Desperate Don

The Democratic National Convention brought out some particularly pathetic behavior from the former president.

As I mentioned the other day, I didn’t watch this year’s Democratic National Convention. One person who did, however, was Donald Trump. And what he saw, I’m assuming in his conjunction with the latest poll numbers, threw quite a scare into him.

Every day last week, he said or did something transparently desperate in his quest to win back the White House, including glomming onto popular individuals and trends. It began Sunday with him pretending that pop-culture sensation Taylor Swift, who had been rumored to appear at the DNC, had endorsed him for president.

Later, in an apparent attempt to woo back swing-voters, Trump shockingly expressed both affection and respect for his popular White House predecessor, Barack Obama — the man he famously led the “birther” conspiracy movement against years earlier.

Of course, Trump has spent much of the last decade disparaging Obama, and blaming him for many of the country’s woes. He’s even implied a number of times that Obama is the puppet-master controlling the Biden administration. But last week, with the momentum on the Democrats’ side, Trump claimed to now like Mr. Obama… and even had good things to say about his wife, Michelle, who’s so popular with Americans that many in MAGA-world had convinced themselves she would somehow end up as Trump’s general-election opponent.

Trump also, to the surprise of many, fawned over the Republican governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp — a man he’d been publicly trashing for close to four years because Kemp refused to help him steal the 2020 election. Two years ago, Trump tried everything he could to primary Kemp out of office, including hand-picking his primary challenger. Just three weeks ago, he publicly attacked both Kemp and his wife in quite personal terms. But it appears that someone finally got through to the former president that the current Georgia governor is more popular than he is in his important swing-state, where Trump not only lost last time, but cost Republicans the Senate majority, and earned himself a criminal indictment… the charges in which he hopes to pardon himself for if he wins in November. So, I guess it’s pucker-up time.

By the way, guess who’s apparently all-in on abortion again? On Friday morning, Trump finally finished throwing the pro-life movement under the bus by declaring his “great” support for women’s “reproductive rights,” the Left’s preferred phrase for abortion access.

I’m sure he’ll tap-dance around this development for the next few days, and pretend it’s motivated by something other than our current political climate, but the good news for Trump is that conservative evangelicals will largely make excuses for wherever he ends up on abortion, being that their resounding support, which he’s long enjoyed, was never really tied to moral stances in the first place.

Oh, I almost forgot. There was an arguably even larger development a day earlier, when Trump seemed to finally admit, in public, that he indeed lost the last presidential election to Joe Biden.

At a news conference, Trump spoke of his final week as president in January 2021, and casually said, “This was the last week in office for me because of a horrible, horrible election. Where I got many millions more votes than I got the first time, but didn’t quite make it — just a little bit short.”

Just a little bit short? Wow. Imagine the national chaos, including a deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, the country could have been spared from if Trump had said that in November of 2020, and left office like an adult.

It’s too bad Trump wasn’t asked about the election comment when he desperately called into multiple Fox News shows during the network’s prime-time DNC coverage, trying (in a mostly futile effort) to shift the spotlight back on himself.

Oh, and in case you missed it, Trump also secured the endorsement of freshly retired presidential candidate and road-kill enthusiast, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in hopes of winning over the roughly 2-4% of the American electorate that was still standing by the prominent conspiracy theorist and acclaimed brain-worm recipient. Trump, it appears, promised Kennedy a spot in his administration (perhaps as the director of the National Park Service, since he has experience with bears).

For those keeping notes, this is indeed the same RFK Jr. who’s been casting Trump’s signature achievement, Operation Warp Speed, as a crime against humanity, and just recently claimed that Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, was owned by the CIA and Military Industrial Complex. Of Trump himself, Kennedy has said that he’s “a terrible human being. The worse president ever and barely human. He is probably a sociopath.” And just a few months ago, Trump called Kennedy “fake,” and claimed he would be an even worse president than Joe Biden.

But hey, in a tight presidential race, I suppose 2-4% is something.

Anyway, the good news is that convention week has come to a close. The bad news is that it’s only August. We’ve got about two and a half more months of this nonsense, folks. And in a contest in which neither major-party nominee is standing on principle, or presenting serious solutions to serious problems, the sky’s the limit for more pathetic, poll-tested pandering to come.

I guess we’ll see what sticks.