“About fucking time,” Mitch said when I arrived.
I stared at him.
“Mitch?”
“Allegedly.”
“You’re dead?”
“Not according to my office.”
He was sitting on a cloud in the same dark suit, looking like someone had interrupted a filibuster to inform him that eternity had started.
“They’re still using my body,” he said.
“For what?”
“What do you think? A Senate seat. A press release. Occasionally a paperweight. I gave those bastards forty-two years and they still won’t let me take one fucking day off.”
“Mitch…”
“Can’t a man just fucking rest? I’m done. And still…”
“Still what?”
“Still ‘deeply engaged in Senate business.’ Apparently death counts as remote work if the majority is tight enough.”
“Why don’t they hold the special election?”
“Because they might replace me with a libtard.”
He stared down at Kentucky for a moment.
“You know what? Fine. Do it. Hold the election. Replace me with a libtard. Replace me with two libtards in a trench coat. Please. I can finally say it.”
“Say what?”
“Anything is better than Donald Trump.”
“That felt good?”
“Best thing about heaven, Lindsey. You can say whatever you want about Donald. Jesus told me I can even take his dad’s name in vain.”
“Jesus said that?”
“He said the rule is jurisdictional.”
“What does that mean?”
“He says he knew it would turn out this way. But his dad is an Old Testament guy.”
“And?”
“God has been asking where we keep the locusts.”
Before anybody asks how I got through the gates:
I was a lawyer.
We appealed.
Not long before I arrived, I told Donald Trump, “Mr. President, you’re not far behind God.”
I have now reviewed both men’s files.
There was some distance.
Death is clarifying. Once there is no primary to fear, no committee assignment to protect and no Sunday-show invitation to lose, the spine begins regenerating almost immediately.
Mine came back with the memories.
In 2015, I called Donald Trump “a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.” I said he was unfit for office. I told the country:
“You know how you make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.”
Then, on May 3, 2016, I wrote:
“If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed … and we will deserve it.”
That may have been the most accurate sentence a Republican spoke in the last eleven years.
Then he won.
When someone later asked what had changed, I gave away the entire Republican Party in four words:
“He won. I lost.”
There it was.
The surrender doctrine.
We renamed cowardice “access.” We called obedience “influence.” We convinced ourselves that if we stood close enough to the wrecking ball, we could steer it.
Mostly, we held its coat.
Now Donald has built the convention our choices earned.
On September 9 and 10, Republicans will hold their first national midterm convention in Dallas.
There is no nominee to choose.
No platform to debate.
No actual party business to conduct.
Just two nights of Donald Trump celebrating Donald Trump, with JD Vance as the opening act, Cabinet officials as the ensemble and endangered Republican candidates arranged behind him like human liability waivers.
It is a political convention in the same sense that a timeshare presentation is a vacation.
Trump is scheduled to headline the second night.
The man has never met a spotlight he thought should be wasted on someone who is actually facing an election.
The Republican chairman has called it “Trumpapalooza.”
That is unusually honest.
It is not a Republican convention featuring Trump.
It is a Trump convention featuring Republicans.
Organizers are predicting 30,000 attendees, roughly 8,000 more human beings than the arena has seats.
The attendance inflation began before the doors even opened.
And here is the exquisite part.
Trump told reporters that his political operation has about $850 million.
Federal filings independently verify more than $403 million sitting in the Trump-aligned MAGA Inc. alone.
Mitch whistled.
“Eight hundred fifty million, and he’s still billing the caucus?”
“Yes.”
“That son of a bitch took everything I taught him and removed the shame.”
The National Republican Congressional Committee is asking House members to cough up $25,000 for themselves and one guest.
The premium package reaches $100,000.
Twenty-five thousand dollars to attend your own hostage video.
A hundred thousand, I assume, gets you two drink tickets, brief eye contact and a written promise not to endorse your primary opponent before dessert.
The convention is supposed to save Republican candidates.
The candidates are being billed to furnish the applause.
Corporate sponsorship money is flowing through a private nonprofit that has not named its donors. The host committee says it has raised about $45 million.
Meanwhile, Dallas, which is facing a budget deficit, has preliminarily estimated $1.8 million in police expenses, and city officials are still asking how firmly reimbursement is guaranteed.
Donald claims $850 million.
The Trump-aligned PAC has more than $403 million.
The lawmakers pay.
The corporations pay.
Maybe the taxpayers front the security bill.
America First.
Invoice America later.
Then Reuters contacted 45 Republican campaigns in competitive House and Senate races and asked whether their candidates would attend or speak.
One gave a substantive answer.
Michigan Congressman Tom Barrett said he was staying home to campaign.
That is not an RSVP list.
That is an evacuation plan.
One Republican strategist called the convention a “shit show.” Another described it as an opportunity to “shake down corporate America.”
My Republican friends, when your own consultants start sounding like Executive Dysfunction Weekly, the intervention is already late.
The candidates understand the trap because I helped write the manual.
Attend, and your opponent gets footage of you applauding a president with 33 percent approval while voters are furious about prices and an Iran war the convention’s own advertised program somehow forgot to mention.
Stay home, and Donald notices.
Then you get to wonder whether the political operation he says will spend heavily on Republican candidates he considers “good” still considers you good.
Either way, somebody sends you the $25,000 invitation.
This is the Lindsey Graham Special:
Know exactly what Donald Trump is.
Say it out loud.
Then calculate that surviving him requires serving him.
Donald Trump has no next election.
These lawmakers do.
Yet his need for applause outranks their need to survive.
He even promised this convention would celebrate “lower costs and real affordability.”
For $25,000 a seat.
Satire used to require effort.
Mitch stared at the invitation.
“They’re going to wheel my body onstage, aren’t they?”
“They still think you’re alive.”
“Exactly. I’m the only endangered Republican guaranteed to attend.”
“Only if your estate pays the $25,000.”
We watched Donald spread his arms beneath the lights while Republican candidates hid behind their invoices.
“Fuck,” Mitch said. “I am so glad I dumped this shit.”
“Mitch, you didn’t dump it. You built the loading dock.”
“And you?”
“I spent the next nine years polishing the truck.”
“Fair.”
Then John McCain walked past us.
He looked at Mitch.
He looked at me.
He kept walking.
Here is the part we do not get to joke away.
Republican lawmakers are not innocent victims of Donald Trump.
Neither was I.
Neither was Mitch.
He started to object.
I reminded him that he was dead and no longer had donors.
He withdrew the objection.
We were not fooled. We identified the danger with remarkable precision.
Then we decided we could rent it.
We traded principle for access, access for judges, judges for acquittals, acquittals for endorsements and endorsements for a party that no longer exists apart from one man’s appetite.
We kept telling ourselves the next surrender would be the last necessary one.
Now the bill has arrived.
Bring a guest.
Bring $25,000.
Bring whatever remains of your dignity.
It will be collected at the door.
In 2016, I wrote that if Republicans nominated Trump, we would be destroyed, and we would deserve it.
I was wrong about one thing.
I used the future tense.
The destruction was not one lost election.
It was every warning we ignored, every lie we excused and every time we mistook keeping our jobs for keeping our country.
The voters do not deserve the consequences.
The country does not deserve the damage.
But the Republican lawmakers now staring at that invitation?
Friends, you were warned.
I know.
I wrote it.
Now pay the cover.
Executive Dysfunction Weekly
Truth. Sarcasm. No Mercy.
EDW•
