Coop Scoop: More important to Politically Defeat Trump Than Convict Him

You cannot outsource the defeat of Trumpism to the courts or the media

September 20, 2023

By Marc Cooper

Chuck Todd, please come back. All is forgiven.

Well not really. You're not really forgiven but we do need you to come back to pick up Kristen Welker and take her back with you to whatever cave NBC has for the moment relegated you to. You have a lot in common. Deference to power.

We are in the midst of the most abnormal political era in modern history. In the midst of the most abnormal incipient set of absolutely decisive presidential campaigns. We are in a moment that's quite abnormal because for the first time in history a major presidential candidate is facing almost 100 felony counts and a half dozen criminal and civil trials in the middle of his campaign yet seems to be continuing as the undisputed front runner of his very diseased political party. And it seems rather obvious to say that Donald Trump is anything but a normal political candidate. He is a psychologically disturbed, mentally ill, psychopath openly bent on the destruction of American democracy as we know it.

So how did the geniuses at the top level of NBC decide, in the heat of this extremely volatile moment in which American democracy is in danger, to relaunch it's aging, decrepit, and increasingly irrelevant Sunday morning snooze fest known as Meet the Press? That answer is simple. They decided to scrape very bottom of the barrel and in the midst of this crisis, to platform this clearly criminal politician and give him more than an hour of relatively unimpeded air time to spout his continuing lies and bullshit. Well, poor Ms, Welker did her feeble best to fend him off, and I do mean feeble, but to no avail. She got plowed over. Just like Caitlan Collins did in her ill-conceived CNN Town Hall with Trump a couple months ago.

Unfortunately, Welker’s luminous political talents shed about as much light as a 10 watt bulb in a mile long underground tunnel would.

Donald Trump of course did exactly what we would expect him to do. He drove up to the studio in his big old steamroller, and he rolled right over the meek NBC host and in doing so rolled right over the network who could not think of a single, solitary innovative way to do this interview in the most abnormal of times. That is bad news for all of us as the media seems rather intent on repeating its foolishness of 2016. Not out of spite. Not out of political partisanship. Not out of a particular bias for Trump. But rather because it suffers from a complete and absolute lack of imagination and like a robot stumbles forward doing what it always does even though we know in advance that little if anything positive will come of it. There are good reasons why people hate the media.  The odor it emanates is unbearable.

And what a week for this to take place within. The same week when Mitt Romney finally expresses all we certainly suspected he and more importantly what other republican senators think of the gargoyle who lives in Mar-a-Lago. Two points for Romney for putting it all on paper and making it all public. But it does not begin to balance out his relative silent inaction over the last eight years of Trump's folly. Do I remember correctly that when Romney ran for president in 2012, trashing the 43% of us who are takers, did he not go on bended knee to plead for support and money from the same Mr. Trump? Was Mitt Romney living in some other universe than the rest of us in 2012? By then he had still not realized what a lying buffoon and manipulative demon Donald Trump was and is? Did Romney tune out the entire birth certificate episode that had already peaked and was all over the media by the time he went to kneel for dollars from Trump?

With the publication of this new biography I suspect Romney has salvaged his legacy, something I plan not to lose any sleep over. But it sure does make Mitch McConnell in particular and just about every other Republican senator look exactly like the mendacious, cowardly, hypocritical, anti democratic creatures that they have become or that they have always been.  May they live and die in eternal scorn and shame.

Let's keep piling on…

Then we have the spectacle of one former Alabama football coach who apparently played a few too many times without a helmet, Senator Tommy Tuberville (a name only Walt Disney or Wes Anderson could have invented) single handedly holding the entire United States military hostage to his crackpot position on barring women soldiers from traveling out of state if they should, God help them, need an abortion. The rest of the Senate is starting to grumble about this after weeks and weeks of this sordid show, mostly because the new military chief of staff has to be confirmed about 10 days from now and it might not happen. But overall the behavior of the entire U.S. Senate, and that includes Senate leader Chuck Schumer has been abhorrent on this issue. I am not an expert parliamentarian and I do not know the inside and outs of arcane congressional procedure. But are you gonna tell me that a political party like the Democrats that hold a majority in the Senate albeit by one seat have no tools to break this one man brick wall who is doing his best to undermine the stability of the United states military? Is Chuck Schumer really that much of a weenie? And that's not a rhetorical question.

Meanwhile, in the House, the neo fascist fringe led by such stalwarts as Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greeen wagging Kevin McCarthy as their little tail, seem to be hell bent on shutting down the United States government in the next week or two for no good reason and regardless of the social and economic disruption it will create. These are not dignified members of Congress. These are not representatives of the people. These are not the respectable pillars of a Democratic Republic. They are rather lowlife saboteurs, fueled by ignorance, racism, nut ball conspiracy theories, and actual living and breathing nut balls like the gentle lady from Colorado, Ms. Lauren “Please Grope Me” Boebert.  These are political criminals and veritable cretins who deserve to be harshly judged and quickly discarded into the nearest dust bin.

Dumb, Dumber and Dumbest

Look folks I am sorry to keep repeating this but the threat to our democracy has not only not subsided it has increased as we near the 2024 election, the process and outcome of which I cannot even begin to imagine. As much as you, I would like to never think about Donald Trump again. As much as you I would not like to tread this very familiar ground one more minute of my life. But do not kid yourself -- as I have argued for months now, regardless of the tight polls that we see right now, Joe Biden is the odds on favorite to be reelected but it’s not a done deal. Ask a poker player who's dealt pocket aces and then gets beat by a donkey holding 7-2 off suit who called his raise but the flop comes 772. Nothing is guaranteed until it happens.

While Donald Trump's road to electoral victory is narrow and tenuous and uphill it nevertheless exists. All of which brings me to a simple point. Please stop trying to outsource the defeat of Donald Trump to anybody except yourself and ourselves, OK? It's much more important that we politically defeat Donald Trump and Trumpism than anything else. That means it's more important than him being convicted. Or of him going to jail or being put under house arrest or whatever the outcome is going to be of his trials. They're not going to matter if he's elected president. And they might not matter that much even if he's not elected. Because as we have mentioned dozens of times before, Trumpism is now a mass phenomenon in which tens of millions of Americans have voluntarily enrolled themselves and are not about to quit this month or next. And we risk an explicitly anti-democratic, and clearly authoritarian white nationalist mass movement becoming a permanent major political force and perhaps a dominant one.

The court can beat Trump but they can't beat Trumpism. MSNBC or your favorite political YouTube grifter can talk smack about him all day but it does nothing to stop Trumpism. Donald Trump can only be rendered irrelevant and his political followers can be politically disempowered if they are met by  a constant wall of unbreakable resistance and rejection. We must make it politically but more importantly socially unacceptable to be a Trump supporter. We must make it clear who the real majority is in this country. We must make it extremely lonesome and uncomfortable when Trumpanzees attempt to strip a local library or pollute a local school curriculum or elect a local racist to the state senate or worse to the US Congress. The courts can't do that. The media can't do that. Only an organized conscious mobilized and serious movement of millions of Americans must emerge in the next year to make this a reality or else we risk everything. I guess I should have mentioned it at the beginning of this paragraph but I'll do it now. We should not in the same manner try to outsource the defeat of Trump and Trumpism to the elites of the Democratic Party. That party will of course be instrumental in Trump’s defeat but only if we the citizens are the organized power behind it or underneath it or alongside it that forces the party to at least save itself or at a minimum to not throw us under the bus as it lays down on the road in front of Donald Trump’s juggernaut. (Note: I am not now nor I have ever been a Democrat. I am not suggesting a cease fire on criticizing Democrats. I am proposing you prioritize your fire and you make alliances where you can. In the current moment that means a coalition that stretches from Bernie Sanders to Liz Cheney. And it excludes and confronts an increasingly detached narcissist like Cornel West who could easily get Trump elected by winning 10K votes from the SJW’s in Madison).

There is no question the media is currently involved in a despicable feeding frenzy over Joe Biden's miserable poll numbers. That's one truth. The other truth is his poll numbers are also miserable. The fact that he's not ten or 15 points in front of this completely discredited criminal rival truly boggles the mind. It speaks very poorly of our general society. It speaks very poorly of our self-important media which seems to have a whole lot less influence than it imagines. It speaks very poorly of our levels of civic understanding and engagement. It's speaks very poorly, I am sorry to say, of millions of Americans who continue to celebrate immersing themselves willfully in ignorance, bigotry, and outright anti-democratic idiocy. This is not 2015 where we can all sit around and read JD Vance’s elegy to his hillbilly family and cluck our tongues over the unfortunate situation of so many honest but misled folks in Appalachia. Sorry, time is up. If you haven't figured this out yet and you still think Donald Trump walks on water., or perhaps you think you'd rather have a 77 year old psychopath in office than an 80 year old who stutters now and then, there is something really deeply and seriously wrong with you. I for one, have absolutely no desire to try to convince or change the mind of anybody at this juncture who is a Trump supporter unless they are under the age of 9 in which case I might try. And there’s no reason for anybody else to try. All that energy instead should be invested in registering new voters and in local organizing to make sure that the latent majority that opposes Trump actually shows up on election day. We have ebough voters to block Trumpism if only they vote.

Nor do I want to hear anymore about that most horrible word in all of politics and that is the word “messaging”. It's not about messaging,  it's about what you actually do. Less talk more action. The Democrats, Joe Biden, and the rest of us who are not necessarily Democrats but who have some sense of social justice are in real danger because of the malfeasance of the Democrats who, it seems, don't really get what this moment is about. It's actually their last chance. And our last chance. If Trump wins the 2024 election and if half the states or more continue to be dominated by Republicans, and if the US Congress or even half the Congress is controlled by Republicans, we won't have to worry about much of this anymore any time again because our political system will change very radically.

The baby talk debate currently taking place in and around the Democratic Party as to what its “ message” should be going into the election is enough to make you want to move to Fiji. Oh, what a dilemma! Do we talk about kitchen table issues (Kitchen table issues being the second most horrid term in the political lexicon right after the word messaging) or should the Biden campaign and the Democrats be talking about Donald Trump, democracy, and the survival of the Republic? I had to laugh today when I heard one pundit on MSNBC speculate that while Biden’s speech this week on democracy was a good one it just does not resonate with all those non white people who are more interested in “kitchen table” issues. I don't know how that pundit knows that; he must be a clairvoyant or something. Talking about democracy in the abstract or talking about “Bidenomics” (the third most horrid term in our political lexicon) is hardly the point and they are hardly mutually exclusive. Let me make it easy for the Democrats by providing them at least the rough draft of a bumper sticker slogan to run on that ends the debate. How about:

Freedom and Dignity.

That’s it.  I think those two words cover both the issue of democracy and the issue of domestic economics. There must be a very sharp distinction drawn between not Democrats and Republicans but between Republicans and Americans. Between those who support basic democratic principles and the expansion of freedoms including personal freedom, and those who wish to restrict our freedoms. Freedom includes freedom of access to medical coverage, abortion care, affordable housing, child tax credits and so on. Sorry to disagree with that pundit but I think non white people can grasp that concept easily enough to perhaps boost Mr. Biden's numbers which have fallen from 70% support among non white voters to an anemic 53%. And instead of treating us all like unworldly idiots who cannot pick our eyes up off the telephone bill sitting on the kitchen table how about we deal with economic issues as an issue of capital D Dignity? Not by trying to gaslight people and tell them that they should be feeling better about the economy when they're not. And they are not. And for very good reasons. Mostly because housing has become absolutely unaffordable for everybody. Mostly because the rise in wages created by the pandemic has been eaten up by inflation. Mostly because education has become unaffordable.  Mostly because drug companies are run by bandits. Mostly because cars are now unaffordable. We need Democrats including the president who can accept and acknowledge the existence of these very real problems but at the same time can say we are working on them. This is how we're fixing them. This is what we're going to do this week about them. Not hey you ungrateful bastards, you should vote for us because some bill that we never explained to you last year is gonna get a bridge built a couple miles from your house that you'll be able to use. That's just ridiculous. And insulting. And it’s a LOSER. The polling on Biden’s economic program is five points lower than his already weak overall favorability that struggles to crack 40 percent. What absolute mental giants decided he should run on his weakest plank?

Americans meanwhile are agitated. Some of them in a very good way. We've seen a wave of teacher strikes. UPS almost went on strike before the Teamsters secured a very good contract. The automobile workers are on strike and they don't want to hear the BS coming from the White House. They’re pissed off because the CEOs of the three big automakers each make about $25 million a year while the average senior experienced automobile worker makes about $75,000 a year which is not enough any longer to support a family of four. There are other newer automobile workers who are making closer to $35,000 a year. They’re pissed because the union gave big givebacks during the 2008 financial crisis to help save the industry from collapse and since then they haven’t really seen the Democrats or anybody else do much for them.

We have the actors and writers of Hollywood on strike now for months. Most of them make what a taxi cab driver makes or less. And while the platforming and cable industry is collapsing around them, the big CEOs can only think of how many more pennies they can squeeze from the pockets of the creators who actually make the industry run before the roof falls in on their little heads. Not in recent history, and by that I mean the last 30 years or so, have so many Americans expressed their desire to be in a labor union. And I guarantee you that a unionized job does a lot more for you and for your life then two hours of diversity training brought to you by the bosses who run your corporation and see you only as a producer of profit…for them.

Wouldn’t it be something if elected and leading Democrats actually linked up with and tapped into some of this new energy for justice and reform that we're seeing struggle to break through the gloom of the last five or six years?  Joe Biden says he's the most pro union president ever. I suspect the railway workers would disagree with that but OK we'll take him at face value. Biden better be careful when it comes to this strike. Donald Trump is trying very very hard to preempt Biden by saying nice things about all those nice white working people in Ohio who are on strike.  He's not pandering to the union leadership, worse, he is pandering to the rank and file which helps separate them from their leadership which, in the case of the UAW, is among the best of union leadership. Trump is trying to sound like he's very pro worker and what is Biden going to do about that?

Do you know that about 70% of the electorate of the United states is still white? Do you think it's a good idea that we continue to allow the Republican Party financed by oligarchs and plutocrats and greed heads to continue to parade around like it's the party of the white working class? And are we really that surprised that with this kind of turn the Republican Party is actually gaining strength among non white workers who really don't care if they're called LatinX or if they have “allies” in the local gender studies faculty lounge? What they care more about is who's going to provide them and their families some level of security in a very economically insecure world and what politician is going to really work with them and not just “message” them.

The UN General Assembly is meeting this week in New York and Joe Biden has got a very full schedule. I don't expect him to be on the picket line with the UAW. But does our putative but rather invisible vice president Kamala Harris have something better to do this week than to get her butt out and on to the picket line and to actually do something by showing the world and showing the electorate the support of her party for ordinary American workers in need — or do they just want to message it?

Well, it's their decision. I hope they play it right. If they don't they won't have to worry about it much longer. ++

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