They knew what he was

Adapted from the Twitter feed, Tuesday, July 14, 2020. Posted Wednesday evening, July 15.

The Displeasure of His Company: Donald Trump and then Speaker of the House Paul Ryan looking less than happy with each other's company. Photo by Evan Vucci/AP via Politico. It's undated but it's probably from 2018 after Ryan called it quits in April.

In 2016, when the Republicans made their deal with the devil, they knew what Trump was. They knew everything about him that made him unfit for president, practically unfit for life outside a mental ward or a jail.

But they thought he would lose. What they wanted out of him were his coattails. He could lose but as long as they survived, they were fine with nominating an immoral, incompetent, corrupt, racist lunatic.

Just in case, they sent Paul Ryan to talk to him and make sure he would stop with the populist nonsense and pledge to be a true conservative. He would sign the tax cuts, deregulate everywhere, and help repeal the ACA. Which he was glad to do.

And they were fine with this. They figured that if, wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles, he did win, they could control him.

By control him, they meant simply keep him on the conservative straight and narrow. They didn't care if he went on being an immoral, incompetent, corrupt, racist lunatic on Twitter or at his rallies, just as long as it didn't cost them politically and financially.

Like I said, they knew all his flaws, foibles, and vices, and they judged that none of them, not even all of them taken as a whole were unmanageable or detrimental to their agenda…

But they underestimated one. They may have even overlooked it.

His self-destructiveness.

All his life, apparently even when he was a kid, he's had a penchant for self-sabotage. And anyone who was near him would suffer for it.

He was a self-suicide bomber and if you were close to him when he blew himself up, you were caught in the explosion.

He's been doing it all along since he took office. Every single time he's had something like a success, within days he's caused himself a new problem and created a bigger mess.

And now here he is, doing it again but on the grandest of scales. He seems determined to take the whole country with him. He's become the crisis we knew he wouldn't know how to handle when it came, threatening to destroy us as a nation and a people. Like Rick Wilson has written. Everything Trump Touches Dies

The Republicans could have foreseen this. Should have foreseen it. But all they chose to see was how they could use him to manipulate their base.

Comments

[Bill Wolfe]

Good point about his self-destructiveness. I hadn't seen anyone else make that observation. Perhaps his way of proving to himself that his dad's opinion of him was right all along.