivering for the people he serves, Donald Trump pines for the job whose work he scorned. He wants the Beast, and Air Force One, and the kowtowing of the great and the good. But everything he's done since he was booted out of office has been a failure. His website. His social media startup. All failures.
Americans have short memories, as we saw in Virginia. (But not in New Jersey, or California.) It's our job to make sure they remember not only of the dangers of Trumpism, but also what a sad sack and pathetic man Trump is. We must combine a recognition of the threat he poses without ascribing superhuman powers to him. He's a nothing. Sheriff Joe is on the case.