Boxed in!
Republican Party leaders are like those French mimes pretending to be stuck in a box. “Oh, dear, how will I ever escape?” Only they’re not trying to escape. It’s just performance art.
For example, Nikki Haley twisted herself into knots trying to avoid saying that the Civil War was about slavery. She backtracked, and then made the predictable gaffe that she had black friends growing up. So, what, she doesn’t have black friends now? Oh lord, how WILL she get out of this? She won’t because she doesn’t want to.
Republicans continue this charade because their base falls for it. Republican voters are like the people who mock the mime, but then stand there mesmerized by him in the park and even throw their money into his hat after the show. Nikki Haley is even surging in the polls, at least according to The Washington Post she is. Meanwhile, Haley and Trump are attacking each other. This will box them in by turning off moderate Republicans. We don’t need them to vote for Democrats. We just need them to NOT vote at all.
SCOTUS agreed to decide whether Trump can be removed from the Colorado presidential primary ballot. The problem is that the Colorado supreme court decision included language from Justice Gorsuch’s own past ruling. SCOTUS will have to rule whether it’s up to the states to decide or if Trump is an insurrectionist. A recent example of SCOTUS being cornered was when it decided in favor of voting rights because of Chief Justice Roberts’ own precedent. Boxed in!
Trump has boxed himself in on presidential immunity. In a recent court filing, Jack Smith proposed theoretical crimes that presidential immunity could permit. Trump’s defense attorneys made their case in favor of presidential immunity by arguing that if Trump were to commit such “lurid” hypotheticals there’s no way being president could save him. Boxed in!
Or how Elise Stefanik was cornered during her Meet the Press interview Sunday, when NBC played a clip of her previously condemning the violent insurrectionists. Or, how Republicans believe the FBI staged the insurrection, all while defending the insurrectionists. Or how some Republican women are trying to gain votes with a pro-contraception coalition while their male counterparts are trying to outlaw birth control lumping it in with abortion. Boxed in!
The list goes on. But it is crucial to call out Republican gaslighting, projection, and double standards. The purpose of it is to confuse voters so that they conflate their own leaders’ evil behavior with normal behavior making “both sides” the same.
Journalists need to corner Republicans with questions like, Is slavery bad? If they say yes, they will be in violation of their own anti-critical race theory (CRT) laws. See how that works? Flagging their pretzel logic shows them unworthy of their boxes being checked at the voting booth.
Chicago native Lorraine Evanoff earned her degree in French from DePaul University then became a Certified Financial Manager. She worked as a finance exec in film production for seven years in Paris, then in Silicon Valley during the dot-com era, and later for various Hollywood production companies, notably as CFO of National Lampoon. She is currently living in Los Angeles with her husband.