Trump is the Pennywise of the Republican Party

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

Hey, ya wanna be my lawyer? You wanna be my state GOP chairman puppet? Ya wanna be my new oldest son?

     And so forth and so on.

    In his physical and digital excommunication, Donald Trump, the ringmaster of the GOP's Big Tent, is actually the Pennywise of the Republican Party. Exiled to a figurative storm drain, all he can do is log on to his "blog" and shrilly wail in his now-tinny voice about Joe Scarborough and Mika or one Republican or another. In fact, if it weren't for the ratings-hungry mainstream media continuing to breathlessly report on his every public brain seizure, his pronouncements would hardly rise to the level of a whisper. Absent social media, he's reduced to crashing weddings and bellyaching about the "stolen" 2020 election.

     And the come-ons from his storm drains at Bedminster or Mar a Lago are, predictably, all about him and what you can do for him. And, as with Stephen King's epic novel, It, the GOP's answer to Pennywise will never lack for rain slickered victims to get too close to the drain and never be heard from again (except if CNN hires their remains to replace Rick Santorum for fairness and balance).

     In refusing to seriously criticize Marjorie Taylor Greene, much less expel her from Congress, what passes for GOP leadership is signaling they're all in on Trump, conspiracy theories, fatal riots and all. We all remember, I think, Lady G mincing to a microphone and saying the GOP couldn't win without the guy who'd cost them the White House, Senate and reacquiring the House. Florida Man Zero, Matt Gaetz, still firmly has Trump's jiggling back flogging the Big Lie even though no one has apparently clued him in that, as far as he's concerned, Fat Elvis has already left the building.

     For those not about to be accused of paying underage children for sex, Trump is soliciting help.

     "Hey, kid, tell people I won the election and that Joe Biden is senile."

     This, and blocking the Biden agenda at virtually very turn is what passes for ideas from the Party of Ideas. And why do they even need ideas when they can always depend the cast-iron ignorance of people like the goobers in Iowa who still think their last stimulus checks came courtesy of Donald Trump and the Party of Ideas that, to a man, voted against the latest stimulus measure?

     The bar for Republican truth-telling (the oxymoron of the century) is not only set low, it's buried six feet beneath the ground moldering with the truth itself. "Yes, the vote was rigged last year but vote for me next November!" "No, there wasn't a riot on January 6th. It was just a really motivated tour group" (although tour groups generally don't come with body counts).

     And they're valiantly manning this fire hose o' bullshit because they know that's what their alleged savior wants to hear them say and, most importantly, what his aggrieved voters want to hear. But what the GOP doesn't seem to realize is that Trump is like those black bears that you see in Clark's Trading Post in New Hampshire. They tell you the bears are trained but they're really not. Hence the endless spoons of soft serve ice cream the assistant needs to shovel into the animal's mouth. Because they're smart enough to know the second the ice cream stops is the very second the cooperation ends.

     But the GOP still isn't smart enough to learn that it works the same way with Trump- That the second they stop spoon-feeding him flattery and lies is the very second he turns on them and roars, albeit at a much lower decibel range.