We Can't Dismiss the Restoration of Captain Crazypants or Ignore Him and Hope He'll Go Away

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

06 June 21

That didn't work last time, and Maggie Haberman was right to report Donald Trump is saying he'll be restored to the presidency.

ormally, I do not pay a lot of attention to Sub-Left’nant Blimp of the National Review, but I figure that his sources on the Right are better than mine, so I present without comment the latest installment of The Adventures of Captain Crazypants and His Howling Morons.

Two days ago, the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman reported that Donald Trump “has been telling a number of people he’s in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated by August.” In response, many figures on the right inserted their fingers into their ears and started screaming about fake news.

Instead, they should have listened — because Haberman’s reporting was correct. I can attest, from speaking to an array of different sources, that Donald Trump does indeed believe quite genuinely that he — along with former senators David Perdue and Martha McSally — will be “reinstated” to office.

At the time Haberman reported this, too many people lost their minds. Of course, this has news value. If the most immediate former president* has gone this cuckoo bananas, and is already planning to crank up his wankfests again, that’s a helluva story. It’s possible that both Haberman and the Sub Left’nant are getting this from Republicans pleading with the world to rescue them from the stubby little clutches of the former president*. Considering that the Republicans in the Congress are doing everything they can to sustain the damage his administration did to, well, everything, I find it hard to summon up much sympathy in that case.

But, whatever its source, there is absolutely no question that we have a right to know this particular detail. If he shows up on the 12th at Bedminster with his body painted blue and bellowing about His Imperial Majesty, surely nobody would begrudge us the video. Like it or not, he’s a force in the political world until proven otherwise, if only because the rest of the Republican Party is terrified of crossing him. His daughter-in-law, rumored to be the next member of the family to run for a political office for which they're utterly unqualified, says she’s not concerned about the possibility of a Restoration in August. Neither is anyone else, but that’s not the point. There is still a level of dangerous mischief he can play in a country just now coming out of the pandemic and his towering misrule. That’s news, folks. You may recall how well “Ignore him and he’ll go away” worked as a strategy a mere six years ago. Democracy is a slow-moving target right now.