[WILFORD BRIMLEY VOICE] MR. TRUMP, ARE YOU THAT SMART? NEVER MIND, YOU AIN’T GONNA TELL ME THAT, ARE YOU?
I suspect it’s going to turn out that Trump was doing more than tweeting throughout all this, and that it reflected a strategy that has now paid off. But Republicans — including NeverTrumpers still capable of some degree of rationality, if such exist — should ask themselves what other Republican candidate in 2016 could have withstood this sort of assault. As with the Kavanaugh character assassination attempts, I think the answer will be damn few. Maybe Ted Cruz, but nobody else really comes to mind. And, say, Mitt Romney? It is to laugh. We got Trump because of a media/political environment that only Trump could survive and flourish in.
And note that the past week has been a bad one for Trump’s enemies in general: Higher education is facing its biggest scandal ever, the SPLC is folding, the Democrats are split over anti-semitism and more or less open Marxism. . . . Stay tuned. It’s going to get interesting.
UPDATE: Battenfeld: Great job, Democrats, media … you’re on your way to re-electing Trump.
ANOTHER UPDATE: “It is a complete rout for Democrats and the media.”
Related: ” I can’t resist a moment of triumph. . . . I think it has been a foregone conclusion for a while that Mueller would acknowledge there was no collusion, because 1) there was no collusion, 2) the charges Mueller brought against Trump underlings and associates did not involve collusion, and 3) the meeting with the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya proved there was no collusion, since had the Trump campaign been conspiring with Russian officials, there would have been no reason to meet with an obscure lawyer who claimed to have (but did not have) dirt on Hillary. (That meeting, by the way, appears to have been a setup by the Clinton campaign, since Veselnitskaya was in the United States on a matter in which she was working with Glenn Simpson, and she met with Simpson both before and after her brief meeting with Donald Trump, Jr.)”
Flashback, March 2017: “Hypothesis: The spying-on-Trump thing is worse than we even imagine, and once it was clear Hillary had lost and it would inevitably come out, the Trump/Russia collusion talking point was created as a distraction.”
MORE: From the comments: “The unions and some companies can make the economy tank. Get ready for it.” They’ll be playing into his hands if they do.