To no one’s surprise, Donald Trump announced his presidential candidacy for 2024 in a rambling hour-long speech that the media cut away from because it was largely a warmed over version of what he says at rallies, except that it seemed even more incoherent. Even Fox News cut away, showing just how much his star has faded and Rupert Murdoch has reportedly told him that Fox News will not support his candidacy. That will not deter his MAGA cultists who will be delirious with joy at their Dear Leader riding to their rescue.
Trump is clearly announcing his run from a position of weakness because he had undoubtedly expected that he would be riding a wave of election successes by his acolytes in the various races. But they lost all over the place. Now his announcement is seen as a desperate attempt to stem the calls for him to stay out of the race and to stymie those who might think of challenging him. The Republican establishment is recoiling from the thought of him dragging them down again. With a normal person, pressure might work to get a failing candidate to withdraw and one can expect all manner of maneuvering behind the scenes to try and keep him out so that someone else can be the party nominee. But that may not work because Tump is not a normal person. He is a delusional narcissistic pathological liar who sees anyone who is not totally supportive of him as an enemy and he will lash out at them. Republicans have created a monster and it is now turning on them.
In the latest major defeat for him, Trump backed election-denier Kari Lake lost her high-profile race for Nevada governor.
The Democratic candidate for governor in Arizona, Katie Hobbs, has defeated her far-right, Trump-endorsed opponent, staving off a major threat to voting rights in the state.
Hobbs, who is Arizona’s outgoing secretary of state, defeated Kari Lake, a former TV anchor who denies the 2020 election results.. The Associated Press projected Hobbs as the winner on Tuesday evening with more than 95% of votes reported.
…Had she won, Lake had vowed to further dismantle voting norms in the state, arguing winners should be declared on election night – a rare occurrence in Arizona, where mail-in votes can take days to count – while also forgoing ballot counting machines in favor of slower and less accurate hand counts.
And in recent months, rightwing activists had aggressively operated in the state. Hobbs referred several complaints of voter intimidation to law enforcement and the US justice department. And members of the conspiracy theorist group Clean Elections USA had been photographic and intimidating election workers and voters outside the Maricopa county election headquarters in Phoenix.
…Abortion rights may have also been a motivator for many voters. In a recent poll, more than 90% of Arizona voters opposed a total ban on abortion. After Arizona revived a pre-statehood ban on abortions, Hobbs made the issue central to her campaign, speaking in personal terms about the impact such a ban would have on women and families.
If you want to get a clear look at how extreme Lake is, just check out this video,
.@VaughnHillyard: "Could I say something about Kari Lake, you guys?" pic.twitter.com/UvhwEtOkPD
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) November 15, 2022
Interestingly, though, she supported John Kerry in 2004 and Barack Obama in 2008 before switching to becoming a Republican in 2012. She has yet to concede and we can be sure to hear plenty of allegations from her and her supporters about election fraud because that is what Republicans reflexively do now whenever they lose an election, and Lake has been one of the worst offenders in that regard.
But do not worry about Lake’s future. Telegenic extremists and loonies always can find a place in right wing media. No doubt, she is already in talks with Fox News.
Lake was part of the large pool election deniers who lost last Tuesday.
Republicans who rejected and sought to overturn the 2020 presidential election results – including Trump-backed candidates who amplified his election lies – lost nearly every statewide race in which they sought to take control over how elections are run, a result hailed as a significant victory for free and fair elections in the US.
Voters rejected election deniers who sought to become the top election officials in Arizona, Nevada and Michigan – all key battleground states – as well as in Minnesota and New Mexico. In Pennsylvania, Doug Mastriano, a state senator who has been among the most prominent spreaders of election misinformation, lost his bid to be the state’s top election official.
…In 94 statewide races this fall, just five non-incumbent election deniers won their elections as of Monday afternoon, according to States United Action, a group that has been tracking election deniers running in the midterms. Those candidates won in Alabama, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas and Wyoming.
While many of the Trump-endorsed loonies lost, especially in statewide elections, there were still some who won, especially those in very safe Republican congressional districts.
More than 210 GOP candidates who spread doubt and lies about Biden’s 2020 victory have won congressional seats and races for governor, secretary of state, and attorney general so far, but the vast majority of them are headed to the U.S. House and Senate.
Election-denying candidates for the top three statewide positions have fared significantly worse across the nation, especially in swing states, where midterm voters have largely rejected the MAGA loyalists who supported overturning Trump’s 2020 loss.
We should not expect the people who have embraced the election denying lie and all the other QAnon-inspired conspiracies to change their stances in the.face of this repudiation. That is not what cult members do. When faced with a setback, they double down on their beliefs and decide that the problem was that they were not strident enough. So we need to brace ourselves for even more extreme rhetoric.
So, Trump declared for President yesterday. I suspect he thinks that’ll protect him from being indicted. Yet one more thing he is ignorant about. (But the resulting court filings should be humorous reads.)
Can’t believe I’m about to say this but… in their defence…
“Republicans” -- as in, the party -- absolutely did NOT create this monster. Think back to 2015. The party had a whole slate of candidates, including the obvious heir apparent, Jeb Bush, who had the experience, the money, the name recognitiion, the lot, as well as others including Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and more. And Trump -- not even a politician, remember -- wandered down the escalator and fucking dismantled them, all of them. The Republicans were doing absolutely everything they could back then to make their candidate ANYONE but Trump. He wisely went first and hardest for Bush. Once the strongest opposition pulled out, he attacked other candidates, usually one at a time, until they too stood down, and the whole stack of them fell like dominos. And the whole time, even as he was taking out competitor after competitor, people wrote him off as a joke, including as especially his own party. The Republican party machine did their level best to strangle Trump’s candidacy before it began, but they failed. Once he bested them, well, most of them fell into line -- what else could they do?
It’ll be interesting to see, with Trump in his supposedly weakened position, whether it makes any difference. How weak was his position in 2015? He wasn’t even a politician, he was that guy off the TV. Now he’s “former President Trump”. And lest we forget… in 2020, he polled more actual votes than any other candidate in US election history with the sole exception of Joe Biden that same year.
Ron DeSantis might well be the Republican candidate in 2024… or he might be another Jeb Bush. I for one wouldn’t bet on either of those things right now. Too many people looked way too stupid in 2016, writing off Trump.
Sonofrojblake: You seem to be saying the Republicans did everything they could to stop Trump, AND that they spinelessly acquiesced and let him walk all over them. I lean toward the latter, but both could well be true, to the extent that the Republican Party simply couldn’t stop Trump because they had absolutely nothing else to offer anyone. So maybe both of those things are true at once.
The biggest disappointment of 2016 was Chris Christie. I expected him to win with his superior bullyboy persona, but he simply wasn’t willing to step up and say “You’re a businessman? Big fucking deal, I’m a GOVERNOR, and I don’t get to skate by and declare bankruptcy like you always do!” He could easily have torn Trump down for the fake-ass, lightweight con-man he always was…but he did nothing. Maybe the fact that his party totally hates people with expertise and actual real-world-governing experience was a factor there…
Australia’s vote counting is done by hand, and has results far faster than some of what I’ve seen from USA.
sonofrojblake @#2,
I admit that the word ‘create’ is a bit vague but I think it is defensible because ever since he won the nomination in 2016, the Republican Party has coddled and excused him despite all his lies and all the terrible things he has done, right through the events of January 6th and even after. So yes, they can justly be blamed for creating the monster that Trump became. They are finding that it is not that easy to wash your hands of the stain.
@Raging Bee, 3:
Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.
They couldn’t stop him because he was better than any of them at the game -- partly because he was playing by a set of rules only he seemed to understand at the time. They were all doing “business as usual” campaigning, and he had brought a gun to a knife-fight. Once they lost to him, they got in line, and to their credit, they learned from him. (I’ve said it before -- leave it to the Right to concentrate on getting into power first, and arguing about what they’ll do with it second.)
So in fact I’ll go further -- the Republicans didn’t create the monster that was Trump. Mommy and Daddy Trump did that. No -- what happened was that Trump created the Republican Party as it exists today. It remains to be seen whether they can move on past and without him employing his tactics.
An aside: does nobody remember 2015? Does nobody remember the Republican party candidates lining up to rubbish Trump? Does nobody remember the vituperative attacks on him from every quarter of the party? And does nobody remember the angry, baffled looks on their faces when none of it worked? When the bloody voters, damn them, just kept on and on and on voting for Trump, rather than doing as they were told by their betters at Republican HQ and voting for one of the usual suspects?
It would have been funny, if the Democrats hadn’t been criminally incompetent in their candidate selection and even more contemptuously complacent in their campaigning.
I’m just suprised nobody seems to have any recollection of how it went down, and just seems to have swallowed the line that the Republicans created Trump and have always loved him, and that we have always been at war with Eastasia or something. It really feels weird getting this here, where I’d have expected longer and clearer memories. This kind of revisionism you expect somewhere like Facebook or something, but not somewhere where most people appear to think.
The guy is simply the id of the republican party, the person they would be if they could get away with it. He says out loud what they say only in spaces that are safe for their bigotry, greed, hypocrisy, etc.
That’s it though -- he’s demonstrated to them that they don’t need to limit that behaviour to their safe spaces. They CAN get away with it. Hence the rise of the crazies.
It would have been funny, if the Democrats hadn’t been criminally incompetent in their candidate selection and even more contemptuously complacent in their campaigning.
I’ve always expressed contempt for the Democrats’ piss-poor performance in 2016; but I always remember that Hillary Clinton did get more actual votes than Trump did.
I’m just suprised nobody seems to have any recollection of how it went down, and just seems to have swallowed the line that the Republicans created Trump and have always loved him…
In a very real way, they did create Trump, by relentlessly hawking an ideology and mindset of hero-worship of rich people and big business, and screaming hatred of all the horrible evil commies who would question or constrain those brave heroes’ actions. They conditioned their base to look for and worship a certain kind of person, and Trump fit their stated demands perfectly. And no, the fact that they hated him and tried to control or stop him doesn’t change this fact. “The Establishment” hated him, but they’d knowingly conditioned their base to love and support what he embodied.
@Holms:
Canada does hand-counting as well, at least for national and provincial elections. (Municipal elections are different.) But at least one of the big reasons it’s so much easier to do that in Canada or Australia is that when there’s a national or provincial election, that election is the only thing on that ballot. Only one race is voted on, which means it’s really easy to just take a box and put all the ballots for candidate A in one pile and all the ballots for candidate B in a different pile.
Part of the reason why the U.S. elections are such a mess is that everything from President to Congressman to state Governor to District Judge to town Dogcatcher to various ‘ballot initiatives’ is voted on at the same time on the same ballot, and not everybody votes straight ticket so they all have to be checked separately.
@sonofrjblake:
I’ve been saying for years that one of the biggest issues is that there have been generational shifts in the Republican Party from Nixon’s time to Reagan’s to Bush Jr’s to Trump’s. Over each generation the people who were primarily grifters getting others wound up to vote got replaced by the people being wound up who were annoyed at not being given the things they had been promised; the people who were using the system for their own purposes got replaced by the people who hated the system. So now with Trump, you’ve got somebody who is saying the quiet part out loud, and all the pissed-off people are ready to trash the system that had been preventing them from getting what they saw as their due as a result of generations of previous promises.
@jenorafeuer:
Two races, one for the local candidate for the House of Representatives, and a state-wide race for the Senate.
And neither is as simple as dividing the ballots into piles -- the House votes are instant runoff, and the Senate votes are single transferrable votes electing (normally) six senators in each state, with fractional vote values being transferred in many cases.
However, most House seats have clear results, though aren’t formally concluded, by the close of counting at midnight on polling day. The final results for the Senate are frequently not known for a week or two after polling. It’s usually clear who will form government (have a House majority) by about 10-11pm on polling day, and the losing party leader will usually concede at about that time.
@sonofrojblake
No, I don’t remember that, because in 2015 my state absolutely did not vote for the hatemonger. Somehow after he gamed the election, those same GOP members of congress became infested with maga brain, and failed to impeach him on either occasion when they were morally bound by oath to do so.
Only one side has embraced corruption, and reality is that the American voters just rejected all things maga quite soundly, again.
From Ballotopedia
I can’t wait for tfg to become as influential as Jesse Ventura. Good riddance! Perhaps the GOP will start taking an interest in responsible governance rather than enabling treasonous amoral fascists with barrels of ill gotten money, and long coat tails.
https://www.theshovel.com.au/2022/11/16/fck-this-guy-again/
#14 tuatara
“…and boasted that he was able to memorise – in order – the words ‘person’, ‘woman’, ‘man’ and ‘camera’,…”
Your source forgot tv 😉
Well, I waited.
IMO, this very post about Trump being a loser means that Trump remains post-worthy. I know, I know. Tautology.
But still.
@Tethys,13: you don’t remember 2015. Marco rubio won the nomination. Trump (somehow still the candidate, despite your state not voting for him) “gamed” (rather than as reality has it, “won”) the election. I see. I think im beginning to understand you a bit better.