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Item one: Are "the rubes" finally on to Trump?

The standard commentary on Donald Trump’s "God Bless the USA Bible" is that while of course it’s cynical and twisted and borderline sacrilegious, there’s also no doubt that his people are going to buy it by the carload, because these people would buy a bag of Trump Dogshit from the guy ("from the bowels of the best dogs, everybody says so"). Some people are just that, well, let us say easily taken in.

Trump’s dark penchant for hucksterism is endless, and P.T. Barnum’s dictum is as true today as it was when he said it. You could take slips of paper on which you write the names of 25 things these Americans like, pull out three or four, conjure up some physical manifestation of it, and Trump would sell it: NASCAR-Branson’s Famous Baldknobbers Beer, in limited-edition cans that show Trump as Rambo.

It’s endless. Or is it? Trump’s fundraising has taken a nosedive. His small-donor numbers are below where they once were. NBC News recently reported that donations to Trump of $200 or less are down 62.5 percent against 2019. He’s still raised a lot; I don’t want to mislead you here. The New York Times recently reported that Trump has more small donors than Joe Biden in some key swing states. But Biden has raised more from small donors overall, according to OpenSecrets. And in the most recent Federal Election Commission filings, Trump had $33.5 million cash on hand and Biden reported having $71 million. That was March 20, before Thursday night’s Radio City Music Hall event with Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, where Biden raked in $26 million.

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All this is a shock to no one because, as we all know, Trump is spending a good chunk of his donations on his legal bills. The Times ran an amazing report about this on Wednesday. Of nearly $85 million in donations, almost a third, $27 million, has gone to legal bills. Hey, at least this time around, he’s apparently actually paying them.

Trump will have money. There’s no use pretending he won’t. But $400 sneakers and $60 Bibles are not signs of strength. They’re signs of weakness. Panic. Desperation. A guy who’ll sell anything that isn’t nailed to the floor.

And: He damn well should be panicked. Liberals and Democrats always impute to Republicans and right-wingers a strength they neither have nor deserve. Just because Trump tries to act like a tough guy and appeals to tough guys, liberals tend to concede he’s a tough guy. Nonsense. He’s a very weak and insecure man, as Mary Trump is always pointing out.

Physically, he’s horribly out of shape: probably couldn’t climb a 20-step flight of stairs without stopping halfway up and, Rambo iconography notwithstanding, couldn’t throw a punch that would crush a grape. A few months ago, I saw a photo of Biden biking around Rehoboth Beach, and it struck me: Has Trump even ever been on a bicycle in his life? I’d be shocked. Biden may be older, but really, who’s the more likely stroke victim here, the guy who still rides the occasional bike or the guy who eats well-done steaks and whose four major food groups are McDonald’s, KFC, pizza, and Diet Coke?

Psychically, he’s in far, far worse shape. He knows very well in some corner of his brain that he’s guilty of everything he’s accused of. He knows that if he doesn’t win the presidency, there’s a very serious chance that he ends up convicted of one of those crimes and in prison. It won’t be Angola Penitentiary, but there won’t be chandeliers in the bathroom or an 18-hole golf course for him to win phony championships on, either.

He would never admit any of this publicly, but privately Trump is surely terrified of this possible future. He knows that if he loses, the cases go forward, and he’s going to have to fight them as long as he possibly can, and it’s going to cost untold millions. Hence the sneakers and the Bible. And there’s surely more in store.

Some people will buy these things, there’s no question of that. But I’ll bet you that if we look hard six months from now, we’ll see that sales did not meet expectations. Of course, we’ll never know that because Trump will have full control of that narrative, and he’ll insist that sales were off the charts, and the press will print it. But we’ve seen this movie and heard this b.s. Trump Steaks were moving faster than they could cut them. Trump University was making millionaires out of many, many people. Right.

So let’s avert our gaze from the people who’d walk across hot coals for Donald Trump (while he stood off to the side, pleading bone spurs) and think instead about the ones who are slowly peeling off. They’re out there too. And they’re starting to see what you and I have so obviously seen for years: a twisted, desperate huckster who’s never cracked a Bible in his life and whose only religion is hustling the suckers who are born every minute.

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Item two: Some reflections on Joe Lieberman

When a former senator dies, Washington and the national political media pay him or her the honor of respecting their public service. When a well-known senator dies—because, let’s face it, most of them toil in obscurity (quick: Who are the senators from Indiana?!)—there is an extra dose of honor applied, in the form of paeans to the qualities that made that person stand out, always spun in the most positive way possible.

Maybe this makes sense. Maybe it’s a humane instinct, to refrain from speaking ill of such a person while his family is still mourning. So I come to you not to heap invective upon Joe Lieberman. But it seems to me it’s someone’s duty to gently suggest that an alternative narrative about this life exists and is worth consideration.

Lieberman won election to the Senate over Republican Lowell Weicker in 1988 in one of the closest Senate elections in Connecticut history. Weicker was of a species that hasn’t existed for some time—a genuinely liberal Republican. Not "liberal for a Republican," but a liberal Republican. These people were Republicans largely because of their flinty and austere views on fiscal policy, but on social issues and foreign policy, they were liberals. Jacob Javits of New York, Chuck Percy of Illinois, and so on.

Lieberman ran mostly to Weicker’s right. He backed the Reagan administration’s bombing of Libya, its invasion of Grenada, and its hard line on Cuba. He also endorsed a moment of silence in public schools. Weicker opposed all those positions.

If Lieberman genuinely believed these things—fair enough. If he believed devoutly in bipartisanship—again, fair enough. But it was also the case that Lieberman deserted his own party’s cause at critical times in ways that smelled of something more than an urge to be bipartisan and veered toward a brand of capitulation that the mainstream media of the day applauded as bipartisan, at least when a Democrat did it (because somehow, no Republican ever did, or was asked to).

On the Sunday before Thanksgiving in 2000, with the presidential election between Al Gore and George W. Bush still being fought, Lieberman, Gore’s veep pick, went on Meet the Press and said that disputed military ballots from overseas should probably be counted after all. This was not the Gore campaign’s position, as the assumption was that most of these ballots would break for Bush. However, as The New York Times reported at the time: "The Republicans who are challenging the rejection of military ballots generally have not disputed the Democrats’ contention that the ballots failed to meet legal standards."

But Lieberman conceded the right. "We’re getting kicked around for saying illegal votes are illegal votes," said a Democratic congressman from Florida. "The Republicans got a lot of illegal votes counted on Friday that never would have been let in before, and now we’re the ones retreating? Incredible."

Some years later, when Barack Obama was president, came the time that Harry Reid, the Democratic leader of the Senate, was trying to push Obamacare through that body. Lieberman had agreed, said Reid’s office, to lowering the Medicare eligibility age to 55, which was seen as a major breakthrough compromise that would help grease passage of the bill.

Shortly thereafter, Lieberman went on Face the Nation—he had that knack for Sunday drama—to say he was against it. Reid thought he had a deal. Lieberman always insisted he never firmly said yes. We may never know, but we do know this: Lieberman acted in such a way, dramatically drawing attention to himself, to submarine the Democratic Party’s highest legislative goal of the last 50 years.

By this time, of course, Lieberman was no longer a Democrat. After being such a forceful voice in favor of Bush’s Iraq War, he left the party. He won his last reelection as an independent in 2006, a race I remember very well. He won with mostly Republican votes.

Throughout his career, the Washington media, shaped at the time by voices like David Broder, who spent his later years fretting about rising extremism on "both sides," limned Lieberman as a model centrist consensus maker. Another interpretation of those times, I suggest to you, is as follows.

This was the time when the Republican Party’s anti-modern extremism was first becoming apparent—nay, obvious—to a growing proportion of the country. The threats against dissent after 9/11. The "why do you hate freedom?" attacks on opponents of the Iraq War. The full-throated defenses of torture. The Bush administration’s very political firing of some U.S. attorneys who weren’t using their offices politically enough for Karl Rove. The Terri Schiavo episode—an early but unmistakable whiff of GOP post-Weimarism.

The Republican Party had started on its long march that led to Donald Trump. Some Democrats went along with that, or at least found ways to accommodate it, and were applauded. I say history will shed kinder light on the Democrats who recognized what was happening and fought it.

Quiz time!

Last week’s quiz: "It might as well be.…" A quiz about spring in history, literature, culture, and song.

1. Who wrote these lines:

Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;

And give us not to think so far away.

As the uncertain harvest; keep us here

All simply in the springing of year.

A. John Dryden

B. Edna St. Vincent Millay

C. Heinrich Heine

D. Robert Frost

Answer: D, Robert Frost. The full poem is here. Tough one, I think. Could easily be any of the other three, except that the prose is a little more on the modern side.

2. They like spring all over the world, unsurprisingly. Match the spring holiday or festival to the country in which it’s celebrated.

Answer: Nowruz = Iran, Tet = Vietnam, Sham = Egypt, Bihu = India. Nowruz and Tet have happened, but you can still catch Bihu (mid-April) and Sham El Nessim (early June).

3. Place the following spring sporting events in the correct chronological order: the Kentucky Derby, the NCAA men’s final, the Masters golf tournament, the Indianapolis 500, the Preakness Stakes.

Answer: NCAA men’s final (second Monday in April, this year, anyway); the Masters (later that week); the Kentucky Derby (first Saturday in May, always); the Preakness (two weeks after the Derby, always); the Indy 500 (Memorial Day weekend, since the 1970s)

4. "Spring" is surely the most famous movement of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. What famous philosopher, interestingly, published a version of it for flute in 1775?

A. John Stuart Mill

B. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

C. Jean-Jacques Rousseau

D. Benedetto Croce

Answer: C, Rousseau. Gettable because he was the only one alive at that time. Well, Hegel was, but he was like 4.

5. According to Ranker.com, what song won a 2023 poll as the best song about spring of all time?

A. "April in Paris," by Count Basie

B. "It Might as Well Be Spring," by Frank Sinatra

C. "Some Other Spring," by Billie Holiday

D. "April Come She Will," by Simon and Garfunkel

Answer: D, Simon & Garfunkel. A bit of a surprise to me. To my further surprise, I knew comparatively few of these songs.

6. What’s the most hated day in the restaurant business?

A. Easter

B. Passover

C. Valentine’s Day

D. Mother’s Day

Answer: D, Mother’s Day. Obviously.

New Quiz: "On the avenue, Fifth Avenue.…" A quiz about Easter.

1. Easter was a pagan holiday before it was a Christian one. Where does the word Easter likely come from?

A. From the Russian возрождение (vozrozhdeniye, or "rebirth"), transmuted over the years from Eastern (that is, from the East, from Russia) rebirth, and eventually shortened to just Easter

B. From the old High German word Essentren, a flower that was among the first to sprout every March

C. From the name of the English pre-Christian goddess Eostre, the goddess of fertility and spring

D. From the Norse god Estrehin, the god of sunshine and flowing water

2. A Roman soldier ran a spear into Christ’s torso just after he’d expired on the cross. That spear, the so-called Spear of Destiny, has been coveted over the ages by any number of generals and tyrants, right up to Adolf Hitler, who had it seized from a Viennese museum in 1938 for use in occult ceremonies. Where is the spear today?

A. The Vatican

B. The Hofberg Treasure House, Vienna

C. The Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

D. Mar-a-Lago

3. This artist’s dramatic, circa-1600 rendering of Christ’s crucifixion departed from custom by having no other human figures in the scene—no Virgin Mary, no Roman soldiers—and by showing the dying Christ alone, in the dark, body twisted, skulls and crossbones at his feet.

A. El Greco

B. Tintoretto

C. Raphael

D. Caravaggio

4. In the song "Easter Parade" by Irving Berlin, the man sings to his female companion: "On the avenue, Fifth Avenue, the photographers will snap us, and you’ll find that you’re—" what?

A. dressed in Christian Dior.

B. more beautiful than before.

C. full of grace and l’amour.

D. in the rotogravure.

5. Who originated the role of Jesus in Jesus Christ, Superstar?

A. Ian Gillan, lead singer of Deep Purple

B. Murray Head, who’d been in a London production of Hair

C. Michael D’Abo, lead singer of Manfred Mann

D. Ian Hunter, lead singer of Mott the Hoople

6. The Bethlehem, Pennsylvania–based Just Born Confections is known for what Easter treat?

A. White chocolate bunnies

B. Malted milk eggs

C. Pastel-colored jellybeans

D. Marshmallow "Peeps" shaped like chicks and other animals

By the way, New York City still has an Easter Parade. Kind of charming. Answers next week. Feedback to fightingwords@tnr.com.

—Michael Tomasky, editor

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