It’s OK, Texas isn’t a big football state

I vaguely remember hearing about the idea of Trump holding a “convention” for the midterms, but figured the idea was too stupid to actually carry out. Well that was not a very wise assumption:

The Republican Party’s first-ever midterm convention is quickly becoming a Trump-style grift.

Puck reports that the National Republican Campaign Committee, which is hosting the September event, is asking for House members to pay a minimum of $25,000 to attend the two-day event in Dallas with a guest, with higher packages costing as much as $100,000. On top of that, the event is taking corporate sponsorship dollars, which are going to a nonprofit that doesn’t have to disclose its donors. . . .

“It’s yet another opportunity to shake down corporate America,” one Republican strategist told Puck, adding that it has turned into a “shit show.”

“Nobody understands why we’re doing a midterm convention. It’s just another show that Trump is going to put on to remind the voters that he is sitting there, and maybe they don’t want to be reminded of that,” the strategist added.

Showing up at an event with Trump right now is electoral poison for candidates in competitive races, because the ever-crucial Moron Vote, aka “swing” voters, is suddenly discovering that gas is suddenly real expensive for some mysterious reason that nobody understands, possibly witchcraft or woke cultural Marxism. But whatever the reason might be they don’t like it, because Daddy President said he would fix it and he didn’t.

How well is this Mafia-style shakedown of corporate America and Republican politicians — two groups that needless to say deserve every bad thing that’s happening to them now and more — being organized?

All this is for a convention that doesn’t include any actual party business, since no candidates are being nominated like in presidential election years. The whole thing appears to have been planned haphazardly, with invitations only going out in the last few weeks to Republican leaders and lawmakers, many of whom have other commitments.

I bet they have “other commitments” . . . like, let’s see here, watching the two opening games of the NFL season, which will be appearing on televisions at exactly the same time as the two glorious nights of the faux convention.

I’m morbidly curious to see if the traditional broadcast networks will be extorted into televising something that’s going to get lower ratings than a re-run of Gilligan’s Island. NBC, which is carrying the opening night NFL game, obviously won’t, but the Thursday night game in Australia (Friday morning local time, yay capitalism) is on Netflix so I bet Bari Weiss’s reboot of Der Stürmer will carry Trump’s speech, the only audience for which is going to be twisted hate watchers among the LGM commentariat (you know who you are). I suppose it’s worth mentioning that all this will be on the very eve of the 25th anniversary of 9/11, and we can just imagine the howls of outrage if Democrats were to desecrate that holiest of days with this kind of grotesque onanistic cash grab.

In sum, this farcical griftathon is going to be close to peak Trumpism, although I haven’t heard yet if Ted Nugent or the surviving member of the Village People is going to be the opening act.