Recently, a colleague of mine was invited on an all-expenses-paid trip to former President Donald J. Trump’s Jan. 29 “Save America” rally in Texas, complete with VIP backstage access and a photo op with El Presidente.
Being a fellow connoisseur of human folly, as Mr. Bennet says of Lizzie in Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” my colleague gleefully passed along the email, which reads in part:
“What are you doing on January 29th?
”I’m holding a RALLY in the GREAT STATE OF TEXAS and I want YOU and a guest of your choice to join me BACKSTAGE as my VIP guests.
”My team will cover your flight and hotel, and we’ll even take a picture together so that we can remember the moment forever.
”My team needs to finalize the VIP list soon so I need to know TODAY if you want to come or not. I really want you to join me at my RALLY - I hope you don’t let me down.”
The email goes on to explain that all you have to do to enter a chance to win this trip and backstage access is to send an iddy-biddy check for $50. Somehow this encapsulates the entire Trump presidency, including the picture of Donnie Two Scoops with a cowboy hat hovering above his head as if it were something out of a Magritte painting.
“Saving” America is really code for saving himself. The Supreme Court has just cleared the way in an 8 to 1 vote to allow the National Archives to turn over Trump’s papers to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection instigated by Trumpet’s “stop the steal” campaign in the run-up to Congress certifying the votes that made Joe Biden president. Trump tried to claim executive privilege. But the Supremes, including the three he appointed — Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — said not so fast. Only Uncle Clarence Thomas dissented without explanation, which is not uncommon in emergency situations — though critics wondered if he might be covering for his wife, Ginni, an archconservative supporter of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and critic of the House select committee investigating it.
And now that select committee wants to know what Ivanka Trump — Daddy’s right-hand woman — knew and when she knew it. For Trump, there’s only one possible path to immunity from prosecution — run out the clock and retake the White House in 2024.
For Dems in disarray, there, too, is only one possibility, as David Brooks articulated it on “The PBS NewsHour”:
“America wants a president who's a leader and who's out there articulating things. But (Joe Biden’s) got one job right now. And that is to get — make sure Donald Trump does not win in 2024. And that means he has to win over people who are both sometime Democratic voters and sometime Trump voters.
“And focusing on the 10 to 15 percent of the Republicans who are tired of Trump, to me, is the number one job for the next three years.”
It’s going to be a tough challenge for all of us, but we can do it. Otherwise, we might find that we are — to use a favorite Texas expression — all hat and no cattle.