There are few people on this planet who enjoy a fanbase as rabid as that of Donald J. Trump. The former president emerged, all the way back in 2015, as the Republican party’s surprise frontrunner, and he’s served as the party’s unofficial head every day since. That could be about to change, however, as those once-fanatical followers start to drop off in the wake of Trump’s embarrassing legal woes.
Trump’s supporter base has long been his claim to fame, allowing him to cling to relevance even following his 2020 loss, copious shameful gaffs and purposeful acts of malice, and mounting legal costs that could finally see the former billionaire bleed his accounts dry. As he faces legal challenge after legal challenge — finally facing consequences for decades of criminal activity — it seems Trump’s base may finally be getting the message. They stuck by him through an atrocious COVID-19 response, bicker-fests with other world leaders, and a full-blown attempted insurrection, but the president’s floundering campaign and quickly draining finances may finally serve as his death blow.
The former president and current vacuous fraudster is seeing both his followers and his finances bleed away in the wake of his civil fraud trial, which resulted in a sky-high penalty payment more than $400 million deep, with interest. That’s even as his former flood of followers diminish into a trickle, and the GOP — a party that, for years now, has built itself solely around Trump — continues to fumble the only ball still in its court.
The GOP has been attempting, in a childish rebuttal to Trump’s dual impeachments, to slap back with impeachment inquiries into current President Joe Biden. They’ve been working to introduce a formal impeachment since Biden’s very first day in office, and every time they’ve floundered and failed. The latest attempt is no different, particularly following the embarrassing removal of the GOP’s primary source from the Biden impeachment website.
That source was former FBI informant Alexander Smirnov, who the Justice Department recently charged with making false statements. Some of those statements, like those regarding Biden and his son Hunter accepting bribes from Ukraine, may have even been Russian disinformation, according to the department.
Republicans leaned hard on that now-debunked claim in their efforts to impeach Biden, and with the claim proved inaccurate and Smirnov charged, they’ve got little to fall back on. They’re doing their best to stir up something new, but they just keep coming up empty handed. The phony allegation has been a lynchpin of their push for impeachment for too long, and without it they’ve got nothing real to work with.
With Trump eyeing down a complete drain of his finances and the GOP fumbling at every turn, its a bad time to be on the right side of the political aisle. Trump’s financial woes are just starting, as he works to dodge penalties and delay repayment, and eyes down a slew of upcoming court cases that could add millions more to his already hefty penalty. Add that to his spiraling cronies in the GOP and their failing impeachment process, and Trump is having a bad week indeed.