To whom can a sleazy republican with allegations of sexual torture in his background turn for help? Why, Trump of course!
A scandal-scarred Senate candidate wants Donald Trump’s endorsement. Other Republicans worry he’ll give it.
... one of the most dramatic behind-the-scenes battles for Trump’s favor taking place right now. The former president has hosted a steady stream of potential candidates, sitting senators and political kibitzers who have tried to keep him from endorsing Greitens, a devoted cheerleader who is trying to use Trump’s grass-roots strength to emerge from disastrous allegations of bound hands and coercive sex that forced his resignation as governor in 2018. Trump advisers aware of the meetings spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect private conversations. [emphasis mine]
... in a state that Trump won by 15 points in 2020, the Greitens campaign has tested the question of just how far the former president and Republican voters are willing to go to overlook past controversies.
[Y'all will put up with a lot from Trump and his cronies. How do you feel about sexual torture? You know, "locker room stuff".]
Several Republican strategists say they worry that the lurid scandals that brought down Greitens will create an opening for a Democrats if he is the nominee...
“I keep saying to the president: We want to nominate electable people. I think he’s trying to find the most Trumpian person who is electable,” said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who recently traveled to Trump’s Bedminster resort in New Jersey and said it was “an encouraging sign” for Republican chances to take over the Senate that the former president was, for now, staying out of some races. “A lot of people on the ground are encouraging him to stay out. They are saying don’t put Missouri in play.”
[Clearly, Trump's own people don't mind the scandal, being used as they are to much worse...]
... Greitens has hired a coterie of former Trump aides and won the endorsement of former Trump attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani and former New York police commissioner Bernard Kerik, whom Trump pardoned after a guilty plea for tax fraud and lying to the government. Former interior secretary Ryan Zinke, former White House aides Boris Epshteyn and Sebastian Gorka and several others from Trump’s orbit have signed on to the effort.
[... but what about the voters? 40% of Americans would disembowel their own children if Trump told them to. But is that enough to get someone like Greitens elected? It's a tricky calculus.]
... “Gov. Greitens has unparalleled support among the MAGA base and beyond in ruby-red Missouri,” Epshteyn, a campaign adviser, said in a statement, citing campaign event turnout and small-dollar donation numbers. “That support is evidenced in polling by President Trump’s pollster which shows Greitens annihilating all the other candidates.”
[Well well. Maybe the MAGA crowd is ready to elect a sexual torturer to the Senate as long as he has Trump's seal of approval.]
Greitens has also gone all in on Trump’s false claims of election fraud, even embracing the idea that a new ballot count in Arizona and other states could lead to President Biden being replaced by Trump before the next presidential election.
[And there you go: Denying the validity of the 2020 election is all it takes for all else to be forgiven. (Well, as long as "all else" doesn't include betraying or criticizing Trump.)]
... Stephen K. Bannon, the former Trump adviser who has taken a leading role in spreading falsehoods about the last election, has heaped praise on Greitens for saying that Biden’s electors may have to be decertified if the private Republican ballot audit in Arizona finds a different result.
[Wining the primary but losing the general. This is the pickle the GOP has created for itself by turning their constituents into a bunch of raving MAGA lunatics and cultists.]
... “I think if the election were to be held today in a five- or six-way race, Eric Greitens is ultimately the nominee,” Harris said. “If there was a prolonged effort on educating people on all he did, his support would fall pretty quick and he would pose a serious problem in the general election.”
... Greitens was once seen as a rising star in the party, with a movie-star appearance and campaign talent that Trump typically gravitates toward. But his rise was upset in 2018, when his former hairdresser accused him of coercing her into a sexual encounter three years earlier.
She testified under oath to a special investigative committee of the Missouri House that he led her to his basement, bound her hands, blindfolded and undressed her and later coerced her into performing oral sex. She said she believed he had taken a photo of her at the time and threatened to release it publicly if she spoke of their relationship. Greitens declined to testify in his own defense, but he made his cellphone available to police, who found no evidence that a photo was taken.
In a separate audio recording made days after the encounter, the woman agreed when an acquaintance asked whether she had been “half-raped and blackmailed,” according to a bipartisan report written by the Republican-held Missouri House. “Yes,” she said.
#MAGA #Depravity #Trump #TrumpEndorsement #Greitens
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-eric-greitens-endorsement/2021/07/22/9e9998a2-e8c0-11eb-97a0-a09d10181e36_story.html
