Days Of Strangeness Aren’t Over

The former president and his followers won’t go away without a fight.

That much has been made clear by two developments that followed hard on the heels of the balloting.

One was Trump’s announcement that he would seek the presidency again. That announcement came exactly a week after Americans cast their ballots in the mid-term elections, at a time when Republicans openly groused about the former president’s corrosive influence on the GOP’s chances of political success.

Still smarting from the rebuke that the electorate had delivered to him and his hand-picked candidates across the nation, it was a subdued Trump, one who varied little from his prepared text, who said he would run for president again.

Trump unfettered and improvising is one of the most magnetic sights in American political history. Those who love him glory in every utterance and insult he delivers, seeing him as the voice for resentments long suppressed and the instrument of revenge long delayed. Those who can’t stand him also can’t look away because the sight of him draws the eye the way a train wreck or some other cataclysm does.

But Trump confined to a teleprompter is something else altogether—a certified cure for insomnia, in fact. The conviction that animates his unscripted appearances disappear and he acts as if he were encountering not just the text of his speech but the English language for the first time as he reads along.

His current circumstances, though, make it dangerous for him to riff in the fashion his followers adore. Bedeviled by legal troubles—wondering which indictment will come first—Trump’s every word now can create additional exposure for him.

So, he sticks to the script.

And he sends a signal to his fellow Republicans, many of whom urged him not to run again, that, should he go down, he is more than willing to take other members of the GOP with him.

He will have help making good on that threat.

Before all the votes in the mid-terms had been counted, restive Republicans announced that they were dissatisfied with their legislative chieftains, U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, and U.S. House of Representatives Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-California.

The most vocal challenges to McConnell and McCarthy came from those with at least one foot in the alt-right camp, including longtime Trump election-lie backers.

Of the two legislative leaders, McConnell will have the easier time of it. He has the votes to hold onto his post.

That’s because Republicans will be in the minority again in the Senate. Long lines rarely form to fight for the right to lead sacrificial lambs.

McCarthy has a more difficult problem. Because his party—barring an epic turnabout—will have the slimmest of majorities in the House, he could be at the head of something worth leading.

But that slim majority gives every faction, no matter how small, immense leverage.

Sen. Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia, demonstrated that in the Senate. Over the past two years, he was the most powerful member of the upper chamber.

Manchin, though, battled to lead his party back to the center, which helped Democrats immensely in battleground states.

The bomb throwers who will badger and beset McCarthy won’t be doing so to drag the GOP toward unpersuaded voters. No, they will be battling to throw red meat to the Trump base, which has demonstrated now in three straight elections it doesn’t have the muscle to win national elections.

To get the speakership he long has coveted, McCarthy will have to barter and trade pieces of himself.

This will have the effect of making Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Georgia, and her ilk the real power in the House.

That will leave us with a Donald Trump who is scripted but seething and a Marjorie Taylor Greene who is unleashed and empowered.

Cue the crazy.