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Thanks, Trump, for ensuring that the 2022 midterms will be all about you [1]

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Date: 2022-09-04

Sure, the fact that six Republican-appointed Supreme Court Justices judges instantly transformed half the American population into second-class citizens by denying them the right to control their own reproductive decisions was always going to be a problem. Still, with a bit of website scrubbing and mealy-mouthed sophistry, even hardcore, virulent GOP abortion deniers like Marco Rubio and wannabe GOP senators like Blake Masters thought they might be able to massage that sticky issue into the background. The important thing was to focus like a laser beam on crime and inflation -- so-called “kitchen-table” issues that Republicans have historically never had any solutions for — but no matter: as long as that tiny slice of the fickle electorate that actually decides elections wasn’t reminded again and again of the abrasive and unbalanced monster of Mar-A-Lago.

David Frum, writing for The Atlantic, gives us the context of the GOP’s thinking about this:

For the 2022 election cycle, smart Republicans had a clear and simple plan: Don’t let the election be about Trump. Make it about gas prices, or crime, or the border, or race, or sex education, or anything—anything but Trump. Trump lost the popular vote in 2016. He lost control of the House in 2018. He lost the presidency in 2020. He lost both Senate seats in Georgia in 2021. Republicans had good reason to dread the havoc he’d create if he joined the fight in 2022.

Frum’s thesis is that President Biden didn’t just wake up Thursday morning and decide it was about time to go to Philadelphia and call out Republicans as fascist Trump sycophants hellbent on violently wiping out democracy. To be sure, he did that, but he could have done that any time over the past two years. No, this particular speech was crafted for delivery at a specific time, and especially vetted and doubtlessly written to elicit a reaction from one special guy.

And Trump obliged. As Frum points out, the first thing out of Trump’s mouth as he spoke in Wilkes-Barre, PA., was an insult to the city of Philadelphia, which Trump painted as some imaginary crime-ridden hellscape but in the banal light of reality was simply gearing up again for the millions who enjoyed this weekend’s sunny weather to top off their Labor Day weekend with the Made in America Festival and the traditional fireworks over the Delaware river.

Hint: Wilkes Barre has a population of 40,800. The population of Philadelphia alone is nearly 1.6 million.

The rest of the speech was a regurgitation of what Trump now considers his “hit-reel:” attacking the “vicious monsters” of the FBI, whining about the Justice Department’’s search of his closet, vilifying Mitch McConnell, and, of course, claiming he truly won the election. As Frum notes, there was only a tiny opportunity allotted for either Mehmet Oz or Doug Mastriano -- his “selected” candidates for Pennsylvania -- to get a feeble word in. The overwhelming focus of the rally, as Frum aptly characterizes it, was “Trump, Trump, Trump:" in every sense “a protracted display of narcissistic injury that was exactly the behavior that Biden’s Philadelphia speech had been designed to elicit.”

And true to form, the media ran with it. If anyone had any doubt what the 2022 election was about, after this week’s rally those doubts were long gone. It was all about Trump. Again.

As Frum observes:

Republican congressional leaders desperately but hopelessly tried to avert the risk that this next election would become yet another national referendum on Trump’s leadership. Despite Trump’s lying and boasting, politicians who can count to 50 and 218—the respective numbers needed for a majority in the Senate and House—have to reckon with the real-world costs of Trump’s defeats. But Biden understood their man’s psychology too well. Biden came to Philadelphia to deliver a wound to Trump’s boundless yet fragile ego. Trump obliged with a monstrously self-involved meltdown 48 hours later. And now his party has nowhere to hide. Trump has overwritten his name on every Republican line of every ballot in 2022.

As Frum puts it, Biden simply dangled the bait and Trump grabbed it like a greedy fish, putting the entire Republican party on the hook with him.

So now all American voters have the 2022 playbook.

They know who’s really on the ballot.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/9/4/2120776/-Thanks-Trump-for-ensuring-that-the-2022-midterms-will-be-all-about-you

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