George Conway is a Republican who used to be married to Trump administration official Kelly Anne Conway. Yet to his credit, he himself is vehemently opposed to Donald Trump, thus serving as an example that not all Republicans or self-identified conservatives have lost their sense of decency or even sanity.
He has been giving a lot of summaries of the Trump trial in New York. You know, the one about corruption and the hush money that he apparently paid to Stormy Daniels, a porn star whom he had an affair with. Frankly, it feels like the least serious of the pending legal cases against Trump, although it does serve as an illustration of the extent of his staggering levels of corruption, as well as his overall decadence. How this guy became the post child of allegedly traditional values for those who identify as Evangelical Christians will forever escape me. I don't agree with most of what Evangelicals here in the United States believe, yet it feels like somebody who was guilty of half the things - hell, a quarter of the things - that Trump is guilty of would have served to disqualify him a long, long time ago. Somehow, Trump has succeeded in managing to change the narrative and make himself apparently appear to them like an innocent man, the victim of political persecution by radical leftists and de facto communists intent on taking over the country.
Which brings me to the next point. Since Trump has apparently somehow convinced so many people that his overly convenient narrative - crazy and against all logic as it seems by any rational standards - is true, this trial, and the other legal cases still pending, actually feels like it is helping to make this case for him. It really does seem sometimes like his political opponents will go to any lengths to try and get him, which is frankly sad. The most serious charges against him - his role in undermining the results of the 2020 election, which he clearly lost, and his attempts to try and intimidate people into simply giving him the election win (pressuring Vice-President Pence to intercede on his behalf in Congress, and pressuring election officials in George to "find him" over 11,000 votes weeks after the election was over), his role in steering his cult followers to the Capitol Building on that fateful January 6th day, which sure looked quite a bit like an attempted coup to me, as well as his theft of documents with sensitive national security material, feel far more serious to me. Those are the trials which I wish we were watching, instead of yet another sleazy trial highlighting sex and catering to people's basest instincts.
Startlingly, Conway feels that the trial is helping Trump in another way, as well. Specifically, he is mentioning the lack of Trump rallies, which translates to an absence of opportunities for Trump to say more crazy things that might hurt him politically. Here is how Conway put it:
“Actually if you look at it politically in my judgement, this is helping him politically … it is keeping him from being on television saying all the crazy things like in Wildwood the other day,” Conway said during CNN’s live coverage of Trump’s trial, making reference to his rally in New Jersey over the weekend.
Maybe Conway has a point there. Although so far as I can tell, the crazy and, on the surface, off-putting things that Trump regularly says and does seems not to be putting people off to him. In fact, it seems quite the opposite. The crazier and more ludicrous his behavior, the stronger and more loyal the base of his support gets. Remember this is the guy who kicked off his ultimately successful 2016 presidential campaign with a racist dismissal of Mexicans as criminals and rapists and championing an immigration ban from Muslim countries. Before cameras for all to see, he mocked a disabled reporter. He had a hard time criticizing outright Nazis and white supremacists, dismissed dozens of countries in Latin America and Africa as "shithole nations," and even posted a short video of one of his supporters shouting out "white power!" during the 2020 campaign. Even some of the less serious, more comically ridiculous nonsense don't seem to hurt him any, such as his using a marker to suggest that a hurricane would hit Alabama, which no weather forecasts were predicting, or him praising the healthcare system of an African nation that did not exist before a conference of African leaders, or literally being laughed at by world leaders at the United Nations after he apparently mistook the UN as a Trump rally.
And let's face it: that's only a tiny slice of all the crazy and absurd things which Trump has said and done, and which he survived politically. No, not just survived. These crazy chapters - and the book just keeps getting longer as more chapters are regularly added - seem endless. Not only do they not hurt Trump, they strengthen him politically. Who could have imagined thirty or twenty years ago - or possibly even ten years ago - that somebody who made such a mockery of everything, and who undermined American democracy itself, would not only still be considered a viable candidate, but would be so close to winning a clearly undeserved second term in the Oval Office at this point?
So I am not so sure that a lack of Trump rallies is helping Trump or not. He might say and do ridiculous things that anyone with some kind of common sense or objectivity or even decency would reject. Yet recent history has shown that his support may temporarily waver, but it does him and his political ambitions no serious harm in the long run. We may wish it were not so, but let's be real. It seems that the more we really examine this country, we see a lot of rot in it. It's a little like looking under some rotten pieces of wood and peering underneath, only to see maggots and other things that would disgust and turn most of us off.
What an age we live in.
Sigh.
Below are the two links related to George Conway that got me on this topic, and from which I obtained the quote used above:
The New York Trump Case Is Kind of Perfect Story by George T. Conway III • 6h • 14 min read
The New York Trump Case Is Kind of Perfect (msn.com)
George Conway: Trial is helping Trump; showing his rallies would hurt him Story by Dominick Mastrangelo • 9h • May 13, 2024:
George Conway: Trial is helping Trump; showing his rallies would hurt him (msn.com)
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