Earlier this week, Maggie Habberman of the New York Times posted that Donald Trump has become full-blown delusional, he actually believes that he is going to be “reinstated” as president by August.
Trump has been telling a number of people he’s in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated by August (no that isn’t how it works but simply sharing the information). https://t.co/kaXSXKnpF0
— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) June 1, 2021
The right-wing rag National Review has now confirmed this report. Maggie Haberman Is Right:
Two days ago, the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman reported that Donald Trump “has been telling a number of people he’s in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated by August.” In response, many figures on the right inserted their fingers into their ears and started screaming about fake news. [Pavlovian response knee-jerk reaction to anything from the New York Times.]
Instead, they should have listened — because Haberman’s reporting was correct. I can attest, from speaking to an array of different sources, that Donald Trump does indeed believe quite genuinely that he — along with former senators David Perdue and Martha McSally — will be “reinstated” to office this summer after “audits” of the 2020 elections in Arizona, Georgia, and a handful of other states have been completed. I can attest, too, that Trump is trying hard to recruit journalists, politicians, and other influential figures to promulgate this belief — not as a fundraising tool or an infantile bit of trolling or a trial balloon, but as a fact.
Whoa, whoa, whoa! Does Martha McSally share this delusional fantasy? She has been mercifully silent since her humiliating two-fer loss for the Senate in November. Former Sen. Martha McSally silent on Arizona audit, Trump talk she could be ‘reinstated’ to Senate:
Former Sen. Martha McSally, R-Ariz., who narrowly lost her Senate campaign last November to Democrat Mark Kelly, declined through a former campaign staffer to comment to The Arizona Republic about whether she believes the Arizona Senate’s GQP “fraudit” will reverse her loss. [Because it can’t].
McSally has not publicly addressed the baseless claims of a stolen election and conceded her race well before conspiratorial theories took root in right-wing America.
No one from Trump’s orbit has been in touch with her 2020 team to discuss the potential implications of the audit, a former McSally campaign staffer said.
McSally has steered clear of commenting on the ballot review going on at Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix.
David Perdue has already announced he is not running for Senate again in 2022. David Perdue decides not to run for U.S. Senate in 2022.
So is this just Trump trying to pull others into his delusional fantasy?
It will be tempting for weary conservatives to dismiss this information as “old news” or as “an irrelevance.” It will be tempting, too, to downplay the enormity of what is being claimed, or to change the subject, or to attack the messengers by implying that they must “hate” Trump and his voters. But such temptations should be assiduously avoided. We are not talking here about a fringe figure within the Republican tent, but about a man who hopes to make support for his outlandish claims “a litmus test of sorts as he decides whom to endorse for state and federal contests in 2022 and 2024.”
[T]he scale of Trump’s delusion is quite startling. This is not merely an eccentric interpretation of the facts or an interesting foible, nor is it an irrelevant example of anguished post-presidency chatter. It is a rejection of reality, a rejection of law, and, ultimately, a rejection of the entire system of American government. There is no Reinstatement Clause within the United States Constitution. Hell, there is nothing even approximating a Reinstatement Clause within the United States Constitution. The election has been certified, Joe Biden is the president, and, until 2024, that is all there is to it. It does not matter what one’s view of Trump is. It does not matter whether one voted for or against Trump. It does not matter whether one views Trump’s role within the Republican Party favorably or unfavorably. We are talking here about cold, hard, neutral facts that obtain irrespective of one’s preferences; it is not too much to ask that the former head of the executive branch should understand them.
Just how far out there is Trump’s theory? Consider that, even if it were true that the 2020 election had been stolen — which it is absolutely not — his belief would still be absurd. It could be confirmed tomorrow that agents working for a combination of al-Qaeda, Venezuela, and George Soros had hacked into every single voting machine in the country and altered the totals by tens of millions, and it would remain the case there is no mechanism within the American legal order for a do-over of any sort. In such an eventuality, there would be indictments, an impeachment drive, and a constitutional crisis. But, however bad it got, Donald Trump would not be “reinstated” to the presidency. That is not how America works, how America has ever worked, or how America can ever work. American politicians do not lose their reelection races only to be reinstalled later on, as might the second-place horse in a race whose winner was disqualified. The idea is otherworldly and obscene.
There is nothing to be gained for conservatism by pretending otherwise. … It merely demands that Donald Trump be treated like any other person: subject to gravity, open to rebuttal, and liable to be laughed at when he becomes so unmoored from the real world that it is hard to know where to begin in attempting to explain him.
Here’s the problem. The MAGA/QAnon personality cult of Donald Trump is just as unmoored from the real world and reality as their “Dear Leader.” They live in their own alternate reality. That makes them dangerous. They are a proven domestic terrorist threat and a national security risk. What if Trump summons them to insurrection again like he did on January 6?
https://twitter.com/smotus/status/1400538989652709381
This is the kind of thing that turns into a civil war of some kind, at least when a “deposed king” is still around. See British history: the first (1642–1646) and second (1648–1649) British Civil Wars pitted the supporters of King Charles I against the supporters of the Long Parliament, also known as Cromwell’s Revolution. It was followed by the third English Civil War (1649–1651) which pitted supporters of King Charles II against supporters of the Rump Parliament. Charles II was exiled (1651), and the English monarchy was replaced with the Commonwealth of England, which from 1653 (as the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland) unified the British Isles under the personal rule of Oliver Cromwell (1653–1658), and briefly his son Richard (1658–1659). The Stuart Restoration took place in 1660 when King Charles II returned from exile in Europe. This period is sometimes known as the Interregnum, between the execution of Charles I in 1649 and the Restoration of his son Charles II in 1660.
Jonathan Bernstein warns that Trump’s Planned Return Isn’t Really a Joke:
We have something new in U.S. politics: a pretender. Former President Donald Trump is still claiming that he really won the election, and is now saying he’ll be “reinstated” to office by August, after an audit of some kind provides proof of voter fraud. Some of his supporters are egging him on; others are going along with portions of the charade; still more are trying to ignore it all.
It’s tempting to treat the whole thing as a joke. But there are reasons to take it seriously.
[I]t’s quite possible that Trump doesn’t realize what he’s proposing is flat-out illegal. That is, the choice Masket is posing is no choice at all: What Trump claims will happen, an extra-legal seizure of power, would be a coup regardless of whether he’s delusional or not. And we don’t even have to explore what he really thinks; as Benjy Sarlin points out, “What’s definitely true is he ACTS on conspiracy theories as if they were real.”
[O]f course, it could all amount to nothing. Reporting suggests that some of Trump’s advisers are trying to talk him “off the ledge.”
And while he’s known for his preoccupations, he’s also known for not following through on things, so perhaps he’ll get distracted rather than continuing to build the expectations of his strongest supporters. It’s also possible that more Republicans will decide that the costs of defying Trump are smaller than the costs (to themselves and the party) of trapping themselves further. Still, even if Trump was gone from the scene entirely, democracy in the U.S. would face serious dangers. And he’s not gone yet.
Delusional Donald Trump plans to restart his MAGA/QAnon cult rallies in the coming weeks. A grifter has got to grift. What makes anyone think that he will not use this opportunity to incite his equally delusional cult followers to violence and insurrection yet again? Trump planning rallies in Ohio and Florida this summer:
Former President Donald Trump plans to resume his signature campaign-style rallies in a series of battleground states this summer as he inches closer to a decision on whether to mount a comeback presidential bid in 2024.
“We’ll be doing one in Florida, we’re going to do one in Ohio, we’re going to do one in North Carolina,” the 45th President told the right-wing media outfit One America News in an interview Thursday, adding that he would release a rally schedule “relatively soon.”
“We’ll be announcing them very soon over the next week or two,” Trump said.
The North Carolina rally is scheduled this Saturday. Former President Trump speaking in NC Saturday: Here’s exactly when and where
Former President Donald Trump will speak at North Carolina’s annual state Republican Party convention on Saturday.
Trump will speak in person at the June 5 convention dinner in Greenville. He is scheduled to speak at 6 p.m., according to a release from the NC Republican Party.
Trump’s speech will be closed to the media, and journalists won’t be able to view it via livestream or alternate forms, said Livy Polen, a spokeswoman for the NC GOP.
You are forewarned, America. You saw what happened at Donald Trump’s last rally on January 6 in Washington, D.C. He tried to overthrow the U.S. government in a coup d’etat.
As Rep. Liz Cheney said:
The President of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack. Everything that followed was his doing. None of this would have happened without the President. The President could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not. There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.
Delusional Donald Trump is not done. He is still plotting an insurrection.
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