Or Roger Stone quit because he belatedly realized after the latest, post-debate Trump meltdown that he was the right hand man of a conniving buffoon. Take your pick:
Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump late Friday fired Roger Stone, his campaign manager, over concerns about Stone’s loyalty to the billionaire businessman’s run for Republican presidential nomination.
"Mr. Trump fired Roger Stone last night," a campaign spokesperson told Newsmax on Saturday. "We have a tremendously successful campaign, and Roger wanted to use the campaign for his own personal publicity.
"He has had a number of articles about him recently, and Mr. Trump wants to keep the focus of the campaign on how to 'Make America Great Again,' " the spokesperson said. [emphasis added]
No, Trump wants the focus of the campaign kept on Trump. How DARE Mr. Stone try to pull a Trump at Trump's expense! The NERVE of the man, thinking that his own egotism and vanity and gloryhogging were the equal of his boss's! Who does he think he is, anyway? Trump?
Of course, that's not Mr. Stone's side of the story.
Sorry @realDonaldTrump didn't fire me- I fired Trump. Diasagree with diversion to food fight with @megynkelly away core issue messages
Sorry, Mr. Stone, but the Trump campaign doesn't have any "core issue messages" other than Trump's food fights. Or "Trump being Trump". Isn't that what's gotten him to the top of the polls? And you want to weigh him down with professionalism and statesmanship and competence and policy knowledge and vision and all the other "political stuff" when his Tea Party supporters just want to see him go postal on all the people they hate? What kind of GOP political consultant are you? Answer: Go check Trump's Twitter feed. I'm sure The Donald must have already called Mr. Stone "Rick Santorum thirty seconds after drinking from the wrong Grail" or something.
It's at this point that I would venture a comment like, "Maybe, perhaps and perchance, the wheels are finally coming off the Trump Express" - ordinarily, typically, a campaign whose candidate blew himself up like Trump did the past forty-eight hours and then had his campaign manager leave in "controversial" circumstances would be seen as one in complete disarray, but again, it's precisely this kind of thing that has propelled Trump into the stratosphere. For anybody who knows the first thing about how politics works, it's a frightening detour into a kind of alternate Bizarro World with dismaying implications for an already-moribund former Republic that cannot afford to immolate itself in a fit of unfocused, ignorant, fratricidal rage at the behest of a classic demagogue. Perhaps the only mistake Trump could make that would actually derail his rise is to walk back his bombast and pretend to apologize - especially under fire.
In which case, uh-oh:
Rival Republican presidential candidates piled on Donald Trump on Saturday for his caustic remarks about a female debate moderator, and the billionaire celebrity candidate backpedaled in an effort to keep his campaign from unraveling.
Trump blasted Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly during a debate in Cleveland on Thursday when she questioned him about insulting comments he had made about women. The backlash to his exchange with Kelly has threatened to knock the wheels off the bandwagon of support that had Trump leading early polls in the race for the Republican nomination for the 2016 election.
Trump was promptly dumped from a keynote speaking role on Saturday night in Atlanta at an important gathering of conservative activists put together by the RedState organization. Republican candidates Carly Fiorina, Scott Walker, Lindsey Graham, Rick Perry and George Pataki denounced the comments on Twitter or in statements.
RedState chief Erick Erickson said he disinvited Trump because of his remarks about Kelly on CNN.
The Trump campaign issued a statement clarifying that by "her wherever," Trump meant Kelly's nose.
<eyeroll> Suuuuuuure, he did. Because it's impolite to refer to a woman's "nose" on national television. Unless she using it to part The Donald's bush, anyway.
In the first Avengers movie there's a scene after Rogers, Stark, Thor, and Banner are all assembled on the SHIELD helicarrier where Stark asks Maria Hill how Nick Fury can see all the screens on the vessel's bridge with only one eye. "He turns," Hill replies. "Sounds exhausting," Stark observes.
That's what the Trump campaign is in a single word: exhausting. Him and his berserker, loony tunes supporters. The endless snarling anger, the endless raging disapprobation, the endless insultingly nonsensical foolishness. Conservatives who have sold out to Trump are not trying to "make America great again" (a ludicrously empty, trite, and cliched slogan that Trump couldn't flesh out with two scoops and Rosie O'Donnell's last liposuction byproducts), they've given up on restoring the Republic and are venting their despair and deluding themselves into believing that Trump is some kind of poltroonish magic-bullet shortcut alternative to the long, uphill, twilight struggle in front of us.
Donald Trump is the "fat-burner" of politics. Sure, it would be great to be able to lose twenty pounds overnight without any effort. Problem is, the only actual way of accomplishing that is via amputation. Otherwise, it's what nobody likes but nobody can avoid: eating less and exercising. No wonder fat people aren't necessarily jolly.
It's that exhaustion that I'd argue will cause the Trump campaign to fizzle out as quickly as it took off, except that this mass Trump psychosis on the Right, the mirror image of the rise of the Nutroots fifteen years ago, is not so much changing all the political rules as much as scrambling them beyond deciphering. Chaos, in other words. Historically, chaos has not been the friend of free societies.
But it is the bosom ally of demagogues. No matter from where they're bleeding.
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