It’s fitting that the Trump era will reach its nadiral finale this week when more than 100 Republican House members and at least 12 senators protest the Electoral College vote on Wednesday, having absolutely no actual effect on the election results. That ill-fated protest, like Trump’s presidency itself, will end with an embarrassing, desperate, impotent whimper.
The dumb and damaging stunt has even rightward voices decrying its awful unseriousness.
National Review calls it a “dead end.” Republican Sen. Ben Sasse has called his colleagues “institutional arsonists” for the effort.
In an interview with Fox News, the architect of the little-coup-that-couldn’t, Sen. Josh Hawley, was asked if he believed Trump would be president on Jan. 20. Hawley said, “That depends on what happens on Wednesday,” to which Bret Baier blithely replied, “No, it doesn’t.”
A Wall Street Journal editorial suggests, “Republicans should be embarrassed by Mr. Trump’s Electoral College hustle,” but most assuredly they are not. After all, it’s just the latest — “and hopefully the last?” she asked with trepidation — stupid stunt we’ve seen plenty of over the past four-plus years, ranging from the dumb to the dangerous.
It’s, in fact, an embarrassment of riches — or perhaps richly embarrassing — to look back at just a few.
Trump’s 2016 campaign was full of them, setting the tone for a new era of puerility, beginning with this long descent down a golden escalator to his effort to seat four sexual abuse accusers of former president Bill Clinton in the family area of his debate against Hillary Clinton.
Things devolved considerably from there. In 2017, Vice President Mike Pence cost American taxpayers $325,000 to briefly attend an Indianapolis Colts game and then abruptly leave when Colts players knelt for the national anthem, in what was reportedly a planned stunt of Trump’s creation.
In 2018, Georgia Republican gubernatorial candidate Michael Williams brought a “deportation bus” to campaign stops, saying he hoped to fill it “with illegals and send them back to where they came from.” He finished last in the five-man primary.
In March of 2019, Rep. Devin Nunes — once a co-sponsor of the “Discouraging Frivolous Lawsuits Act” — sued Twitter over critical posts by parody accounts, one pretending to be a cow and another, his mother. Answering the age-old question, can you sue fake cows, it was eventually thrown out by a judge.
In one of the frattiest stunts of the Trump era, perennial Delta Tau Chi pledge Matt Gaetz vowed to “storm the SCIF,” a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility in the basement of a Congressional building to “demand transparency” during the 2019 impeachment hearings. The stunt had a vague whiff of nobility until you learned that nearly 45 Republicans already had access to the depositions, and Gaetz and crew brought their cell phones into the secure area, a major breach of protocol. But who cares, because, “we’re going streaking!”
In March of 2020, just as the COVID pandemic was breaking and Congress was scrambling to pass its first stimulus package, Republican Rep. Thomas Massie took to a radio show, threatening to object to a voice vote in the House, which was set up to avoid having congressional members get on planes and convene in person. Due to his stunt, leadership flew across the country, risking their health and that of others, to — you guessed it — vote the way they would have anyway.
And later in the annus horribilis that was 2020, the Trump administration used tear gas on peaceful protesters to clear Lafayette Square so that he could pose for a photo-op at St. John’s Episcopal church amidst the unrest over George Floyd’s death.
This is but a brief catalog of the destructive dumbing down of American politics by Republicans in Congress under the careful tutelage of Donald Trump.
Political stunts weren’t invented by Trump, nor are they the sole domain of Republicans. From Michael Dukakis riding in a tank to Clint Eastwood speaking to an empty chair, stunts rarely go over well.
In the era of Trump, though, these stunts became fill-ins for legislating, oversight, checks and balances, and actual governing. They were no longer the sideshow, they were the show, the only one that seemed to matter to the president, anyway, and the one that captured his supporters’ imagination on Fox News and elsewhere.
And worse, most were entirely unconservative endeavors. Anti-speech lawsuits? Wasting taxpayer money on frivolous nonsense? Flouting national security protocols? Turning the government against the people? And now, attempting to thwart the will of millions of Americans to “pretend” to overturn a democratic election?
The childish idiocy of Trump Republicans is an embarrassment to the country, even if not to the GOP. Here’s hoping there are some grown-ups in the new administration and the new Congress, on both sides of the aisle. We can’t afford to get any dumber.
![In a narrow vote this week, the Federal Trade Commission approved a rule that will ban the vast majority of noncompete clauses by U.S. employers, which have long prevented workers from switching jobs or setting out on their own. In doing so, the agency did its duty to protect American economic dynamism and opportunity, nothing less, nothing more. We hope that’s the clear conclusion of the courts that will now rule on a lawsuit being brought by the Chamber of Commerce, which has strenuously supported this anticompetitive practice. Of the arguments that the business group and other opponents have rolled […]](https://www.nydailynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/GettyImages-1820955015.jpg?w=490 "In a narrow vote this week, the Federal Trade Commission approved a rule that will ban the vast majority of noncompete clauses by U.S. employers, which have long prevented workers from switching jobs or setting out on their own. In doing so, the agency did its duty to protect American economic dynamism and opportunity, nothing less, nothing more. We hope that’s the clear conclusion of the courts that will now rule on a lawsuit being brought by the Chamber of Commerce, which has strenuously supported this anticompetitive practice. Of the arguments that the business group and other opponents have rolled […]")
