Aren’t You All Tired of This Crap?

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Monday, December 05, 2022

 

Are you not tired of this crap yet?

 

Former President Donald Trump on Monday denied he wanted to “‘terminate’ the Constitution,” two days after suggesting “the termination of all rules … even those found in the Constitution.”

 

“The Fake News is actually trying to convince the American People that I said I wanted to ‘terminate’ the Constitution. This is simply more DISINFORMATION & LIES,” Trump said on Monday on his own social media platform, Truth Social.

 

Trump’s lying, of course. He said what he said, and now he’s trying to back out of it. The more interesting question is why anyone is helping him do it. Week in, week out, this is what the guy does. On Monday, he’ll say that “people with red hair ought to be drowned in butter.” On Tuesday, normal people will say, “that really doesn’t sound like a good idea,” which, because our politics is stupid, will prompt Trump’s fans to say, “actually, what America needs — and what it’s always needed — is for us to drown people with red hair in butter.” On Wednesday, Trump will say that he “actually never said that we ought to drown people with red hair in butter,” but merely “suggested that butter would have red hair if it drowned, which it must, if America is to be great again” — and, at this signal, the people who’d defended him on Tuesday will pretend that this is what they’d understood him to mean all along, and then insist that the real villains of the story are the people who heard him say “people with red hair ought to be drowned in butter.” On Thursday, Trump will say the original thing again, in slightly different words.

 

Why does this happen? Beats me. At this stage, literally nothing is being achieved by it — except, of course, to drive independents and mainstream Republicans from the coalition. No laws are changed. No judges are appointed. No arguments are won. No thorny topics are broached. America doesn’t improve. Conservatism doesn’t improve. The GOP doesn’t improve. Everything just gets dumber and more cultish. As there should be, there is a limited supply of political energy in this country, and for some reason, the American Right has decided to spend an inordinate amount of it defending a man who is now serving nothing except for his own boredom and his own ego. At some point, conservative-leaning voters are going to notice that all Trump cares about now is the pretense that he won the election of 2020, and that, in order to push that idea, he will happily destroy anything and everything that gets in his way. Until then, I must ask: Are you not tired of this crap?