SUPER BOWL –Las Vegas is set to host Super Bowl 58.
By Jordan Mendoza, USA TODAY, February 13, 2023
Exterior view of the Allegiant Stadium before the Las Vegas Raiders played the Kansas City Chiefs during an NFL Professional Football Game Sunday, Nov. 14, 2021, in Las Vegas, John McCoy, AP
Who’s ready for next season?
As the Kansas City Chiefs continue to celebrate their 34-31 win over Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl LVII, football fans are already looking forward to next season and the chance to play for a championship in Super Bowl 58.
But where will the 32 NFL teams be vying to play at the end of the 2023 NFL season? The teams that do make it to the title game next year will not only be part of Super Bowl stadium history, but will be playing the game in a new city and state.
The first public hearing of the January 6th Congressional Committee, as seen on TV, on June 9, 2022. The first hearing included video clips of the insurrection and testimony. Video of Donald Trump’s speech at the Ellipse in Washington DC on January 6th, the day of the insurrection.\By Mark Peterson/Redux.
If you’re reading this, then you probably already know: Donald Trump is reportedly thinking about running for president a third time. As he would only be one of a handful of ex-presidents to run again after losing reelection, there aren’t a lot of historical parallels for this, should he announce. But it would kind of be like the bubonic plague announcing a comeback and expecting people to be happy about it. Or your oncologist telling you your stage IV cancer had returned. Or the worst president in modern history, the one who incited a violent coup because his ego is so fragile he couldn’t admit he’d lost, deciding to take another stab at terrorizing the nation for another four years. Something like that.
Does Trump actually have a shot at winning? That he has a greater than 0% chance of doing so should terrify everyone in this country, as well as the people living in the countries he’d probably drop a bomb on if given the chance—and considering the 74,223,369 who voted for him last time, including those who have publicly stated he’s a danger to society but would nevertheless still vote for him again, his odds are clearly a lot higher than that.
Though a New York Times/Siena College poll this week found nearly half of the party’s primary voters wanting someone else in 2024, Trump still leads the field—and thus remains the favorite to take the Republican nomination if he runs. And as Politico noted Tuesday, Trump “could launch his third campaign any day now.”
In short, if you’ve been paying any attention at all, this news has no doubt caused you to panic, driven you to drink, or ripped through your stomach like a batch of bad oysters shucked by Mr. Mar-a-Lago himself, who you know ignores the “employees must wash hands before returning to work” sign. To be clear, given the circumstances, these are appropriate responses.
But maybe you still need convincing. Or maybe you know a person who knows a person who still needs convincing. Whatever your situation, the following is a list of some of the many reasons why Donald Trump should never be allowed inside the White House again. Not even as a guest! Not even as a school trip chaperone standing quietly and respectfully in the back. It doesn’t include literally every reason, seeing as our fingers would break off before we could get through every single one. But for anyone wondering if it would really be that bad, it should be enough to convince them that yes, it would really be that fucking bad.
Let’s assume Donald Trump runs again for president in 2024. Yes, I know, caveats, caveats. Republicans say it’s too early to discuss ’24. A lot can change between now and then. Maybe Trump won’t actually run. Maybe he’s just teasing the possibility to milk the attention. Apparently, he likes attention.But if Trump does decide to inflict himself on another race, he will enter as the clear Republican favorite, enjoying a presumption of invincibility inside the GOP.
This has engendered a belief that anyone who challenges Trump must tread lightly, or end up like the roadkill that his primary opponents became in 2016.
That notion is outdated. Trump’s bizarre and enduring hold over his party has made it verboten for many Republicans to even utter publicly the unpleasant fact of his defeat—something they will readily acknowledge in private. I caught up recently with several Trump-opposing Republican strategists and former associates of the president who argued this restraint should end. The best way for a Republican to depose Trump in 2024, they said, will be to call Trump a loser, as early and as brutally as possible—and keep pointing out the absurdity of treating a one-term, twice-impeached, 75-year-old former president like a kingmaker and heir apparent.
In other words, don’t worry about hurting Special Boy’s feelings.
“Why on earth would we hitch our wagons again to a crybaby sore loser who lost the popular vote twice, lost the House, lost the Senate, and lost the White House, and so on?” said Barbara Comstock, a longtime political consultant and former Republican congresswoman from Virginia. “For Republicans, whether they embrace the Big Lie or not, Trump is vulnerable to having the stench of disaster on him.”
Trump’s wasn’t an ordinary election defeat, either. Some nervy Republican challenger needs to remind everyone how rare it is for an incumbent president to lose reelection, and also that Trump was perhaps the most graceless loser and insufferable whiner in presidential history—the first outgoing commander in chief in 152 years to skip his successor’s swearing-in. And that he dragged a lot of Republicans down with him. As Comstock hinted, Trump was the first president since Herbert Hoover to preside over his party’s loss of the House, Senate, and White House in a single term. Said nervy Republican challenger could even (just for fun) remind the former president that he once called the person he lost to “the worst presidential candidate in the history of presidential politics.”
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