Trump Implodes and Republicans Scrub Their Websites

Republican candidates pretend abortion and Trump are both non-issues now

Editorial rights purchased from iStock. Photo by kimberrywood.

I thought it would take longer. I thought it would be more dramatic. I wanted to see Donald Trump on the witness stand muttering mumbo jumbo and flailing around like the moron we know him to be. Instead, all it took was a 36-page DOJ response to Trump’s absurd demand for a “special master,” and Trump began imploding on Truth Social, making one bizarre claim after the other. It wasn’t supposed to be this easy.

It’s hard to argue with photographs of documents stamped “Top Secret” littering the carpet that covers the floor of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. Some hardcore crazies may still say those docs were planted, but anyone with a functioning brain knows Trump is history.

Republicans in congress distance themselves from Trump

Trump has now become a liability — virtually overnight. Before the DOJ released its response to Trump’s call for a special master to be appointed in response to the documents legally removed by the FBI from Mar-A-Lago, Trump still had plenty of Republican support. That was yesterday.

Today, things are looking quite different. Even Jim Jordan and Marjorie Taylor Greene have stopped talking. And at least 10 Republican candidates are no longer basing their campaign rhetoric on their close ties to Trump and the “stolen election.”

It’s not that they’ve suddenly seen the light— it’s just that winning is what matters most. If they can’t win by being honest, they’ll lie. It’s what Trump did. He was pro-choice before he became a messiah to the Evangelical community. But Trump’s future isn’t looking good now, despite his messianic pretensions. Even typically cautious reporters are saying Trump will probably be indicted.

This is where the rest of the Republican Party leadership jumps ship. As loyal as they’ve been to Donald J Trump — as much as they know he still appeals to their base — a former president indicted for espionage is not a horse they want to bet on.

However, Trump isn’t the only Achilles’ heel for Republicans.

The practical implications of overturning Roe v Wade

The overturning of “Roe v Wade” is not the winning issue Republicans hoped it would be. While the right-wing Christian contingent on the Supreme Court has no head for practical considerations — health care professionals and the rest of us do — including at least one Republican.

Representative Neal Collins of South Carolina was forced to confront the reality of life without “Roe v Wade” just two weeks after the Fetal Heartbeat Bill became law in his home state. Here’s what he had to say.

The second week that this — that the Fetal Heartbeat Bill became law, a doctor called me. A 19-year-old girl appeared at the ER. She was 15 weeks pregnant. Her water broke. The fetus was unviable. The attorneys told the doctors that because of the Fetal Heartbeat Bill — because that 15-week-old had a heartbeat — the doctors could not extract.

They discharged that 19-year-old. The doctor told me at that point there is a 50% chance — well, first she’s going to pass this fetus in the toilet. She’s going to have to deal with that on her own. There’s a 50% chance — greater than 50% chance that she’s going to lose her uterus. There’s a 10% chance that she will develop sepsis and herself, die.

That weighs on me. I voted for that bill.

I’m tempted to be pissy and point out that a single moment of thought before casting his vote in favor of “that bill” should have told him to expect this scenario — just as we all should have expected the 10-year-old from Ohio to be forced to leave the state for an abortion after being raped.

That’s the thing, though, isn’t it? Right-wing, holier-than-thou Christian lawmakers don’t think. They judge, pontificate, and attempt to control, but they don’t think. And now that we’ve done their thinking for them, they realize they’re in trouble.

Republicans remove references to abortion from their campaign rhetoric and their websites.

I believe Neal Collins means well. At least when the doctor called to explain the situation that confronted his 19-year-old constituent due to the passage of the Fetal Heartbeat Bill he voted for, Collins began to think about it. And to his credit, he has also begun to talk about it. But the rest of the Republicans in Congress have chosen a more typical approach: denial.

The only practical implications they concern themselves with are those that affect their re-election chances. Faced with the fact that most people in this country want abortion to be legal, they’ve decided to stop talking about it.

Republicans don’t want us to talk about it either — it makes them look bad. To that end, they have systematically removed their anti-abortion rhetoric from their campaign websites.

They must not understand how technology works. There’s this thing called a screenshot that can preserve a website’s content for future reference. They must not understand how memory works, either. No doubt their constituents will recall which candidates supported overturning “Roe v Wade”.

Like the toddler who shuts his eyes, hoping you can’t see him if he can’t see you, they always do the easiest, simplest thing in response to the most difficult, complex, and challenging situations.

The good news is that plenty of Americans are capable are dealing with complex, challenging situations. The Democratic party is filled with them.

The bad news: Ron DeSantis.