By Dan Barkhuff
There isn’t anything grey here unless you’re rooting for the darkness.
Let’s be real for a second: the outrage within MAGA, the threats of violence, and the “darkest day in American history” isn’t based in any reality. MAGA voters aren’t stupid, and that’s the issue. Stupid would-be believing Donald J. Trump is genuinely innocent of the charges he is now facing: using campaign money to cover up banging a porn star while his wife was nursing his son – all to further his political ambitions.
Everyone knows he did it. Everyone knows this is wrong. Even MAGA. Especially MAGA. The evangelicals so virulently opposed to women’s rights, as they conceive them, know hush money to a sex worker isn’t moral, or what Jesus would do, or justified if one just reaches far enough back into the Old Testament.
They just think the juice is worth the squeeze.
How long ago did Tucker Carlson have his writers start working on the “Trump indictment feed the rubes some red meat” angle?
How long ago was the messaging from the RNC decided upon?
How long ago did some small money donor’s 20 bucks to WinRed to drain the swamp go into the pocket of a woman best known for Pornucopia?
How long ago did we as a nation allow ourselves to lose the bubble? It’s fashionable amongst some to mock those who aspire to the Normal Rockwell version of America. It was never real, they say, and that’s probably true, but it was aspirational - the aspiration of family, hearth, and home driving the pursuit of happiness at the heart of the Mayflower in 1620, watercraft off of Saigon in 1975, and Mariel in 1980.
Humanity has always set sail toward the idea of America.
We all know right and wrong, but only some of us view American democracy as the greater of two evils.
I’m tired and do not want to write any more. A man I couldn’t think any less of threatens a country I was ready to die for. The coming weeks, as we used to say, “could get sporty.”
I am long on this nation. Our strength is enormous. I cannot believe the worst will come to pass because of a man who always had just enough money to move through life being the Great American Asshole. Ultimately, I hope it does not come to pass that America didn’t see the con until it was too late.
But there isn’t anything more to say about it.
