Last week, right before Christmas, Donald Trump appeared to offend his own base when, while on tour with fellow geriatric Bill O'Reilly, he revealed that he was in support of people being vaccinated against COVID-19 and its current variants, Delta & Omicron. He is just opposed to mandates making it mandatory to get the vaccines.
The crowd in Orlando booed. They felt betrayed.
Later that week, he was interviewed by right wing commentator Candace Owens, and repeated his support for the vaccines. Owens has since moved on to touting another phony treatment, claiming collodial silver, whatever the blue hizell that is, is preventive medicine against COVID, claiming she takes a teaspoon a day. Right, sure, and cows can actually jump the moon. Research tells us that use of this ersatz "cure" can turn a person's skin blue. In the case of Owens, an African-American, I'm not sure what the result would be from repeated usage.
Conspiracy theorists, like those in the Q-Anon cult, went bananas. They felt betrayed.
But, there are those who considering the long game with Trump, a con artist who has had millions of people snowed under for so long. He knows he's in major legal trouble and if he can snake his way out of the various lawsuits brought against him, the road clears for him to run again in 2024. As if he'll actually run. It's more likely he'll end up in prison or in a psychiatric hospital by then.
For those of us who are looking for positives, we can say he's trying to repair an image irretrievably shattered over the course of the last several years, between his support of the birther movement during the Obama years, and being exposed as a misogynistic, whiny man-child who throws major tantrums when things don't go his way.
After losing his re-election bid nearly 14 months ago, Trump tried to claim that 5,000 dead people voted in Georgia. The Georgia Board of Elections found just four votes from deceased voters, and, to the surprise of absolutely no one, those votes were for Trump. Every time Trump has tried to claim fraud, it gets debunked so easily, it's a waste of time to go back to the well again. He got drunk on power in Washington, and, because he was pampered for so long, conditioned to believe he's never wrong by his late father, he can't reconcile himself to the truth. He conned the evangelical Christians into believing he is one of them, but in truth he is not. Son Donald, Jr. proved to be just as Biblically illiterate the other day, and it was revealed a short time prior to that debacle that Ivanka helped arrange that now-infamous church photo op last year.
No matter how much work Trump does to try to repair his image going forward, there are going to be those stories and revelations about what really happened on January 6, 2021, and the image of Trump we'll see is the one that has been ingrained in our collective psyche.
Leopards can't change their spots, and 70-something man-babies are forever stuck in an eternal second childhood.
No comments:
Post a Comment