Trump Has Always Counted on the Kindness of Collaborators
FOTP News in Review for ... Sunday, November 15th, 2021
Sen. John A. Barrasso (R-Wyoming), according to the website OpenSecrets, is worth $8,339,006. In 2018, the first year he was elected, he received 67 percent of the vote. Now you’d think with that kind of money and that much job security, not selling your soul to a money- and attention-grubbing carnival barker who once deducted $70,000 on his taxes on hair care products (italics mine) and stood by while men in animal masks planned to hang his own vice president would be relatively easy lifting — especially if you’re the kind of senator, and Barrasso says he is just that kind, who speaks for the average American who doesn’t use gel and only dons the gargoyle mask on Halloween.
You’d be wrong.
Barrasso won’t, in fact, distance himself from the former president because, even though Trump may have orchestrated a coup on the United States, Democrats encourage early voting and there’s inflation.
This past Sunday, Barrasso was on This Week — either because he lost the GOP weekly lottery for such appearances, or because he put in for it — and played the obedient party poodle on national television.
It was not pretty.
It never is.
We pick up the interview midstream.
HOST GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Finally, I want to ask you about President Trump. As you know, Jon Karl, our chief Washington correspondent, had an interview with President Trump he released this week where the president seems to defend those who were saying “hang Mike Pence” on January 6th. I want to show it.
Stephanopoulos then played the tape so Barrasso could hear the interview and we could all hear him hearing it.
(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)
JON KARL, ABC NEWS CHIEF WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT: Were you worried about him during that siege? Were you worried about his safety?
DONALD TRUMP, FORMER PRESIDENT: No. I thought he was well-protected and I had heard that he was in good shape.
KARL: Because you heard those chants. That was terrible. I mean, you know, those—
TRUMP: He could have — well, the people were very angry.
KARL: They were saying “hang Mike Pence.”
TRUMP: Because it's common sense — how can you, if you know a vote is fraudulent, right, how can you pass on a fraudulent vote to Congress?
(END AUDIO CLIP)
Stephanopoulos then asked the senator if he ever worries about turning into Lot’s wife when he looks back on being a Republican.
STEPHANOPOULOS: So he says "hang Mike Pence is common sense." Can your party tolerate a leader who defends murderous chants against his own vice president?
BARRASSO: Well — well, let me just say, the Republican Party is incredibly united right now and it's because of the policies of this administration.
Barrasso couldn’t have been any more obfuscatory if he'd swung a cat over his head with his right hand and hid his left under the desk.
And I think the more that the Democrats and the press become obsessed with President Trump, I think the better it is for the Republican Party. President Trump brings lots of energy to the party. He's an enduring force. But elections are about the future, not the past. And that's what we saw in Virginia and all across the country. And the Republican policies and the Trump policies of a strong economy and American energy, not begging Vladimir Putin to produce more oil, which is what Joe Biden is doing, those are policies that we're going to continue to run on in the future.
Let us now set the Wayback Machine to 2018 and Helsinki, to a time when an American president didn’t beg a Russian president, but did announce he believed him more than he did his own intelligence community.
President Donald Trump on Monday said at a joint briefing with Russian President Vladimir Putin that while he had “great confidence” in the U.S. intelligence community, Putin was “extremely strong and powerful in his denial” that Russia meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
That was your guy, Senator.
STEPHANOPOULOS: So you have no problem with the president saying "hang Mike Pence is common sense"?
BARRASSO: I was with Mike Pence in the Senate chamber during January 6th. And what happened was they quickly got Vice President Pence out of there, certainly a lot faster than they removed the senators.
Interesting defense. Even if the president did want the vice president hung, he wasn’t hung, so no foul.
I believed he was safe the whole time.
Good to know that if, God forbid, the vice president actually were hung and Barrasso saw Pence’s lifeless body swinging slowly from a tree on Constitution Avenue, Barrasso could give himself a pass because the VP didn’t appear panicky as he was dragged kicking and screaming from the hallowed chamber with a bag over his head.
I didn't hear any of those chants. I don't believe that he did either. And Vice President Pence came back into the chamber that night and certified the election.
Barrasso apparently didn’t hear what we all heard him hearing.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, we just played the chants. I'm asking if you, if you believe, if you can tolerate the president saying "hang Mike Pence is common sense"?
BARRASSO: It's — it's not common sense. There are issues of every election. I voted to certify the election. And what we have seen on this election, there are areas that needed to be looked into, like what we saw in Pennsylvania. We all want fair and free elections. That's where we need to go for the future.
“It’s not common sense” — where does the man find the courage?
Stephanopoulos tried again.
STEPHANOPOULOS: But you're not going to criticize President Trump for those views?
BARRASSO: I don't agree with President Trump on everything. I agree with him on the policies that have brought us the best economy in our — my lifetime.
Crowing about Trump’s handling of the country’s economy while he was trying to trash its democracy is like reminding us that, aside from everything pre-1865, John Wilkes Booth should be known for his acting chops.
And I'm going to continue to support those policies and continuing to work to stop what Joe Biden is doing to this country, which I believe is almost irreversibly bad.
How’s he going to stop him?
“Joe Biden is in the White House, and there’s nothing we can do about that right now, other than to stop this administration and make him into a half-term president.”
A half-term . . .?
That isn’t cowardice in the face of Trump. That is collaboration in support of Trump.
But that’s not the worst of it — there’s an odd, thrown-together, grammatically challenged website called primarytherino.com, run by God knows who, that targets GOP House and Senate members for not being sufficiently at the behest of Donald Trump. You want to get depressed?
John Barrasso is targeted as not being loyal enough.
Trump Has Always Counted on the Kindness of Collaborators
"Barrasso couldn’t have been any more obfuscatory if he'd swung a cat over his head with his right hand and hid his left under the desk."
Wait! What?! How'd he do that? I smell a rat....
And while we're talking about rats - "Democrats encourage early voting and there’s inflation."
JFC. Not a day goes by that I don't say to myself "this has got to stop." In truthi probably scream it most days though I'm not sure if it's just loud in my head or I'm saying/screaming it out loud. Despite current efforts by the House I'm not optimistic anyone will be held to account or that scales will soon fall from the eyes of any Trump voters.
It's bad when Michael Flynn, a former general officer, one time national security advisor, and all around immoral douchebag says the quiet things out loud by pissing on the Establishment Clause and calls for the US to be a "Christian country." If Flynn has no legal or ethical qualms about violating good oaths, he's still protected by the First Amendment, although cutting off his pension and throwing his skinny little ass in jail would be nice. But Barrasso, a standing Senator with obligations to serve and protect his constituents and the welfare of the entire nation, represents the total disconnect between our elected "representatives" and the interests of the citizenry. True, this manifests itself primarily with those "representatives" with an R following their names, but it puts the lie to our entire form of government which ultimately is based on the honor system - that we'll abide by a set of "rules," codified or not.
Trump's single success was to lay bare the fact the Constitution has no teeth, that for 250 years we've been suckers for believing otherwise. Will the GOP gaslighting succeed due to a collective fatigue or is there any hope that we'll claw back some semblance of our national ideals, or at least some system in which there's some degree of trust and collaboration?
Each of your Monday recaps, Barry, lead me to conclude that I shouldn't hold my breath awaiting the latter.