Trump goes cuckoo over Cocaine Mitch — Sad!

You can take Trump’s attack on Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell any way you like — the two men are back to hating each other after a few years’ peace. That’s all fine. But the gratuitous reference at the end to his “China-loving wife, Coco Chow,” is obviously way over the top. I’m not going to say that Trump is throwing away whatever dignity he has left — it probably overstates the case to say that he had any to throw away — but this isn’t just your ordinary troll. It’s extraordinarily lame and stupid.

If we are allowed to raise questions about Joe Biden’s mental acuity — questions which are fully justified, by the way — then I think we have a right to raise questions about Trump’s stability right now.

It doesn’t take any special expertise in Republican politics or Washington power dynamics (or casual racism, for that matter) to see what’s wrong with Trump’s “Truth” post. But the bigger issue here is probably Trump’s sincerity, which even his detractors have seldom had an opportunity to question. Here, Trump is doing something unusual for him — he is saying something he demonstrably does not even believe himself. He is not just behaving like an idiot — he is behaving like one of those swamp-dwellers he enjoys vilifying.

If the Taipei-born Chao really were a “China-lover” — and she most certainly is not — then how does Trump explain his own having appointed her Secretary of Transportation in his own administration? His accusation calls his own judgment into question as much as it does hers.

Now, after seven years of this, I get how Trump’s outrage machine works. He throws provocations out there. He trolls and demoralizes and baits everyone who disagrees with or dislikes him. He fills them with rage and then feeds off of it. They usually can’t help taking the bait. It is usually fun to watch. It was one of the greatest features of his presidential candidacy and his presidency. It set him apart from just about anyone I’ve ever seen run for or hold office in the past. There is no historical analogy for Trump.

But “Coco Chow?” Really?

The once great and mighty god-emperor of Internet trolls has been reduced to laughable Don Blankenship levels of fatuity.

We haven’t really been hearing much about Mitch McConnell’s “China family” since Blankenship’s nakedly racist and absolutely hilarious 2018 Senate campaign in West Virginia. Blankenship, who by that time was already the most unpopular man in the state for unrelated reasons, was running in a three-way Senate primary, which he lost badly. He chose to run very hard against McConnell as Senate Republican leader and came out with a series of … well, unique campaign commercials.

Unfortunately, I think Blankenship’s ads have been pulled for violating YouTube’s terms of service, but I was able to find them contained within a couple of old news clips. Here’s the one about McConnell creating jobs for “China People” and wealth for his “China family”:

And here’s the one that coined the now-famous and celebrated sobriquet “Cocaine Mitch,” which McConnell himself has since embraced.

Chao, of course, deserves much better than this.

As during the George W. Bush administration, when she served as labor secretary, she was probably one of the most effective Cabinet members in Trump’s administration. The mostly untold story of the Trump era is that, while the bombastic president was creating so much drama in public, thousands of conservatives — empowered by establishment Republicans’ refusal to serve in a Trump administration — were quietly making policy and choosing his judges.

It was Chao who took the fight to California, challenging the state’s ability to interfere with interstate commerce by creating its own little emissions fiefdom. Had Trump not failed so badly in the 2020 election, she might have succeeded.

Sad!