CROSSING THE RUBICON

For those who don’t know the meaning of the term “Crossing the Rubicon,” allow me a moment to play History Professor:

In the Roman Republic, there was a law that a Roman General could not enter the territory of the Republic with his army, without the express consent of the Senate. This law was the first declaration of civilian law supremacy over military power.

The Rubicon River is just south of the town of Cesena, in northeastern Italy. It became known after the fall of the Roman Empire as the Fiumicino River. In 1933, the Fiumicino was identified by academics as being the ancient Rubicon. The final consensus and official renaming of the river from Fiumicino to Rubicon was in 1991. The river runs for 50 miles through the northeast of the Italian peninsula near Rimini, from the Apennine Mountains to the Adriatic Sea.

The name Rubicon derives from the Latin word “rubeus” or “red,” due to iron deposits in the area that give the water a reddish hue, allowing it to be known in Roman times as “the river of blood.” The Rubicon was a minor waterway in Roman times, as it is now, but it held great political importance: it was the northern border of the Republic with Gaul.

On January 10, 49 B.C.E., Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon with his army, without the consent of the Senate. Crossing the Rubicon began the civil war that ended the Roman Republic.

In the 2,000 years since, “Crossing the Rubicon” has meant committing an irrevocable political act that leads to some form of “war.”

Riiiiiiingggg! There’s the bell - class dismissed!

Now that we all understand the metaphor, we can realize the importance of political commentators saying that yesterday, Nikki Haley “crossed the Rubicon” when she stated on Meet The Press that, “I absolutely trust the jury,” in answer to a question about her response to the E. Jean Carroll verdict last Friday. She added, just to make her position crystal clear and “burn the bridge behind her” as Julius Caesar actually did in his crossing, “I think that they made their decision based on the evidence.”

Haley’s answer fits into an the emerging message that answers Trump’s New Hampshire riddle more directly, one that is already forcing a more pointed response from Trump and the former GOP that he has transformed into The Trump Party.

Haley has, with that statement, unambiguously said in public that Trump is a loser, which she has avoided doing until this past week.

Last Tuesday in New Hampsire, Haley said that “With Donald Trump, Republicans have lost almost every competitive election. We lost the Senate, we lost the House, we lost the White House. We lost in 2018. We lost in 2020, and we lost in 2022.”

There is no more direct route to enraging Trump than to call him a “loser.” One can only imagine how many times he heard that from his monster father, growing up. Old Uncle Thin Skin will explode over this word faster than he will when accused of not being as rich as he tells everyone he is.

Her attacks on his age, honesty, his “unhinged” rants, and mental fitness all relate to this as well. They offer an actual theory of why he is a loser: She is pointing out that he is a raging incompetent who upsets the swing voters who Republicans need in order to win.

An enraged Trump is ten times more likely to commit an act of public stupidity than otherwise.

The more Haley can bait him into responding with especially racist or nasty personal attacks - such as purposely mispronouncing her first name, or accusing her of not having been born in the United States - the easier it is to illustrate his political unacceptability and incompetence.

While the Biden election team is impatient to declare Trump the winner and open the general election campaign, having the Republican Haley make the points about Trump’s failures, his lifelong incompetence, all the things about him that puncture the balloon of his self-created image as a successful businessman and politician is a good thing. Her statements smooth things for the barbs the Biden campaign is now firing at Trump - the tweets pointing out in real time the increasing signs of mental deterioration, that have Trump now responding at his hatealongs to defend himself (and make the point on his own about his decline to people in his bubble who haven’t heard that news) and all the other recent barbs that have drawn blood from Old Uncle Thin Skin.

The Goody Two Shoes Wing of the Democratic Party, the believers in Michelle Obama’s trite “When they go low, we go high” failed strategy, is now Officially Worried that President Biden is willing to “get down in the mud” with Trump, citing the well-known rule that when you wrestle a pig, you get dirty and the pig likes it.

CNN’s Alayna Treene wrote about the new White House strategy:

“As he looks ahead to a likely rematch in November, Biden has laid out the stakes of the election in as stark terms as any American election ever. But as serious as he is about what’s at stake for democracy in 2024, aides to the president’s reelection campaign tell CNN that the needling will keep up as they shift fully into general election mode – even if it prompts criticism that the president has let himself be dragged into Trump’s way of playing politics.

“Part of it is personal: Biden enjoys mocking an opponent he finds so offensive. Part of it is strategic: the president and his campaign operatives are hoping to trigger a man well known for watching his own coverage, obsessing over what people say about him or responding in ways the Biden team hopes will make him look ridiculous and give them more grist for attacks.”

The official Biden campaign Xitter account responded “Be Best.”

The Two Shoes crowd immediately became worried that this was “stooping to Trump’s level,” that the response was disrespectful of Melania Trump’s use of English, which is not her native language.

They’re wrong.

Remember in 2016, when Marco Rubio said, “He's like 6’2” which is why I don't understand why his hands are the size of someone who is 5’2”. Have you seen his hands? You know what they say about men with small hands…..You can’t trust them. You can’t trust them.”

Rubio knew that the size of his hands has been a point of concern to Trump ever since Graydon Carter called him “a short-fingered vulgarian” back in 1987.

Sure enough, at the next GOP debate, Trump responded, “I have to say this, he hit my hands. Nobody has ever hit my hands. I’ve never heard of this one. Look at those hands. Are they small hands? And he referred to my hands if they’re small, something else must be small. I guarantee you there’s no problem. I guarantee you.”

Yes, he’d never heard that before, which is why he hadn’t missed an opportunity in the 18 years since Carter had made his observation, to try to prove he didn’t have small hands.

And then, of course, we got the testimony of first-person eyewitness Stormy Daniels, who reported that the Trump Woody is in fact “a small mushroom.” Small mushrooms are known as “buttons.” Is this what Old Uncle Short Fingered Vulgarian was referring to when he said he had “a much bigger button” than Kim Jong Un?

There’ an old saying, “Never give a sucker an even break.” On the issue of all things personal, anything that might detract from the self-image dancing in his deteriorating mind, Trump is very vulnerable to committing the wonderful Public Self Own, since he cannot stop himself from responding to everything he perceives as an attack on him, another slur from the people on the other side of the glass door he has spent his life with his nose pressed against, knowing in what passes for a heart that the door will never open for him. Trump is not the “strongman” of his imagination. He is and always has been the sucker, the loser, the heir who turned a large fortune into a small one, the financial genius who would have been really successful if he had put that inheritance from Daddy into mutual funds and left the account alone.

I can sit back and daydream just how wonderful it would be if Old Uncle Thin Skin got the Zinger of Zingers, the one that really made him explode in the Ultimate Public Self-Own: the arrival of the massive fatal myocardial infarction that’s been on his “to do list” for years, coming mid-rant at a hatealong, in front of the adoring Inadequates, as he hits the floor behind the podium face first.

Not kicking Trump in that ginormous fat ass of his would be political malpractice.

Zinger on, Joe! You and Nikki Haley are right - she is not Nancy Pelosi.

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