I still can’t believe the GOP took President Biden’s bait on this one

| 9:09 am EDT September 3, 2022
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It’s fun watching congressional Republican leaders try to claim that President Biden has insulted “half the country” by calling out Donald Trump and his scumbag support base. Republican leaders are walking right into a trap when it comes to this.

Polling shows that a majority of Americans want Trump criminally charged. Polling also consistently shows that about half of Republican voters want someone other than Trump as their 2024 nominee. Yet the Republican Party leadership still clings to Trump’s political carcass.

Watching Joe Biden bait all these midterm Republican candidates into loudly defending Trump, given how toxically unpopular Trump is with general election audiences, is a thing of beauty. The kicker is that the Republicans didn’t have to take this bait. They could have just said nothing in response to Biden’s speech, and tried to prevent the speech from gaining enough oxygen to get any lasting media coverage either way.

But one of the remarkable parts about Donald Trump’s downfall is that in spite of being out of the game, he still has loyalist zombies like Kevin McCarthy and Ronna McDaniel in key Republican leadership positions. If these types wanted to do something smart for the Republicans’ midterm chances, they’d cut off Trump entirely. But because McCarthy and McDaniel are only in their current positions because Trump put them there, they wouldn’t last five minutes if they tried steering the party into its inevitable post-Trump landscape.

And so, even as Donald Trump becomes more toxically unpopular than ever, and even as the Feds prepare to arrest him for espionage in a way that’ll make him even more radioactive with mainstream voters, the Republican Party is marrying itself to Trump’s ghost more loudly than ever. Good. Hopefully the Republicans will continue to make this mistake all the way through November.