I definitely don’t feel like a Fox News daddy writing this post. Just the opposite. Now I feel like a border-line TDS sufferer after reading ‘Regime Change,’ by the NYT’s Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, and all its depressing coverage of the near-constant controversies swirling around President Trump during his second time around in the White House.. I’m not going to bother reviewing one of the most reviewed books on the planet. I’ll just point you to David Remnick’s spot-on praise of ‘Regime Change’ in the New Yorker and leave it at that. (The headline on Remnick’s review: “Chronicle of a Disaster Foretold.” *)
Instead, I’ll just leave you with one reoccurring thought that kept popping to mind as I plowed through the book and all its depressing coverage of the Trump presidency in 2025 and early 2026: When are Republicans finally going to openly admit he’s the embarrassing, narcissitic, vulgar, needy, bullying man-child lunatic that we all know he is? When are they going to feel safe enough to openly distance themselves from Trump, sort of like how it took more than a decade before most Republicans acknowledged that, well, you know, maybe the Iraq War wasn’t such a good idea after all? You know it’s going to happen. You’re already starting to see the early signs of the political distancing underway today, as the Globe’s Joe Pindell reports (‘When will Republicans break away from Trump? We might finally have an answer’) and as the WSJ reported last week (‘Republicans in Tough Races Are Tip-Toeing Away From Trump’ – and, yes, I sort of borrowed the Journal’s headline for this post).
But I’m not sure there’s going to be as clean a break after the mid-terms as some think. Count Trump-MAGA out at your own peril. (Karl Rove thinks so too). My gut says the true distancing is years away, perhaps a couple presidential terms from now.
* In his review, I loved Remnick’s comparison of the Trump II White House to something out of “The Death of Stalin,” one of my all-time favorite political flicks. Whoever thought you could make a comedy out of Joseph Stalin’s death?
