Gotta Hate More Than Trump

The latest gross, terrible thing Trump did is wear one of his white USA baseball caps when he was at a ceremony for six dead soldiers returning to the US. Tomorrow, he’ll do things that would have the DC press in a swivet if a Democrat had done them. This is just the way Trump is, and there’s a major media industry devoted to pointing out all of his failures and foibles to engaged Democrats, which is fine, but it’s not enough.

The brand destruction program Democrats need isn’t (only) one targeted at the Trump brand, it needs to be targeted at the Republican brand, and I’m not at all convinced that the current leadership is down for that. Take the example of unqualified moron Markwayne Mullin. First, Fetterbro is all in on him, of course, but Peter Welch? What?

Mullin demonstrated his “competence” by threatening to have a fistfight with Sean O’Brien during a Senate hearing. He’s also a fucking weirdo — he put his finger in the noses of colleagues who were sleeping on a Congressional junket and took pictures. He also claimed that only Democratic rallies became violent (and he said that after January 6). So, he’s at best a garden-variety MAGA manbaby with a side of weird shit thrown in. There is less than zero need for any sane Democrat to say anything nice about him, but here we are.

I thought this was an interesting reminder from the Politico piece where various Republicans stepped up to testify to Mullin’s awesomeness:

Tower is ancient history, but Gregg was another “good” Republican who Obama nominated for Commerce Secretary, then it was revealed that he had voted to dismantle the Commerce Department when he was Secretary, then there was a dust-up over whether Commerce should still supervise the Census, and finally he withdrew because he shouldn’t have been nominated in the first place. Daschle withdrew because he didn’t pay taxes on some consulting and perks he got after he lost his Senate seat. (It was a nothingburger then, and it’s laughable now.) Unlike Gregg, losing Daschle at HHS was a blow to Obamacare, since his real job was going to be to shepherd it through the Senate. And, whatever you want to say about Tom Daschle, he’s a million times more qualified than old two-names Mullin.

Let me summarize:

• After some of the most gross incompetence in the modern history of our country, perpetrated by the Republican Party, Obama still nominated a number of Republicans to cabinet spots. One of them pissed all over the nomination. And one highly qualified Democrat was rejected by Republicans in the Senate.

• Another round of Republican incompetence, combined with authoritarianism, has led to the nomination of an idiot to lead the department that’s responsible for the murder of two innocent civilians. Yet there are members of the “opposition” party running to the microphones to say good things about this idiot.

In addition to making the Democratic brand indistinguishable from pure fecklessness, this pre-emptive surrender to Republicans does nothing to damage their brand. We know that Republicans will, again and again, say anything about Democrats, true or not. The next step will be to hold the Homeland Security “shutdown” (which isn’t really a shutdown of ICE, since they have infinity of cash to keep up wilding) against Democrats when the Iranians retaliate against us. They’re already teeing up the attacks. Never mind that the clown in charge of the FBI gutted the department in charge of preventing attacks from Iran, around the time he flew to Italy to drink beers with the Olympic hockey team.

“Trump bad” might win the next election, and the one after that, but unless the Democratic Party is willing to unite around an anti-Republican message, not a lot is going to change. There’s just no reason why the lame-ass “affordability” messaging is the only thing we need to talk about. We can say that Republicans wreck the economy and get us into stupid wars every time they’re in power, because it’s simply true. But for a whole host of reasons, that’s apparently off the table as a consistent messaging strategy.