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The Witness Chronicles, January 28, 2024

Why Trump cannot lead, and the rampant speculation of the punditsphere

Jan 28, 2024

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Trump Can Never Hire Competent Advisors. Here's Why

Ever wonder why so many ex-Trumpers turn on him?

It’s pretty crazy that a bunch of Americans are seriously considering re-electing him, when his own advisors and alumni of his White House are now making their living criticizing him. And there are a lot of them, because there was a revolving door in his White House HR department.

All that churn and turnover is not only the sign of very poor management at the top, it is reflective of a peculiar trait that goes with toxic narcissism. He cannot stand competence because he fears it may make him look less competent.

The only loyalists who have stayed that way are the crazies, the sycophants, and those whose agenda is enabled by him. Stephen Miller comes to mind, the ‘brains’ behind Trump’s policy of separating immigrant children from their parents as a deterrent to coming here.

It’s pretty hard to imagine a more heartless move than taking a child away from their family. Miller, whose own family have disavowed him as a maniacal bigot, is still lurking somewhere in Trump’s background cooking up legal strategies to further punish refugees escaping untold horrors.

Of course, those refugees and immigrants have to be non-white. The white ones are OK. After all Trump himself has married two immigrants but they were the good kind. Please remind yourself of that when you start to think his immigration rants are anything other than campaign tactics.

They’re racist, plain and simple. Fear tactics.

Now that Trump has burned through the possibly competent people who might have considered joining his next administration, we might ask ourselves, what kind of scum he will have left to run things? Anyone with a shred of self-respect and intelligence is going to avoid that place like the plague.

He demands total loyalty and rewards it with venom if anyone ventures an original idea or simply leaves his employment. They become traitors and he immediately starts egging his cult on to threaten them. It’s really a miracle that there have been no assassinations. Give it time and there may be.

Normally we would expect a White House to be staffed by the best and brightest we have. It has been common in the past for advisors to give up high paying jobs for the honor of serving their country. We know Trump only expects his people to serve him as lackeys.

He is, after all, not going to be a President elected in a democracy, he will be a king, and not a benevolent one. This is not speculation, he has made his plans crystal clear and we know from past experience what kind of leader he would be.

Try and imagine what kind of person would want to be his chief of staff after seeing where it got the last guys. Mark Meadows is under indictment for election tampering in Georgia and very likely will turn state’s evidence against his former boss. Peter Navarro, another serious wack job who was once taken seriously, is now facing four months in prison for contempt of Congress.

Some career path. A major reason Trump is running is so that he can pardon himself and stop the courts from upholding the rule of law, that clearly states that no person is above the law, right up to and including the President.

It may be that a newly elected Trump would have to promise potential staffers blanket pardons to get them to take a job with him, which opens up the possibility of a White House full of felons. At the rate things are going, it may well be that we already had a Trump White House full of crooks.

Crooks and crackpots.

I’m on the record for believing that he will not get re-elected. I’m also certain that he will claim, no matter what, that the election was rigged when he loses. I’m only writing this stuff in the vain hope that it might help tip someone into thinking about the reality of what they are doing, when they consider voting for someone indicted for felony crimes and convicted of sexual abuse and civil crimes.

But maybe that’s wishful thinking, to imagine that a MAGA believer might come to their senses. They don’t really want to, and that is the truly sad thing about what Trump has done to this country.

So, What Next? Rampant Speculation About NH Primary Sets In

Yes, he won. Or did he?

The punditsphere is busy busy busy today parsing the numbers every which way to figure out whether Trump did well or flamed out. Yes, he won a primary in a state whose population does not reflect that of any major state. ‘Major’ meaning a state with lots of electoral votes and a large population.

As I write this the primary has been over for less than 24 hours and the news media is full of analysis, speculation, obscure voter data, etc. And the entire apparatus of political expertise is in hyperdrive trying to tell us either what we want to hear or what we don’t want to hear.

My worthless advice is to ignore it all and watch the man and his reactions. As many have pointed out, he did not give a victory speech, instead doubling down on his online yelling about Nikki Haley and a bunch of things most of us could care less about.

Like debanking, whatever that is.

One thing stands out to me after subjecting myself to this endless flow of speculation and it came from the mouth of a NH Republican voter who did not vote for their man. This voter said, as though it was a fact we all assume, that Trump is only running to stay out of jail.

I think he nailed it. His run for a second term is the biggest grift of his life, a life that has been nothing but a long series of scams. Yes he lives for the attention, bathes in it, but the underlying difference in his campaign this time is fear. The man is terrified.

Important to note that this is not the reason he ran in 2020, an election he lost because many voters who elected him in 2016, did not come back to the fold. He lost them because of his behavior. But those losses in 2024 are being accelerated by his actions since 2020. Criminal cases, denial of election results, and all of the other crap he has piled up after losing.

One thing the pundits get right is that he keeps losing more of his original supporters and he can’t win without them.

In Trump’s life, everything negative is being done to him by others, never by the consequences of his own choices and actions. But those choices and actions are closing in on him from all sides. Civil court cases will destroy his company and reveal how little actual success he has had. The defamation suit from E. Jean Carrol and the rape trial he already lost are not going away, as he doubles down on his defamation and his incompetent attorney makes a fool of herself.

And we are about to see a torrent of losses in criminal courts starting with his claim of immunity, the long shot of all longshots. Reading the transcript of his attorney avoiding a judge’s question about the legality of an immune President sending Navy Seals to assassinate political rivals, was priceless.

The lawyer could not say that would be illegal without blowing his entire argument out of the water.

There are more things around him that would strike fear into anyone, like the state of his marriage, but the jail thing is the big one. He is in serious trouble and I think it is behind his every unhinged speech, online rants, and strange garbling of English into some weird stream of consciousness performance act.

So, we analyze the data about voter preferences, trends this way or that, the next primary and more, and none of it matters. At least not as much as the breathless experts with their digital whiteboards would have us believe. Watching someone like NBC’s Chuck Todd blasting through all kinds of arcane math as he taps away at charts really doesn’t tell us anything useful.

I say, go with your gut, just like that New Hampshire voter who stated the obvious. Trump’s run is a Hail Mary pass to score a get out of jail free card, nothing more.

The problem he faces is we need a President who actually cares about the country and works hard every day to improve lives. We have one, a guy who despite his age, works endlessly to do things like rebuild the economy, fix roads, cut the cost of life saving medicines, and who works to stop a war in the Middle East and win one in Ukraine.

An actual leader, not a guy who spent one third of his first term playing golf.

The guy who played all that golf back then seems to have disappeared, replaced by a paranoid victim desperately trying to save his own ass at any cost. If he is this far gone just three weeks into January, what will he look like in six months?

That’s the question the pundits should be wondering about, not the ratio of moderates to conservatives voting in some obscure New England village.

The Witness Chronicles, politics decoded

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