This is what was happening in Manchester, New Hampshire, on Saturday night. Donald Trump was speaking at a rally he said was the biggest ever held there in Manchester, because every one of his rallies is the biggest ever held in whatever venue, wherever he is. He was speaking to Republicans in New Hampshire about the same things he spoke to Republicans about in Iowa just days before, describing to them a new place in a new country where they had never been. They didn’t know where they were going yet, but if they listened closely to him, he would take them there.
“We need to come together and focus all of our energy and resources on defeating crooked Joe Biden,” Trump said at the rally. Adopting the language Biden has used effectively against him, Trump said of the president, “He is a threat to democracy. He really is. We have to get him out. You know why he is a threat to democracy? A couple of reasons. He’s grossly incompetent. We will end up in a world war because of this guy. The bomb thrower. Look at the Middle East now again. Here we go again. The bombs are being dropped all over the place. The Secretary of missing in action. And then they find him. You know how he’s running the war? Laptop from his stomach waiting in a hospital bed.”
Referring to a war started in the year 2001 by another Republican president, Trump conflated Biden with every president who had served in office since that war began, including himself: “Same people that gave us Afghanistan, I think the most embarrassing event in the history of our country, those are the people running his wars. Nobody ever gets fired. I fired Comey. I fired a lot of people. When somebody’s bad, you have to fire them. Here’s a guy they don’t win wars, they don’t do anything right, and nobody ever gets fired. I guess they know too much. Does anyone know what that means? I know what that means.”
He paused to let the thought sink in, how much he knows, how much he appreciates what people like those in his audience don’t appreciate, but he’s going to tell them: “Sadly, not everyone is willing to put our country first. This is called America first territory. It’s America first. So here in New Hampshire, Nikki Haley. I know her well. The guy is screaming, birdbrain. Only in New Hampshire. Only in New Hampshire.”
Folks, I think I have finally reached an understanding of what is going on in our country: We are living in parallel universes.
In one universe, Joe Biden is president, the unemployment rate is under four percent and has been for 21 straight months, the economy added 216,000 jobs in December, the homicide rate nationally is down 13 percent over the last year, the stock market just reached a record high, the Federal Reserve sees inflation easing more than a full percentage point over the next year and indicates that it will hold interest rates steady, and next month, a recalcitrant Congress is expected to be dragged kicking and screaming into not shutting down the government.
In the other universe, Ron “We Hardly Knew Ye” DeSantis dropped out of a presidential run practically nobody noticed he was engaged in any way. I mean, what was the point? He never looked like he wanted to actually be president. He never uttered two consecutive sentences of a rationale for his campaign, unless you count propping up the private jet rental industry as a reasonable goal he was attempting to attain. All he ever did on a debate stage was look angry and sound angry, but he looked angry and sounded angry every time he appeared in public anyway, especially if anyone wearing press credentials was nearby.
And let’s just stop right there and ask a question I never heard anyone ask over the last six or seven months, and that is, what was the deal with DeSantis and his hatred of the media? It’s yet another example of one of the parallel universes we’ve been in, this one the universe where people who are standing around with cameras and notebooks ready to record everything you say and transmit it for free to the people you’re trying to get to vote for you, those people are the enemy. Huh? What the hell was that all about? I mean, Donald Trump constantly calls the media the enemy, but he’s ready at the drop of an invite from a podcaster with a listening audience in excess of eight to jump in there and babble his lips off in the hope that he’ll gain a zillionth of a point in the polls. Sure, the hatred of DeSantis for Trump was so blatant not even Botox could help conceal it but adopting the polar opposite of Trump’s media strategy fit the political playbook of the too online right, “failing to recognize,” Salon’s Heather “Digby” Parton points out, “that Donald Trump owns them.”
You could of course write the whole parallel universe thing off to yet another successful Trumpian effort to come up with a world of lies and put them across with more aplomb than a cable TV preacher, but I think it’s more than that. The whole thing of having a presidential primary race isn’t just falling apart, it has gone away completely. Trump is left with a single opponent, whom he cannot distinguish from Nancy Pelosi, a Republican boogey-woman nobody else in the Republican Party can remember the name of either, most of them having switched their boogey-people to her successor, Kevin McCarthy, and then quickly to someone whose name they didn’t know in the first place, Mike “I’m Gobbling White Bread and Mayo As Fast As I Can” Johnson. Talk about a lack of imagination! What happened with labeling somebody from the other party as the enemy? Geeeez…
See what I mean? Not only are there parallel universes, but one of them is upside down and spinning backward. Man, every time I turn on the news or pick up the newspaper, I breathe this gigantic sigh of relief that I don’t have the job that used to be regarded as the pinnacle of a journalism career: national political reporter. I knew people who spent decades in the trenches of the newspaper game working their way up the slippery pole to get that moniker after their byline in the paper or on a TV chryon. There was a time, and it wasn’t so long ago, when having that job during a presidential campaign would get you a six-figure advance from a New York publisher to write a (hopefully) definitive book on the campaign, which with a little bit of luck might put you on the fast track to a cushy sinecure on the op-ed page where you could stroke your whiskers or smooth your coif and sit back and finally get to that point every newspaperman or woman longs for when you are blessed with the experience and wisdom to Make It Look Easy as you ride into the golden vistas of the journalism sunset…
Can you imagine working your ass off in the trenches of the ink-stained trade for this pathetic excuse of a Republican primary?
The question we should be asking at this point is, when the Republican primary is over, will anyone notice? If Nikki Haley achieves what we used to call A Close Second, will it matter?
In fact, how would you like to be Nikki right now, when what you are is someone with a first name Donald Trump can easily turn into a racist epithet and then promptly get you confused with Nancy Pelosi? Man, that’s an ambition worth an endless roundelay of soulless mid-level convention venues, empty hotel rooms and backseat rides in SUVs sitting next to people telling you how many points you’re down in the polls.
