By Steve BermanIn Georgia, more votes were cast in yesterday’s Senate runoff than in the 2020 general election where Donald Trump told the states’ top officials to “find me 12,000 votes.” The sane rose up against the insanity and—by just under 100,000 votes—toppled that wall Trump built.
Thus the chant from the opponents of Trump from the last six years have finally reached the ears of the gods of politics: it is the beginning of the end.
I am not a fan of Sen. Raphael Warnock. I find his ability to mask naked political ambition behind a pastor’s frock and disregard that calling as it suits him to be as bad as any Trump-loving evangelical pulpit bearer. To actual pastors, the word may be “offensive.”
Politically and policy-wise, I disagree with Warnock, who in his one year in office has shown himself a patsy, a rubber stamp for whatever the Biden White House floats by. That may not be the case for the next six years. We will certainly find out. One thing Warnock should do as soon as possible is resign his pulpit. Stop using the “Rev.” and collecting that housing allowance from Ebenezer Baptist. He’s a full-time, full term Senator now and if he has a real sense of justice, he’d stop using the flock’s cash to featherbed his own comfortable nest.
The word that best describes my reaction to yesterday’s race is “thankful.” I am thankful that everyone who wanted to vote, voted. I am thankful that suppression and intimidation did not play a factor. I am thankful that all the fantasies Trump built are beginning to unwind as if the spell that knit them together was broken.
The wizard himself is locked in at Mar-a-Lahore, reduced to giving two hour harangues to smaller crowds in small cities where he still claims some ears to hear his incantations. Trump’s message is stripped to its core: “Give me power, burn the Constitution. Screw the law.” As Sheriff Cooley said, “The law? The law is a human institution.”
I’d like to thank Donald Trump for his service. Being unbound by law, morals, or faith, Trump, over the last decade, has exposed the weaknesses and probed the limits of all three, and he has found significant rot under the façades of control and normalcy so carefully curated by his predecessors in politics and in power. It would be a serious platitude to say “only by pulling off the scab can we now begin to heal.” It’s also not really true: pulling scabs exposes the body to infection, sepsis, and death.
“I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way,” Donald Trump said. It applies to politics and government, too, and Trump the scab picker definitely exposed where there needs to be light. The mainstream media, the FBI, social media, public health, medicine, and, especially, defense, have been corrupted, corralled, and captured by ideology, money, power, and foreign interests. Trump wanted them all to be captured by him, which offended their current masters, whose mandarins, by their irritation, exposed themselves shamelessly.
The result is a populace that has red-pilled itself into the emergency room, fighting for the last breath of life. Nobody and nothing can be trusted since the wrecking ball of Trump and his revolving door of throne-sniffers smashed through all the institutions of government.
But in his last, seething act of vengeance, Trump infected the GOP with the loser curse that’s cursed him his whole life. In 2020, he handed both the House and the Senate over to Democrats, who were so discombobulated by years of their own lies, intrigue, and “the end of Trump,” that they failed to do anything except extend and magnify his worst policies (Afghanistan, the American Rescue Plan), and add their own special-interest sauce to the mix (the Inflation ReductionAct). The day before his doomed and ham-handed attempt to suborn government to remain in power, Trump’s call to Georgia Republicans to stay home in protest of a race he lost fair and square put Raphael Warnock into the Senate (along with Jon Ossoff).
Warnock would have lost, I believe, to David Perdue, had Perdue decided to run for the seat that Kelly Loeffler held by appointment of Gov. Brian Kemp. But Kemp had become an enemy of Trump, so somehow (I don’t know what dirt Trump has on Perdue), Trump persuaded Perdue to run against Kemp, a really stupid move. This cleared the field for Trump to entice Herschel Walker to run against Warnock, and the results are that Warnock beat the hero of the Georgia Bulldogs.
I thank Donald Trump for engineering a U.S. Senate race with two Black candidates, a first in Georgia history. I thank Trump for handing over David Perdue’s entire donor and campaign network to Brian Kemp, who has jealously built and guarded it to keep it away from the loser-curse infected GOP infrastructure. It was Kemp’s machine, along with Mitch McConnell’s that enabled Walker to be within spitting distance of Warnock in the first place, though it was too-little-too-late (the candidate was too little on qualifications, and the campaign aid was too late). It was Kemp’s machine, which was honed in the primary against Perdue, that crushed Stacey Abrams, and nearly put Walker in the Senate but for the Libertarian who captured just enough votes to force a runoff.
I thank Donald Trump for exposing the worst in Georgia politics and the best in Georgia politics. Brad Raffensperger held on to election integrity, and easily won another term as secretary of state despite venomous hatred by the Trump brigade. Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan chose to go full NeverTrump, and wisely stepped out of the race for another term. Election officials in Coffee County committed crimes in the name of Trump, giving his “investigators” access to voting machines. Fulton County was finally forced to deal with incompetence and corruption in elections, and has, for the most part, fixed it.
Three and a half million people voted in the runoff that kept Warnock in the Senate, which is only about 330,000 less than voted in the general election. Control of the Senate was not at issue here: had Walker won, the GOP would still only control 50 seats, with Democrats controlling as they had since 2021. The election wasn’t a referendum on President Joe Biden, who was almost completely absent (Warnock wisely brought in Barack Obama instead). Yet all those people got up and voted to keep Walker out of the Senate. Those people cared about politics as more than just a beauty contest or popularity poll. They wanted to send a message, the same message the people in Pennsylvania, Nevada, and New Hampshire sent. They are done with Trump and his wrecking ball.
I thank Donald Trump for being a caricature of a wannabe dictator. When in office, he pantomimed the role, but now that he’s free of the constraints of government service, we all see the plans if Trump were ever to return to power. “Schedule F” would allow the president to replace officials down deep in every federal department. Trump’s minions in the GOP have prepared lists of politically “acceptable” people to fill those jobs. There would be no inspectors general, no whistleblowers, no dissenters to expose the plans and machinations of the man who would be dictator. It would be tyranny all the way down, and no mercy for anyone who dared oppose it. The Constitution would become toilet paper, along with any official records. The “light” disinfectant Trump touted for the body, and used to well to expose his enemies weaknesses, would be gone.
I thank Donald Trump for proving the Washington Post’s new slogan “Democracy dies in darkness.”
Above all, I thank Donald Trump for giving the country a chance to get over him. The last election of the Trump era is over. The final runoff with a Trump candidate was cursed by the man who reserved all glory for himself. There’s nothing left for him to do but spin his webs, a scurvy little spider. That, and wait for the trials that are sure to come, for which he’s hoarded over $100 million of his victims’ money.
The House of Trump is going to come crashing down now that the beginning of the end has finally arrived. If you’re anywhere near it, it’s time to evacuate. I’m thankful for that.
Follow Steve on Twitter @stevengberman.
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