Back in the day, “Saturday Night Live” staged a game show posing the question: ¿Quien es mas macho? ¿Ricardo Montalban o Fernando Lamas? If memory serves, Fernando Lamas was un poquito mas macho. Thirty years down the road, SNL might try judging which Trump hater is more loathsome than the others. The field jostles with heavyweight candidates such as former First Lady Hillary Clinton.
In 2016, Clinton postured like the quarterback who gained more yards but lost the game, or the boxer ahead on points before getting knocked out in the final round. True to form, Clinton wandered the globe touting the places she “won” apart from all those deplorables. People of a certain age might picture 1984 loser Walter Mondale bragging how he “won” his home state of Minnesota.
More recently, Clinton claimed that President Trump knows he is an illegitimate president. After the Mueller hearings, Clinton not only clings to the Russian collusion hoax but extends it to Tulsi Gabbard, branding the Hawaii Democrat as a Russian “asset.” That is a tough act to follow but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) may be up to the task.
She gushes over Stalinists like Harry Bridges, Vincent Hallinan, and Pete Seeger—that last one coming just this past Thanksgiving. She is on record that Donald Trump is an “imposter,” while claiming she prays for him all the time. Pelosi was against impeachment before she was for it. She holds a party-line vote two articles of impeachment then declines to pass on the articles to the Senate, branding Mitch McConnell a “rogue leader.” Often incoherent, Pelosi faces a stiff challenge from House Intelligence Committee boss Adam Schiff (D-Calif.).
The former prosecutor allows the duly elected president of the United States fewer rights than a common defendant in a courtroom would enjoy. Nobody is above the law, Schiff intones, but the president enjoys no presumption of innocence. The wide-eyed Democrat composes a speech in which Trump imitates Virgil Sollozzo from “The Godfather,” demanding personal favors from foreign leaders. He shushes Republican questions and bars their witnesses.
This is the man who for three years claimed he had direct evidence of Trump’s collusion with Russia and got punked by trolls offering naked pics of the president. As Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) noted, Schiff read parts of the Steele dossier into the Congressional Record. Not even Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) can match that record of performance but, not to worry: On the other side of the aisle, some Republicans are making an effort.
“President Trump is on trial,” former Senator Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) explains. “But in a very real sense, so are you. And so is the political party to which we belong.”
In addition, Flake intones “The willingness of House Republicans to bend to the president’s will by attempting to shift blame with the promotion of bizarre and debunked conspiracy theories has been an appalling spectacle.” Moreover, Flake insists, “If there ever was a time to put country over party, it is now.” By Flake’s count, in a private vote there would be at least 35 votes against Trump.
One of those votes against the president would doubtless come from Mitt Romney, son of former Michigan governor and presidential hopeful George Romney. In 2012, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney claimed millions of illegal aliens would self-deport and essentially threw the election. Then, in 2016, he claimed that Donald Trump was “a phony, a fraud.” The junior U.S. senator from Utah can’t be counted out from among the contenders for most loathsome, but he faces a stiff challenge from California Democrat Eric Swalwell, a leading member of Schiff Youth.
Martha MacCallum of Fox News asked Swalwell if he had any second thoughts about things he said in the two years before the release of the Mueller report that found no collusion. Swalwell drew a blank and MacCallum pressed the case of the infamous dossier. Swalwell turned the tables and asked her what in the dossier had been found to be false.
As a stunned MacCallum explained, the dossier said attorney Michael Cohen had been plotting collusion in Prague, but in sworn testimony Cohen said he had never been to Prague or to the Czech Republic. Swalwell then launched into a harangue on Cohen and ramped up fidelity to the collusion narrative. Still, his best was yet to come.
After a stabbing attack during a December 21 Hanukkah celebration in Monsey, New York, Swalwell tweeted, “Anti-Semitism is on the rise in America. And it’s being stoked by @realDonaldTrump who won’t condemn it.” SNL is not on the record, but it’s fair to say that Eric Swalwell is un poquito mas loathsome than most Democrat or Republican Trump haters.