This is quite unrelated, but Trump has a sense of humor. Not a very well-developed one, but which his followers get, but the Late-Night TV comedians pretend not to get. We like to laugh at Trump every chance we get (well, not I, personally, but my friends, certainly) but this feeds the belief of the Alt-Right that Left-Wing comedians are a bunch of nitwits that don't have a sense of humor after all.
Now this Iowa Caucus business. For various reasons, Iowa was allowed, by the Democrat leadership in time immemorial, to have a sort of primary very, very early, which, it turns out, influences strongly which candidate is favored in most subsequent primaries. But, the newspapers say, Iowa is 91% white. I'm not sure how I feel about this. On one hand, if black and minority voters turn out strongly for many subsequent primaries, that will erode the stranglehold that the Iowa Caucus has on the candidacies for the future. But it does leave a bad feeling in the mouth, that white voters have such a great apparent advantage in selecting the Democrat nominee for president.
A funny thing I'm seeing is that many candidates are promising the media that they will have such-and-such a number of campaign staff working in Iowa, or New Hampshire, or wherever. What is that all about? How are voters to respond to that? Should voters respond to that? Why do candidates need to boast about how many staff they're going to have? This seems to me another instance of the US tendency to believe that more is better in almost all cases.
Regardless of Nancy Pelosi's belief that impeachment proceedings against Trump will increase Republican voter turnout next fall, I think impeachment is almost inevitable now. Unfortunately, whether impeachment happens or not, Trump is going to be happy, because: if they do start impeachment proceedings, which of course will not succeed, Trump will go about crowing that They tried to impeach me, but of course they could not succeed! If they do not start impeachment proceedings, he will dance about crowing about something else, equally silly. He is a silly man, and he tries to force his opposition to play silly games, to drag the entire federal government into the clown's ring with him. Someone has convinced Trump that discrediting government is its own reward. Why is this? Because unity is strength for workers and people at the bottom of the economic ladder, whereas for the 1%, they believe that they can go it alone. (They actually can't, very easily; they need to cooperate, too. It all depends on a certain vision of how the economic elite can operate once the federal government stops functioning well. It is by no means clear that things are going to go well for the rich. What is certain is that things will not go very well at all for the poor if the effectiveness of the federal government begins to decline.)
Many of the rules of thumb that the Machiavellis of the conservatives knew and understood, when they laid down the rules of how to destroy the power of workers, were laid down before our economy was so globalized. For their plans to work, they need to have the economy less globalized. But that's not easy; many of the richest families depend of foreign labor, and foreign buyers to maintain their relative position in the hierarchy of affluence; it won't be easy for the Walton family (of Wal-Mart fame) to replace their Chinese sources with sources from somewhere else. (They probably meet at a Bible-Study somewhere to explain to each other how all this is going to benefit them.)
Have we anticipated all the shenanigans that the GOP and the Alt-Right has up its sleeves to perpetrate during the election, and after the election? Perhaps the Armed Forces will have to intervene, to prevent utter foolishness following a bad result for the GOP. This has never happened in the past, and the DOD does not know its way around a coup in the US, though we've watched coups so many times in other countries. Nobody likes those things; they're almost an admission of the failure of free and fair elections. But the GOP are turning out to be such a bunch of scofflaws, that anything is possible.
Finally, the reason that every candidate is desperately asking for money is that they need to run TV ads to counterattack negative messages. (Now that PACs and other organizations can play in the political game, it becomes almost impossible for TV networks to give "Equal Time" to candidates.) So the big winners, it seems, are TV networks. Who'd have thunk it? I can't stand the thought of dishing out money week after week, only to discover that I had been backing a losing candidate all along. The way I think, though, I would indeed probably back a losing candidate
Well, be of good cheer, as Charlie Brown would say!
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