Crying won’t help you, praying won’t do you no good

Glenn opened by noting that, under his administration, “there was world peace. We didn’t have all this chaos in the world. Now it seems like it’s escalating. Even to Crimea is even in the question you’ve said before on social media and at speeches that you have a solution and you said, you know, this can be negotiated. How do we do that?”

“Well, first of all, it should have never started,” Trump replied. “It would have never started had I been president. There was no chance of this war starting. And frankly, I don’t think Putin wanted to do it. I think he was sort of forced in by the statements being made by Biden. And it’s something so sad to say because no matter what happens now, it can never be like it could have been with nobody dead and with no cities demolished.”

Trump is ostensibly talking about Biden’s open support for NATO, which some say foreshadowed the Russian invasion. However, not many reasonable people are giving Putin a pass for a deadly incursion such as this.

Trump was also asked how he would end the war in Ukraine: “It can be negotiated within 24 hours. You have to get them both in a room. And there are things you can say to them, which I won’t reveal now, which will guarantee that this war will end immediately.

Some things seem almost too obvious to be worth pointing out, but I just don’t see how Trump isn’t the GOP nominee next year. The DeSantis boomlet is based on all sorts of dubious assumptions, and the most dubious of all is that 2024 won’t feature a replay of 2016, where a bunch of candidates fractured the anti-Trump vote, and then 30% to 40% of Republican primary voters very quickly transformed Trump’s candidacy — which was considered nothing but a very amusing joke by all Savvy Observers as late as January of that cursed year — into a fait accompli, because of the winner take all GOP primary system.

With Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, and probably at least a couple of others set to jump into the nomination process, Trump’s completely unbreakable hold on at least 30% of GOP primary voters, not to mention the significant support he’ll end up getting from the I wish he wouldn’t tweet so much but I do love how much he owns the libs crowd, nothing short of literal death is going to derail this particular fascist train from running on time.

And guess what: It turns out that’s Plan A among all the sentient life forms on the right wing who suspect that another Trump candidacy will be an electoral disaster for them is a particularly morbid version of Thoughts & Prayers.

On Monday, the Atlantic’s McKay Coppins published a piece about how the top minds of the Republican Party are approaching the problem of having voters who may nominate Donald Trump for president again in 2024. Trump, you see, lost the presidential election in 2020 and was largely responsible for dozens of avoidable down-ballot GOP losses in federal and statewide races in 2018 and 2022, as well. The technical phrase used by political scientists for what Trump is, at this point, is “an anchor dragging the Republican brand into the darkest regions of hell.”

Other elected officials and potential candidates in the GOP who make this point, however, are liable to be targeted by the former president’s many remaining hardcore supporters, who despite being insufficient to win most general-election races, have proven themselves at least numerous enough to determine the results of party primaries. It’s a fun little Catch-22 situation for them.

According to Coppins, the tactical approach that many disgruntled officials have settled on is to hope God resolves the problem in their favor, via smiting:

In his recent book Thank You for Your Servitude, my colleague Mark Leibovich quoted a former Republican representative who bluntly summarized his party’s plan for dealing with Trump: “We’re just waiting for him to die.” As it turns out, this is not an uncommon sentiment. In my conversations with Republicans, I heard repeatedly that the least disruptive path to getting rid of Trump, grim as it sounds, might be to wait for his expiration.

I guess you could say they’ve concluded that he’s out there operating without any decent restraint. Totally beyond the pale of any acceptable human conduct.