They're Underestimating Trump

This morning's headline at The Hill: NFL stars celebrate big plays with dance moves inspired by Trump:

Players across the NFL celebrated big plays Sunday with dance moves inspired by President-elect Trump.

Raiders tight end Brock Bowers, Titans wide receiver Calvin Ridley and Lions defensive end Za’Darius Smith all followed San Francisco 49ers defensive end Nick Bosa in celebrating big plays with dances inspired by Trump.

After a 23-yard touchdown, Bowers shook his arms and hips in the end zone similar to how Trump famously dances.

Following the game, he told USA Today that he’s seen “everyone do it.”

“I watched the UFC fight [Saturday] night, and Jon Jones did it. I like watching UFC, so I saw it, and thought it was cool,” he said.

. . . College players have been doing the move for weeks, and now it’s gone international, the AP noted.

This confirms the words of General Patton:

When you were kids, you all admired the champion marble shooter, the fastest runner, the big-league ball players and the toughest boxers. Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. I wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost, and laughed.

Yet again, we're seeing Trump's instinctive understanding of subliminal cues. He's a winner of the sort General Patton commended to his troops. Big-league ball players and the toughest boxers are emulating someone they apparently now see as an even bigger winner. But in that context, also note a strange non-event reported at the UK Daily Mail: MAGA world outraged after now-deleted tweet reveals Mitch McConnell's secret plot to derail Trump's agenda in the Senate:

Donald Trump's MAGA faithful were outraged after it was leaked that Mitch McConnell hatched a plot to stall his Cabinet nominations in the Senate.

The backlash began after a now-deleted tweet from New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer claimed McConnell told colleagues 'there will be no recess appointments' for the president-elect's cabinet members.

'Message to Trump Team: "There will be no recess appointments" Sen. Mitch McConnell said tonight at a Washington gathering,' Mayer wrote on X at around 8 pm Sunday.

. . . Mayer has since deleted the tweet without explanation, but not before it caused commotion among Trump supporters, who suspected something was foul was afoot.

Senator Mike Lee of Utah reiterated that 'McConnell is no longer the Senate GOP leader' before asking: 'Remember that time when McConnell decided he wouldn’t be speaking for Senate Republicans anymore?'

But note that sopurces close to former Republican Leader McConnell have been leaking to Jane Mayer, a leftist writer for the New Yorker:

Her paternal great-great-grandfather was Emanuel Lehman, one of the founders of Lehman Brothers. Her maternal grandparents were Mary Fleming (Richardson) and Allan Nevins, a historian and John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s authorized biographer.

Mayer attended two private non-secondary schools: Fieldston, in the northwest area of the Bronx borough of New York City; and—as an exchange student in 1972-1973—Bedales, a boarding school in the village of Steep, Hampshire, England.

A 1977 magna cum laude graduate of Yale University, she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and served as senior editor of the Yale Daily News and as campus stringer for Time magazine

In other words, she's a generational member of the blueblood establishment. But beyond that, one of her books is an effort to rehabilitate Anita Hill's failed attempt to play the affronted ingenue card against Clarence Thomas:

Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas (1994) (co-authored with Jill Abramson), a study of the nomination and appointment of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court[.]

This precis summarizes her argument:

Anita Hill's accusation of sexual harassment by Thomas, and the attacks on her that were part of his high-placed supporters rebuttal, both shocked the nation and split it into two camps. One believed Hill was lying, the other believed that the man who ultimately took his place on the Supreme Court had committed perjury.

In this brilliant, often shocking book, Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson, two of the nation's top investigative journalists, examine all aspects of this controversial case. They interview witnesses that the Judiciary Committee chose not to call and present documents never before made public. They detail the personal and professional pasts of both Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill and lay bare a campaign of lobbying, public relations, and character assassination fueled by conservative power at its most desperate. A gripping high-stakes drama, Strange Justice is not only a definitive account of the Clarence Thomas nomination hearings but is also a classic casebook of how the Washington game is played by those for whom winning is everything.

Winning was everything to both sides, of course, it still is, and Anita Hill lost. In fact, subsequent attempts to play the affronted ingenue card have all lost -- especially when they've gone after Trump.

So, why is Mitch McConnell playing footsie with an upper-class member of the anti-Republican left? Something tells me the anti-Trump members of the Senate, at least as of yesterday, were beginning to rally around the possibility that the House Ethics Committee report against Gaetz might be released with salacious allegations, as well as possibly calling the woman who threatened to sue Pete Hegseth as a witness. But I think saner heads prevailed; if Trump could weather tetimony from the likes of E Jean Carroll and Stormy Daniels, putting a couple of other phony ingenues in front of a Senate committee could well backfire.

I think it's slowly beginning to dawn on some of these people that, as General Patton understood, Americans love a winner, and one thing that makes Trump a winner is his instinctive mastery of subliminal cues. This is something Sen Fetterman understands better than other Democrats:

Fetterman said, “There are some [nominations] that I would be excited to vote for, like my colleague from Florida or the representative from New York, of course. Then there are others that are just absolute trolls, just like Gaetz and those things. That’s why, you know, Democrats, you know, like Trump, that gets the kind of thing that he wanted. You know, like the freakout and all of those things.”

He continued, “It’s still not even not even Thanksgiving yet. And if we’re having meltdowns, you know, every tweet or every appointment or all those things, I mean, it’s going to be four years.”

Fetterman added, “I’ve also claimed that Trump is the strongest, that he’s been in the three cycles here. And now things that were really unique that happened the assassination attempt that was in Butler, that’s 45 minutes from where we’re sitting right now.”

It looks like somebody leaned pretty hard on Jane Mayer to take that tweet down. I'll bet someone even leaned pretty hard on McConnell. General Patton would be proud.