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If you are familiar with the movie “A Christmas Story” (and who isn’t?) you’ll recall Skut Farkus, the bully in the fur hat who would beat up neighborhood kids. In this pre-primary election season, Donald Trump plays Skut Farkus with his outrageous name-calling and accusations aimed at his rivals. But which candidate wants to be Ralphie, the little kid who finally beats up the bully?
So far, most Republican presidential candidates have avoided criticizing Trump. Mike Pence, in fact, merely calls him “my former running mate.” While past GOP rivals, like John McCain and George W. Bush, were unafraid to show their disdain for the other, a fear factor is infecting the current GOP crop of candidates.
Rich Lowry writes in National Review:
You can almost see them thinking:
Maybe he’ll leave me alone.
Maybe he’ll make me his veep.
Maybe there will be a better time to attack him later.
And, I can’t risk offending his voters…
This means that Donald Trump’s political dominance of the rest of the field extends to a kind of personal and psychological dominance. They are afraid, and he’s not.
Most Republican candidates fear the Farkus Factor; that is, except for Chris Christie. Leave it to a Sicilian Jersey guy to fearlessly needle the guy from Queens.
Christie appeared on Sunday’s “State of the Union,” calling Trump and his Mar-a-Lago aides “The Corleones with no experience” — and Christie was just getting warmed up.
Finally, Gov. Ron DeSantis is also throwing shade at Trump, as he did on Monday with Fox News’ Bret Baier on “Special Report.” DeSantis criticized the former president’s handling of Covid:
Even January of 2021, right before he left office, his task force was telling us in Florida to close. And so he didn’t have control over his own government. He didn’t have control over Fauci. Fauci ran that government, his last year in office. Trump should have fired him. He did not do that. He elevated Fauci and he made Fauci an international celebrity.
But is it too little, too late? Meanwhile, the rest of the GOP candidates quiver in their boots at the thought of Trump.
GOP candidates aren’t just afraid of Trump. They’re also afraid of alienating his loyal base. These folks are completely unshakable in their support for DJT.
A New York Times/Siena College poll released on Monday showed Donald Trump holding a whopping 37 point lead over DeSantis, his nearest rival. Moreover, in answer to the question, Which candidate would you be most likely to vote for in the Republican presidential primary?, 54% of Republicans replied that they would vote for Trump.
Breaking those numbers down, Nate Cohn of the NYT finds that Trump’s MAGA base makes up 37% of a likely GOP electorate, with 37% persuadable, and 25% in the “not open to Trump” category.
So just who are the MAGA faithful?
Cohn writes:
It’s populist. It’s conservative. It’s blue collar. It’s convinced the nation is on the verge of catastrophe. And it’s exceptionally loyal to Donald Trump…
The MAGA base doesn’t support Mr. Trump in spite of his flaws. It supports him because it doesn’t seem to believe he has flaws.
The poll supports that, too. Not one of the 319 respondents in the MAGA category said that Trump committed serious crimes. And only 2% said he “did something wrong” in his handling of classified documents. Yet they insist that Republicans support him anyway.
The hardcore MAGA crowd includes a 69-year-old retail manager in New Hampshire who expressed his support for Trump like this:
He might say mean things and make all the men cry because all the men are wearing your wife’s underpants and you can’t be a man anymore. You got to be a little sissy and cry about everything. But at the end of the day, you want results. Donald Trump’s my guy. He’s proved it on a national level.
Then there’s the name-calling. Republicans who don’t support Donald Trump get labeled by the MAGA crowd as “RINO,” or “squish,” or even the colorful “toffee-nosed Republicans.” Take, for example, former liberal-civil-rights-attorney-turned-MAGA activist Leo Terrell who called TX GOP Rep. Chip Roy a “RINO” because he supports DeSantis. And Roy has all the bona fides of a conservative Republican.
In MAGA World there is no room for dissent.
Skut Farkus may have been a bully, but his toady Grover Dill stayed loyal to him because Farkus exuded power. On the other hand, Donald Trump talks tough, yet keeps his base’s devotion by whining that he’s “the most persecuted person in American history.” Moreover, the persecution extends to MAGA.
And indeed, on Monday Newsweek published an editorial from the former president called “The Real Victim of the Russiagate Hoax Wasn’t Me. It Was the American People.”
At a rally in Erie, PA, last Saturday, Trump extended his grievances to his loyal supporters:
They’re not indicting me, they’re indicting you. I just happen to be standing in the way. Every time the radical left Democrats, Marxists, communists and fascists indict me, I consider it actually a great badge of honor…. Because I’m being indicted for you.
How can a Republican presidential candidate fight that? Diehard MAGA supporters fear some nebulous federal prosecution for God-Knows-What, and only Trump can save them.
A commenter at a National Review column expressed his frustration brilliantly:
Wild watching him spin all his troubles to adoring crowds. “They’re not coming after me, they’re coming after you!”
Oh? Which people in the audience embezzled money from their own charities, Don? ‘Cause people have gone to jail for that but you didn’t.
Which people in the audience paid off porn stars after cheating on their pregnant wives, Don?
Which people in the audience took highly classified documents and, upon being asked repeatedly for their return, took every effort possible to avoid giving them all back, up to and including obstructing justice? How many people in the audience did that, Don?
I just wanna shake some of these people by their lapels and ask them to acknowledge the substance of everything he’s done, acknowledge they simply do not care about it, acknowledge no, this would not happen to me because I do not do the things Donald Trump does.
People spent Obama’s entire presidency telling me he had a cult of personality but I never saw ANYTHING like this. What breaks the spell? What snaps these people out of it?
What snaps these people out of it? I wish I knew. Is there a Ralphie out there amongst the GOP who can effectively take Trump, aka Skut Farkus, out of the running for the White House?
Featured image: Photoshop by Brand X Studio/used by permission.
Joe R. says: Skut’s gonna re-write the ending of “A Christmas Story”.
It’s gonna involve people losing their pelts.
In Hirsch World, the Capitol Police were doing their righteous duty by shooting and killing one unarmed Air Force veteran, and beating a disabled woman to death. THEY JUST GOT WHAT THEY DESERVED!
In Hirsch World, it is defending democracy to keep people that DARED to walk around in the Rotunda in a DC jail for two years and counting, with treatment learned from the old KGB. THEY”RE JUST GETTING WHAT THEY DESERVE!
In Hirsch World, it is a perfectly valid law enforcement operation to bust into the home of a pro-life activist, holding him, his wife, and children at gunpoint for several hours because he DARED to push off a baby killing advocate threatening his son. THEY JUST GOT WHAT THEY DESERVED!
In Hirsch World, election workers in Fulton County were only “tidying up” when they sent every witness out of the building, work which took them all night. THEY WERE DEFENDING OUR DEMOCRACY!
NONE of these things are to be questioned in Hirsch World. Much less opposed by a loud, obnoxious “bully.”
American Human says: I have a great idea. From now on, for both Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, Independents, lets only nominate people who have no faults, i.e. a perfect person. I suppose we’ve had a few, i.e. Obama, he was perfect right? Of course Hillary Clinton too. What did she ever do? Carter, now there was a perfect man.
We could solve so many problems by only having perfect people as president.
Of course, the Second Coming is not going to be an election – it will be a time of the scourge, the fire, and the sword.
Two things matter to me when casting a vote in the general election: One, does the candidate say that he or she will do, or attempt to do, the right things for the nation (or State, or city); two, how likely it is that the candidate WILL actually carry out their promises ON THOSE MATTERS. Their morality otherwise is not an issue.
Now, in the primary, I might consider whether they have a decent chance to win. That depends on a LOT of factors – their morality is only a minor one there, as witness politics since the Founding.
In 2016, I was skeptical that Trump would follow up his good sounding words, and voted for Cruz in the primary. Voted of course for Trump in the general, as I was QUITE sure that the Hildabeast would keep her promises.
Admitting that you were wrong is a difficult thing that most do not accomplish. Witness the Never Trumpers, including one on this very site.
Taylor says: Kim
Donald Trump is a thoroughly wretched individual who has crypto-Fascist tendencies and he will be the reason we will lose in November, 2024 to the worst president ever. In fact he is a three time loser (2018, 2020, and 2022) and I wish he and his MAGA-ites would leave and just form a third party. I cannot believe that any of the GOP candidates running for the nomination would want to run as his Vice President and who could he get to fill the positions of Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense, Jim Jordan?? The Forever Trump crowd would call Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, and Goldwater, RINOs. I have major league issues with Chris Christie such as his speech at the 2012 convention where all he did was talk about himself, his being used by Obama with Bruce Springsteen as bait, his bullying of Marco Rubio, the Ft. Lee Bridge closure disaster, and his sitting on a beach chair looking like a beached whale with his family after closing the beach to the public, but if the choice came down to Christie v. Trump I would go for Christie any day.
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