Author: Fritz Pettyjohn

He was a different man, 14 months ago, when he started his campaign.  At first, he wasn’t that serious, but he quickly learned he had the ability to tap in to long held grievances of a close to a majority of the Republican electorate.  And it was an electorate he could expand.   As the campaign wore on, and the momentum built, he bonded, in a way he never had before, with millions upon millions of ordinary, hard working Americans.  He was their voice, and bore a responsibility to them.  No one else would defend them, fight for them, and honor them.  He became a different man.

That’s his story, and those with more Christian charity than I have can believe it if they wish.  I think it’s pure B.S, but there’s a way for Trump to prove me wrong.  Withdraw, endorse Pence, and allow the Electoral College to save the country.  The Framers of the Constitution were an assembly of some of the finest minds in all history.  Every word, every clause, of the Constitution was thought through, carefully.  They tried to provide for every possible contingency, and it is for this reason that Section 1, of Article II, is written as it is.  Read it, carefully, as amended  by the 12th and 20th Amendments, and try to figure out why it reads as it does.  In those provisions of the Constitution is Trump’s, and the country’s, salvation.  But for it to work, he must withdraw.  This use of the Electoral College would be unprecedented, but so has everything else about this campaign.

I’m no business man, just a simple lawyer, but I’ve got to believe that having over half the country think you’re a swine is not good for business.  Maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe bookings are up at the new Trump Hotel in D.C. that Ivanka built.  Those rooms look pretty pricey.  The Trump crowd I saw at the Reno rally didn’t seem to have many high rollers in it.  How’s business, Ivanka?  How is your foolish father’s antics affecting the bottom line?

The market had a minor meltdown today as the realization sunk in that the Republicans could lose the House.  Elizabeth Warren unchained.   If they get the House, sell the ranch, it’s over.  We’ll justly call it the Trump bear market.  His name will be mud.

I went through the 60’s, and all the Vietnam protests and riots.  We are more of a divided country now than we were then.  There is the Ruling  Class, and its allies and beneficiaries.  And there’s everybody else.  Which includes me, normal Republicans, and Trump, and his vast army of followers.  We’re on the same side, against the Ruling Class.  But I despise Trump, and his rabid fans hate me.  Together, we’re a majority.  But Trump can’t bring us together.  Only one man can.  Mike Pence, who is a normal Republican and a Trump man rolled into one.

I thought about fabricating a letter from Ivanka to her father, explaining why he had to withdraw.  I just got to spend some time with my twelve year old granddaughter, the love of my life.  I like to think that Ivanka and Trump have a relationship like I have with my granddaughter.  I’d do anything for her.  Trump would do it for her.

Was it locker room talk, or was it two swine bragging about sexual assault?   It doesn’t matter to some, but it is disqualifying to others.  So, when cornered by Anderson Cooper, Trump was forced to lie.  Asked if he’d ever groped or kissed women without their consent, he said, “No, I have not.”

That’s a lie.  The Democrats will show it to be a lie, and if a witness lies in one thing, a jury is instructed by the judge that they may disbelieve their entire testimony.   Trump is a pig, and a liar.  That will never change.  It’s who he is.  Enough women, and men, find that so disturbing that he will never get their vote.  I’m one of them.

Babbie and I watched the first half, and switched to Law and Order.  The country hit a new low last night.  I bailed out of the prognostication business when Trump won the nomination, so I’ll just wait to see the polls later in the week.

And, no, it’s not too late for Trump to drop out.  I’ll explain later, but it’s a live option for at least another week.  If Trump’s support among women craters, it will be the only hope of salvaging this election.

I exaggerated a bit in my last post, when I implied that I, like Jake Tapper, have been in fraternities and locker rooms.  I was never in a fraternity, and I never played a team sport.  My game was handball, and the few men I encountered after showering all studiously avoided looking at each other.  Hanging around a bunch of naked men never appealed to me.

So maybe if I had been in a fraternity, or played a team sport, I would have encountered swine like Trump and Billy Bush.  I have always been a confrontational person, and it would not have ended well.

We’re off to see our twelve year old granddaughter play a basketball game.  It won’t be too many years before she grows up to be one of those tall, slender, beautiful girls that Trump seems so attracted to.  If he was a bit younger, and got the chance, I can picture him assaulting her, as he has so many others.

But maybe I’m just old fashioned.  Maybe it’s not such a big deal.  To each his own.

They tell us the Trump Sex Tape was just discovered a few days ago.  God, they think we’re fools.  Maybe that’s what I hate the most about them, the way they think they’re fooling us.  Nobody’s fooled.  This has been in the works for a very long time.  I get the impression that NBC wanted to hold it for another week or two, when the damage it caused could not be recovered from.  But the Washington Post got wind of it, and broke it on Friday.  That was not the plan.  Because now the Republicans, and Trump, have an out.  If this had been released ten days from now, there would be no way out.  But for the next week, there is.  The WaPo is as stridently anti-Trump as any paper in the country.  But they do have some actual reporters there, who wouldn’t play NBC’s purely partisan game of timing.

I hope to see the real Trump tonight, the pissed off one.  Everybody says you’re supposed to be warm and friendly at these things, but I don’t think Trump’s got it in him, at least tonight.  I think Clinton will bait him, and he’ll bite her head off.  She’s certainly got it coming.   As the chief enabler of a serial sexual criminal she’s got a lot of explaining to do.  And she’ll come right back at him, and lay some more mud on him.  And back and forth.  This isn’t a Presidential Debate.  This is a reality TV show, featuring one of the stars of that medium, Donald Trump.

If it were fairly run, Trump would come out on top.  He hasn’t sold out his country to foreign governments for money.  He’s done some disgusting things, but he hasn’t done that, and she has.  He didn’t do Libya, with her displaying her inner Caesar  — “We came, we saw, he died.”  He didn’t do Benghazi, and then lie to the families of the American dead.  I hope Trump goes at her, hard.

He may hurt himself in the process, but he’ll never get elected anyway.  That sex tape ruined him.  He’s road kill.  All this talk about how this is just how ordinary guys talk in the locker room is bullshit.  As Jake Tapper of CNN said to a Trump apologist  —  he’s been in locker rooms and fraternities, and “I have never heard any man, ever, brag about being able to maul women because they get away with it.”   I’ll second that.   These guys like Jon Voight are probably pigs themselves, and do talk that way.   But most men don’t, and most men look down on the ones who do.

This guy  Voight is an idiot.  He tweeted, “Donald Trump’s words were not as damaging as Robert DeNiro’s ugly rant.”  What the hell is he talking about?  Who did DeNiro’s rant hurt?  Did it hurt Donald Trump’s feelings?   Like who cares.

He’ll wait to see the polls, but there’s no doubt about what they’ll say.  The women of this country can’t stand him, and he has no prayer without them.  I find that fitting, and just, in a way.

He has to withdraw in time for Pence to appear as the Republican nominee at the next debate.  As long as Trump withdraws before that debate, it’s still feasible, legally and politically.  He has, at the very most, ten days to make the  most important decision of his life.  If he won’t withdraw he’ll lose in a landslide, and take the Senate, and possibly the House, down with him.  Can you imagine the damage Clinton could do to this country with Democratic majorities in both Houses?  It really could be all over.  It could be the death of the Constitution.  Once it’s dead, can a Constitution be brought back to life?

Yes, the Framers gave us a way.  Article V would be the only way back to revive and restore the Constitution.  As bad as things would get under Clinton, maybe people will finally figure it out.

I hope it doesn’t come to that.  But if it does, we’ll all know who to blame.

Trump is holding a wasting asset, the 2016 Republican Presidential nomination.  The longer he holds on to it, the less it’s worth.  Every time people hear him bragging about sexually assaulting women, the greater the debacle that awaits him.  He won’t just lose.  He’ll get crushed, destroyed by the most unlikable and distrusted woman in America.  He’s made a fortune selling his brand, but his name will be a joke, like the Edsel.  Who wants to be associated with the greatest loser in American political history?

It’s impossible to say when all this becomes clear to him, but it can’t be more than a week.  He’s down 5 today, and will be down ten or more in a few days.  Donations will dry up.  He’ll draw crowds to his rallies, but the numbers will diminish.  The longer he waits, the worse it will get.

Trump never wanted to be President.  He wanted to be like an elected king, who would supervise his Prime Minister, Mike Pence.  To salvage himself, his brand, and his family, he must give that dream up, and settle for something far less, a king maker.  He, and he alone, can elect Pence President.  His followers wouldn’t like it, but that’s the best he can do for them.  If they accept his instruction, and vote for Pence, Trump will be able to take credit for helping to elect one of the most consequential Presidents in our history.  He will have made a huge deposit into the favor bank of the President of the United States.   He will have an honorable place in American history.  And what is his alternative?

It will be up to Ivanka and the rest of the family to convince him to do it.  It has to be done this week, before the third debate on the 19th.  In the mean time, Mike and Karen Pence, as well as Kellyanne Conway, are on a tightrope.  The only way out of this mess is for Trump to withdraw, and throw his support to Pence.  It’s the only out.  So Pence must hold his tongue and keep a stiff upper lip.  I don’t envy him the task.  But it’s the last best hope of saving the country from the Clintons.  Bill and Hillary are career political criminals, and will do great damage to this country, damage that it will take a generation to overcome.  A lot of good Americans will suffer.  Even greater damage to our institutions will be inflicted.  We’d get through it, but no one knows for sure if all the damage they do can be repaired.  It’s a perilous time for constitutional conservatives.

I’ve met people like Trump, but never associated with them.  Guys who talk like he does are losers.  A man who brags about his success with women is despised by real men.  At least that’s the way I was raised, and it was the culture I grew up in.  Maybe it’s different in Manhattan.  But I don’t really think so.

Where I was raised, grabbing women in the crotch is dangerous.  Women have husbands, and fathers, and brothers, and boy friends, and if you try that on the wrong woman you’re going to get your teeth kicked in.  If anybody ever did something like that to Babbie I’d beat him to within an inch of his life.  Things are different in Trump’s world, I guess.

Murkowski’s out with a phony Ivan Moore poll, showing her way up.  It’s not really a “poll”, more like a piece of campaign propaganda.  I won’t get into it, but she’s in trouble, and she knows it.  The Trump debacle hurts Joe Miller’s chances, but he wasn’t relying on Trump.  That was icing on the cake.  The Senate race in Alaska will be the most interesting in the country.

They’re in celebration mode in the Hive tonight.  It looks like they’ve pulled it off.  Electing Hillary Clinton President in 2016 was a tall order, but they were up to it.   They couldn’t have done it without Trump.  He was their indispensable man, and still is.  But if he’s smart enough to realize he’s being played, he can turn the tables on them, endorse Pence, and walk away a winner.

He’s smart, but is he that smart?

This wasn’t exactly the best day to put out a serious piece of political analysis, but this is up today at American Thinker.

Come back kid vs.the most liberal Republican in the Senate.