Here We Go Again

Here's a truly depressing thought from Politico's Mike Allen: what if Republicans, already showing a complete propensity to fail miserably at learning from their mistakes in 2008 and 2012, nominate Trump again in 2020?

Newt Gingrich, one of Donald Trump’s closest confidants and most visible boosters, on Friday raised the novel possibility of a Trump-Clinton rematch in 2020 — a spooky Halloween-weekend notion for the many voters who just want the ugly race to stop.

“The challenge for everybody’s going to be, 'What if he gets 48 or 49 percent?’” Gingrich said in a video interview for POLITICO’s “Open Mike” series. “And what if he says: ‘You know, I like this campaign and stuff. I ain’t leaving’? There will then be a Trump Party.”

Speaking a few hours before the FBI’s email review became public, Gingrich declared that “odds are better than even” that Trump will win.

But the former House speaker added that if not, Trump might form “a Trump Party inside the Republican Party, just the way William Jennings Bryan brought populism into the Democratic Party.”

Gingrich floated the notion when he was asked if Trump TV — a new media empire that might emerge from the campaign’s aftermath — would be a good idea.

“It’d be silly,” Gingrich said at his office in Arlington, Va. “He’s bigger than that. … It’s an irrelevancy. I mean, I know what it takes to run CNN or Fox. These are big operations, and he could do that if he wants to get out of politics, but he doesn’t need it.”

And so you think he might run again in 2020?

"I think that’s very possible,” Gingrich responded. "I think he likes being part of a movement — he likes thinking of it as a movement. … I was thinking about this, [and] he said to me the other morning, … ‘I sent out one tweet and 15,000 people showed up.’”

POLITICO asked: So you’re predicting a Trump-Clinton rematch?

Gingrich: “Could be, assuming she survives.”

What do you mean “survives”?

“That she’s not impeached and convicted,” Gingrich replied. “Look … when people have time to actually digest WikiLeaks and some brave person puts together a book and goes, 'This, this, this, this, this,' it’s very hard to imagine how there’s not going to be some serious effort in the first year of her presidency.”

Newt is usually full of crap, but at this point you can't discount the notion that the GOP will be so broken that they'll just nominate Trump again in four years.

Having said that, I think it's much more likely we see Rubio, Kasich, or Cruz than Trump again.

But I would have said the same thing if you had asked me who the GOP was going to nominate back in 2015, too.

Trump Cards, Con't

Meanwhile, in Iowa, the Trump Paranoid Style has gotten so bad that Trump voters have stared into the abyss of "rigged elections" and have discovered nothing more than the abyss staring back.

A Des Moines woman has been charged with Election Misconduct, a Class D felony, after allegedly voting twice for GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump. Terri Rote says she was afraid her first ballot for Trump would be changed to a vote for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

"I wasn't planning on doing it twice, it was spur of the moment," says Rote. "The polls are rigged."

But Polk County Attorney John Sarcone says voter fraud in Iowa is very rare, which is evidence that Iowa’s election system is secure.

"I think in the 25-plus years that I've been doing this job, this maybe the third [time] we've had some irregularity that's resulted in a criminal charge," says Sarcone. "People aren’t voting more than once. And if they do, or attempt to do it, they will get caught because there are safeguards in place....We want everybody to exercise their right to vote, but only once."

Rote was released from jail on Friday on a $5,000 bond. If convicted, she faces up to five years in prison.

Trump voters are committing election fraud in order to save America from election fraud, huh.

Gosh it's almost like all of this screaming by Trump about "rigged elections" have had a massively detrimental effect on our voting system.