Is this what winning feels like, Donald?
You may think of yourself as the all-time world champion bullshit artist, but even a dull-witted, intellectually incurious slowcoach like you may have noticed that your carefully crafted image, political and personal fortunes, presidential legacy, and reputation are teetering over an abyss. You promised Americans they would grow sick of all the winning, but mostly they’ve grown sick of your shitshow White House, verbal incontinence, outrageous corruption, and the cost of carrying your water.
Let’s start with your growing realization that you’re in actual legal and impeachment peril. Is there any universe where you think you’re winning on any front?
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Donald, it’s bad. No one in your orbit will tell you, but you’re in the shit, and it’s getting deeper and more pungent by the hour.
You’re losing on impeachment. You’re losing on executive power. You’re losing on silencing eyewitnesses to your criminality and instability. You’re losing the legal fight to keep your taxes hidden. You’re losing on foreign affairs, ceding Syria and Kurdistan to Russia, Turkey, and Iran. You’ve lost the trade war. And no, you’re never winning a Nobel Peace Prize for North Korea, because they played you like a fool.
You spent decades tricking small contractors into thinking that you had some magic power to destroy them if they asked to be paid, threatening to litigate them into bankruptcy or at least submission. You used NDAs and confidentiality agreements to silence your sex slaves and employees, but now you’re posting up against real lawyers and real judges who aren’t buying the horseshit arguments of your phalanx of lawyers.
Your belief in virtually unlimited executive power and privilege has been battered in the courts, and that ride is going to get much, much more difficult because your clown legal team is falling severely short of the mark. The executive power bluff you tried to pull has been called and will leave you with fewer protections than you would have enjoyed if you had just kept your trap shut.
Does it feel like winning when the letter you dictated to White House Counsel Pat Cipollone not only failed to scare Congress away from its constitutional duty to investigate your ever-expanding catalog of malfeasance but is now seen as a roadmap to your weaknesses and legal vulnerabilities?
Does it feel like winning to realize that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi played you like a cheap fiddle by letting you get over your skis on pointless process arguments when she was ready to spring the trap shut, as she did yesterday? Keeping the shrunken, morally bankrupt collection of ass-kissers you call the House Caucus in your pocket wasn’t a victory, Donald. It was the minimum standard on just the first vote on impeachment.
Does it feel like winning when the Democrats in Senate races around the country are polling above their fighting weight and raising money at a faster clip than their Republican opponents?
Does it feel like winning when you ponder an even smaller Republican majority in the Senate or even a minority? Six months ago, that was a far-fetched scenario. Today? The odds are rising, and your protective wall in the Senate (the only wall you’ll ever have) is cracking fast.
Does it feel like winning when Mitch McConnell sits you down and gives you the clear signal that he controls your political fate? You know by now that to protect his majority, he’ll break you in a hot second? It must rankle you that a small, pudgy man from the Deep South holds your future in his soft hands.
Does it feel like winning when you can’t go outside the White House, a property you own, or a carefully vetted yahoo rally without being mocked, ridiculed, and loudly booed? Does it feel like winning when you sense the grim karmic justice of “lock her up” coming back to haunt you? The chanting at the World Series brought home something even your tiny lizard brain can understand; actions have consequences, even for you.
Oh, you’ll resist that assertion and claim you are beloved. Sure, Don. Let’s test it. Go out anywhere, to any public space, and see how they react. It’s not just in liberal blue enclaves. You’re hated almost everywhere, and you know it. Hell, even your vaunted “95 percent of Republicans love me!” claim is getting stressed, with the new Washington Post/ABC poll showing your GOP support is down 20 points, to just 74 percent approval and 22 percent disapproval.
Does it feel like winning when your Republican allies are increasingly forced to engage in ever-more elaborate and implausible lies in a desperate attempt to prevent your richly deserved impeachment? Does it feel like winning that your minions in the House aren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer? Their tactics—dumb stunts combined with a haze of incoherence, conspiratorial drivel, and evident incompetence—isn’t exactly moving the needle in your direction.
Does it feel like winning when the whistleblower you said didn’t exist, does? Does it feel like winning as more and more witnesses march up to the Hill to testify voluntarily? Truth has always been a poison to you, and these eyewitnesses are flooding the zone with it. With every passing day, their assertions have become clearer, more validated, and more dangerous to your political future.
You tried to use the power of the presidency in a shameless, lawless, reckless political extortion scheme, and even you can’t sufficiently smear every witness who comes forward as if they were some kind of Deep State subversive… and you know it.
Does it feel like winning to see your approval numbers scraping record lows, and support for your impeachment and removal rising?
Does it feel like winning knowing that the economy is slowing down precisely because of the idiotic trade you foisted upon the country, and that debt and deficits are rising at a rate that would make even Comrade Sanders pull back and mutter, “Too much, man.”
Does it feel like winning when you realize that the senators you bribed this week with campaign donations only rented you their loyalty? Donald, you purchased a few minutes of passion, but you know in your gut most of them heartily despise you.
Does it feel like winning when what was at first a single whistleblower has now become a flood? As more and more eyewitnesses to your malfeasance, abuse of power, and outright corruption step forward to testify before Congress, and the picture of your widespread illegalities and corrupt intent in Ukraine have become completely apparent—is that winning?
Like the long line of dead-eyed women who squirmed underneath your sweaty, quivering bulk for your usual 45 seconds of passion, they’re in this as a transaction, not a romance. Just because they'll lie there and take it doesn’t mean they enjoy it. Throw a million dollars at any politician and they’ll produce a convincing simulacrum of an orgasm. You’re familiar with that, aren’t you, Donald?
Does it feel like winning when your Middle East policy disaster swept the killing of ISIS commander al-Baghdadi from the headlines? What genius told you to gild the special ops lily when you could have simply let their heroism speak for itself? Let’s not even talk about the dumb photoshop of the military working dog that moron Dan Scavino tweeted from your feed.
Does it feel like winning when you know that the slow litigation grind from Congress and from the State of New York will reveal your taxes? Hell, you’re so nervous about it that I’m surprised you don’t order an airstrike on Mazar’s.
Does it feel like winning when behind closed doors in every caucus meeting, or wherever two or three Republican senators or congressmen gather, that the topic inevitably turns towards how sick they are of defending your bullshit? Does it feel like winning to know that for elected Republicans every day the cost of defying you shrinks, and the cost of defying the voters rises?
Does that feel like winning, Donald?
Does it?
