The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #171871   Message #4188802
Posted By: Steve Shaw
26-Aug-23 - 07:27 PM
Thread Name: BS: Trump INDICTED AGAIN x4 (NO new Trmp threads)
Subject: RE: BS: Trump INDICTED AGAIN x4 (NO new Trmp threads)
Going back to the substantive, here's a Brit view of recent Republican shenanigans from the Guardian:

Donald Trump stayed away from Wednesday’s Republican candidates’ debate in Milwaukee. Yet he remained the evening’s dominant presence. The former president’s poll lead among Republican supporters for the 2024 US presidential contest is so strong that he could afford to do this. His absence deliberately belittled both the televised event, as he simultaneously gave an imperiously misleading social media interview to Tucker Carlson, and his eight challengers, who were left vying to impress in a fantasy “What if?” contest over the choice for a party not in fact dominated by Mr Trump.

Absence also allowed Mr Trump, on the eve of his latest court appearance in Atlanta and now facing 91 felony counts in four separate criminal cases, to avoid offering himself as a target to his eight rivals. Not that he need have worried about that. Most of them went out of their way all evening to pay him repeated homage. No one did this more shamelessly than the Ohio entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who told the audience both that Mr Trump was the best Republican president of the 21st century and that, if elected, Mr Ramaswamy would instantly pardon him for whatever he may have been convicted of in the meantime.

By identifying deliberately with Mr Trump’s outsider status, Mr Ramaswamy did two things. He made a bid to be Mr Trump’s running-mate next year and he also separated himself from the platform’s professional politicians. These seven all see themselves, with varying degrees of credibility, as the alternative candidate to Mr Trump. Their shared problem is that the party shows little sign of being interested in such a person. Certainly not in the former vice-president Mike Pence, whose certification of Joe Biden’s victory in January 2021 was supported by most of his fellow candidates but remains heretical to Trump supporters. And probably not in the Florida governor Ron DeSantis either, who entered the debate as the nominal chief rival to Mr Trump but who once again did relatively little to cement that claim.


Maybe you yanks don't see it in quite the same way, or maybe (as has been expressed here more than once) you think that we Brits don't get it because we don't live over there (and presumably don't get our info from Fox News). Thing is, we see Trump as a world issue, not just a US domestic issue, and we're worried.