The sounds of silence: Trump goes quiet as GOP Louisiana election loss humiliates him
For once this is a story not about something Donald Trump posted to his Twitter feed, but about what he didn’t post.
After traveling to Louisiana three times during the last month to campaign for Eddie Rispone — the Republican challenger to the incumbent Democratic governor, John Bel Edwards — and posting numerous tweets urging his supporters in the state to turn out to vote, after declaring that a vote for Rispone was a referendum on his own performance as president — “You’ve got to give me a big win, OK?” he told the crowd at the election eve rally on behalf of the GOP candidate — Trump remained silent about Rispone’s loss to Edwards yesterday.
For a president who never seems to be at a loss for words, Trump’s failure to acknowledge the humiliating repudiation of his favored candidate in the race only emphasizes the diminishing nature of his political capital which is heading for bankruptcy faster than even his Atlantic City casinos.
The loss in Louisiana surely has Republican senators worried.
Coming on the heels of a similar failure to propel a Republican candidate over the finish line in Kentucky — where incumbent Governor Matt Bevin lost to his Democratic challenger despite Trump’s similar circus-like campaign rally and numerous tweets on his behalf — the GOP senators will have to calculate whether the shrinking political benefit of continuing to support the president outweighs the overwhelming evidence of criminal conduct and impeachable offenses that House Democratic legislators have uncovered in their inquiry to date when the inevitable impeachment trial begins and they are forced to sit as jurors to determine Trump’s fate.
Trump’s silence on the Louisiana election results, of course, doesn’t mean that he was silent about anything else on Twitter this morning. He managed to find plenty of time to retweet clips of various right-wing media totems and GOP enablers trying to defend him in the face of the devastatingly incriminating testimony presented to Congress this week implicating him in a bribery and extortion scheme to pressure the foreign government of Ukraine to interfere in the 2020 presidential election on his behalf.
In the middle of the usual morning avalanche of Trump’s twitter posts, however, was one post in particular that stood out as an oblique — if defiantly counterintuitive, given the pattern of recent Republican election losses — commentary on the setback in Louisiana.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 17, 2019
Despite the comic bravado that the posted video exhibits, the Republican defeat in a predominately red state in the deep south strongly suggests that it is not the Democrats who are afraid of losing in 2020, particularly when polls show that at least five of the leading candidates running to compete against Trump in the presidential election would easily beat Trump at this point, including Biden, Warren, Sanders, Harris, and Buttigieg.
One can only hope that Trump will be equally silent when the next big Republican electoral loss to a Democratic challenger is his own.
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