Donald Trump’s Lisa Murkowski meltdown reveals just how far gone he is
Donald Trump has no voice on social media, rarely appears in public, can’t seem to keep a spokesman around, and has very little remaining voice or relevance in politics. He’s reduced to releasing occasional press releases that he hopes some fraction of the media will regurgitate. Here at Palmer Report we usually just ignore the childish nonsense he releases. But his announcement today actually offers some insight into his downfall.
Today, Trump endorsed a far right primary challenger to Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski. This is clearly in retaliation for Murkowski’s vote to impeach Trump. This is of no value to the Republican Party in general, because Murkowski votes with her own party the vast majority of the time; she merely objected to Trump’s criminal nature. So even if Trump succeeds in ousting Murkowski, it won’t increase the GOP’s number of seats in the Senate, nor will it necessarily give the party a more reliably loyal vote. It serves no purpose, other than to allow Trump to feel like he’s punishing the people he blames for his downfall.
The kicker is that Murkowski will probably survive the primary challenge anyway; it’s not like she hasn’t faced a far right challenger before. In fact, if anything, this could make Murkowski less beholden to the Republican Party, because she may need to use her upcoming votes to paint herself as more of a centrist in order to amass enough moderate support to defeat her far right challenger.
But the real story here is just how far gone Donald Trump is. He has very little remaining in his arsenal, and instead of using it to try to mount some kind of realistic comeback or trying to protect himself from his upcoming criminal indictment, he’s using it to feebly try to take people like Murkowski down with him. He really is a goner.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report