Republicans trying to tame dragon finally accept it as myth
You can put a saddle on a dragon, but that does not mean you can ride it.
These wise words come from — as far as I’m concerned — me, although I’m sure others have said much the same. Anyway, the visual image is a gift from the Bridgeport sage, Walt Kelly, creator of “Pogo,” circa 1966. More on that in a second.
When Donald Trump appeared on the political scene, many members of the Republican establishment thought they could ride the dragon.
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Trump breathed fire, and his innate talent for reaching people exceeded the political skills of people such as Mitch McConnell or Mike Pompeo. They thought they could harness his flames and fly through the air on his back. So did Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway.
They couldn’t. They underestimated the two big “n”s of Trump. Narcissism and nihilism. Trump’s interest was in himself, to the exclusion of all else. There was nothing and nobody he would not jettison if he decided they were unhelpful.
Back to Kelly. The early 1967 Pogo strips included a character who looked very much like Mao Zedong who was indeed trying to ride a dragon, often boosted into the saddle by a “red guardsman,” who pushed his roly-poly master a little too hard, so that the man fell off.
Kelly, who was eight kinds of genius, could see that Mao would be unable control the fanatical tendencies of the Red Guard, that they would ultimately be too violent and chaos-seeking even for him. (This came true.)
That relationship does not line up as a perfect analogy to Trump and the thugs who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, but it’s damned close.
Just as Mao whipped his young Guards into a frenzy with a famous Aug. 18, 1966 speech at Tiananmen Square, so did Trump goad his followers earlier in the day on Wednesday.
Trump told his mob, “You will never take this country back with weakness.”
He urged them to “walk down Pennsylvania Avenue” and try “to give our Republicans — the weak ones, because the strong ones don’t need any of our help — we’re going to try and give them kind of pride and boldness they need to take back our country.”
He said he was coming with them, but then he booked it out there, keeping his own hands as clean as possible.
We know what happened next. Can anyone persuasively claim surprise?
Let’s stipulate that I am not the brightest bulb on the tree. In midOctober 2020, I wrote: “We’re less than one month away from a national election that Trump will probably lose by a significant margin ... It will be a miracle if we’re spared violence from right-wing extremists. So pray for a
Stewart and Klarides, each of them probable seekers of the governorship next year, had the opportunity to get on the record as opposing Trump’s dangerous nonsense with hours to spare. It was like getting off a subway train at the last stop before it plunges into the East River.
miracle.”
On Dec. 21, a writer named Arieh Kovler published a Twitter thread in which he described — in achingly prescient detail — what could happen on Jan. 6. He laid out a probable attempt to seize the Capitol and noted the equally probable inadequacy of the Capitol Police if a big wave of right wing insurgents crashed over the building’s steps.
The point is, you didn’t have to be a genius to know where Trump was taking us. Which is why the people who sided with Trump right up to the moment the windows started breaking, the people who issued denunciations of the sacking of the Capitol as if it were a one-off or an aberration, those people are full of it.
That would include the seven U.S. senators who changed their minds after originally agreeing to join Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley in their craven and empty vote against certifying electors.
Here in Connecticut, two important Republican politicians owe a tremendous debt to Mark Pazniokas of the Connecticut Mirror. Pazniokas took the affirmative step of asking state Republicans whether they supported or opposed Trump’s attempts to tamper with the election results.
New Britain Mayor Erin Stewart and Themis Klarides, Tomb Raider, had the opportunity to go on the record as affirming Joe Biden’s victory and saying to Trump, “go home, we love you, you’re special” (although not in those exact words).
This article appeared on the morning of Jan. 6. Prior to that, unless I missed something, nobody had said much of anything among prominent Connecticut Republicans except for departing Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton who said, weeks earlier on the (not its real name, which I am too tired to look up) “Eddie and the Bean Dad Show” on i95 Rock, that Trump should accept his loss.
Stewart and Klarides, each of them probable seekers of the governorship next year, had the opportunity to get on the record as opposing Trump’s dangerous nonsense with hours to spare. It was like getting off a subway train at the last stop before it plunges into the East River.
They should send Pazniokas an enormous basket of delicious snacks, except that he would return it untouched.
Guess who didn’t seize this opportunity when it came his way? Bob Stefanowski. Bob, who lost to Ned Lamont in 2018, was endorsed by President Trump. He has never put any daylight between himself and Trump and, when approached by Pazniokas in January, he choked. He could not, more than eight weeks after Trump lost by 7 million votes, summon the nerve to criticize the president for disrupting what should be an orderly transfer of power.
A few hours after the article dropped, shots were fired at the Capitol and a bare-chested guy in a Viking hat had taken over the dais in the Senate chamber. At that point, Stefanowski suddenly announced he was sickened.
This had all the soul-stirring qualities of Lindsey Graham’s Wednesday night speech during which, possibly emboldened by a lockdown appletini, he announced he was going to stop being Trump’s lickspittle.
What a difference a few hours make. The dragon is flying away soon. But we’ll still have our memories.