Last Tuesday night was a bad night for Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore.
It was a bad night for his puppet master, Steve Bannon.
It was a bad night for Donald Trump.
I suspect that the next meeting between Trump and Bannon will have all the characteristics of what would happen if you tied two sewer rats together by the tail and dropped them into a closed barrel.
Sorry about that visual.
This was the second time that Trump put his political reputation on the line in the Alabama Senate race.
It is also the second time that voters, in perhaps the deepest red state, rejected his call for support.
Trump, who never takes responsibility for anything that goes wrong, claimed to be prophetic in predicting Moore’s loss.
While not unexpected, this spin stands in sharp contrast to his left-handed endorsement of Luther Strange in the Senate primary in which he declared, “I may have made a mistake in endorsing Luther Strange.”
When I heard the “endorsement,” I couldn’t help but wonder if Trump didn’t have some tacit understanding with Bannon in which Trump really preferred Moore.
Once he lost the primary to Moore, Luther Strange may have thought Trump’s endorsement was a mistake too.
In the immediate aftermath of Moore’s primary victory, Trump delivered a perfunctory and long distance endorsement of Moore.
What became increasingly strange was Trump’s actions after the allegations of sexual predatory behavior by Moore arose.
There was nothing innocuous or ambiguous about what Moore was accused of.
A number of women came forward to describe how Moore sought them out for sexual activity when they were as young as fourteen years old and he was a district attorney in his thirties.
One of his victims even produced her high school year book, in which Moore had inscribed a message to her.
One would have thought, that given his own history of being accused of this kind of behavior, Trump would have viewed the Moore campaign as the third rail.
Instead, he had his all- purpose prevaricator, Kelly Anne Conway, float a trial balloon suggesting that Moore’s support for the Trump tax bill was more important than avoiding sending a child molester to the United States Senate.
Trump followed suit within days declaring that it was paramount that a Republican be sent to the Senate by Alabama voters even if he might be a sexual predator.
He went further accusing Democratic candidate, Doug Jones, as a liberal who was “soft on crime.”
This last accusation was patently ridiculous in light of Jones history as a United States Attorney prosecuting and convicting Eric Rudolph a terrorist and serial bomber, as well as the Ku Klux Klan leaders that had bombed a Baptist church in Birmingham killing four African-American little girls four decades before.
Moore, for his part, largely stayed off the campaign trail in order to avoid questions from the press about the allegations made by his accusers.
Trump repeatedly justified his endorsement of the predator by repeating, over and over again, that Moore denied the accusations which continued to mushroom.
In doing so, Trump was clearly trying to inoculate Moore with the same “defense” that he asserted when even more women accused him of sexual assault during the 2016 election.
What Trump didn’t count on was the tidal wave of sexual assault reports that have deluged the fields of show business, media, politics and government and have ensnared Democrats, Republicans, liberals and conservative men alike.
The cry from women all across America that “we’re mad as hell and not going to take it anymore” has fallen on Trump’s deaf ears.
Even after spending almost twenty years as a judge in a criminal court, and having thought I had seen it all, I have to say that I never dreamed I would see the day that an apparent level two sex offender would endorse an apparent level three sex offender for a U.S. Senate seat.
In addition to his predatory sexual history, Moore revealed his true character in an interview in which he proposed abolishing all of the amendments to the Constitution following the Tenth Amendment.
Slavery would no longer be abolished, Due Process and Equal Protection would no longer be guaranteed, voting guarantees for all races would no longer exist, popular election of U.S. senators would be abolished (considering the results of the election, I can understand why Moore would be for this), women would no longer be guaranteed the right to vote, and the poll tax could be re-imposed.
Trump justified his support for the predator by declaring that Moore supported Trump’s ”agenda.”
It looks increasing like Trump supports Moore’s agenda too.
Trump, Bannon and Moore have an interesting shared view of the future.
Fortunately the voters of Alabama did not share their views nor have any appetite for sending a deviant to the United States Senate.
At this writing, Roy Moore has not conceded defeat, claiming among other things, that the large African-American voter turnout was riddled with fraudulent voters.
Sound familiar?
Trump is ready to move on, declaring that Moore should concede.
God sees.
If only for this moment.