Overconfident morons
After Donald Trump nominated the radioactively scandalous Matt Gaetz for Attorney General instead of someone he could have easily gotten confirmed with a recess appointment, I wrote yesterday that the best thing we have going for us is that Trump and his babysitters are overconfident politically naive morons. Someone asked how this can be the case, if they just won the election. That’s a fair question, and the answer comes back to something that Steve Bannon of all people said eight years ago.
After Trump won in 2016, there was massive pushback. The women’s march. The Muslim ban protests. At the time Bannon said that all he and the Trump regime had to do was wait for the pushback to die down, and then they’d be able to go ahead and do whatever they wanted. Of course in reality the pushback never did die down over the course of those four years, and Trump and his people were indeed unable to do a lot of the evil things they tried to do.
What strikes me to this day is that Bannon was naive enough to think the anti-Trump pushback was going to be brief. He thought we were really just going to give up after a month or three and let Trump do whatever he wanted. What also strikes me is Bannon’s sheer arrogant overconfidence. Not only did he think the pushback would go away, he bragged to the media that he thought the pushback would go away. “Never announce your secret plan” has got to be on page one of the textbook on how to be a successful villain. But Trump and his people didn’t seem to have a clue.
Here we are eight years later, and just as was the case in 2016, I don’t think Trump and his people did a single thing to win the election. I think the media simply handed them the election in dishonest fashion while chasing ratings. How else do you explain the near total lack of coverage of Trump’s obvious dementia and status as a recently convicted felon, even as the media pretended Biden was senile and held Harris to an impossible standard of perfection?
So yes, I think Trump and his people are just as big of overconfident morons as ever. Bigger, come to think of it. Steve Bannon was once the poster child for overconfident morons. The guy managed to get himself fired from the Trump White House, which should have been impossible, and then managed to get himself sent to federal prison, and is now on his way to state prison on charges that Trump can’t pardon. That’s a unique kind of stupid. Yet Trump’s current handlers appear to be even more inept.
Remember, the people babysitting Trump in 2024 are the people he ended up with after he ran out of people like Steve Bannon. Trump’s current handlers are the lowest rent morons out there. They make Bannon, who’s a world class idiot, look smart in comparison.
How else do you explain how badly Trump and his babysitters have blown this recess appointment strategy? They managed to get the Republican Senate to give them carte blanche for just about anyone they want in the cabinet. Then they turned around and nominated Matt Gaetz, one of the very few names that the Republican Senate was never going to allow to be confirmed quietly. That’s a special kind of stupid. And no, it’s not some secret evil genius plan to get someone else in there after Gaetz flames out. A failed nominee for something as prominent as Attorney General is a bodyblow for an incoming President. It would hugely weaken Trump out of the gate. If this is their “strategy” then they truly have no idea what they’re doing.
So yes, Donald Trump and his latest batch of bottom feeders are indeed overconfident morons. They’ve once again been handed the keys to the White House by the media, and they’re once again tripping over the doorframe on their way in. As long as we keep pushing back against them, we’re going to win at least some of these battles. Not all of them. Not by a long shot. But we’re going to win some crucial battles and we’re going to salvage some things. Both because we’ll never stop fighting and because they’re overconfident morons.
