Terrible strategic calculations in Denver
By 
Surprise: This post isn’t about Nathaniel Hackett.
Joe O’Dea, the Republican nominee for US Senate from Colorado, fired back at Donald Trump on Monday after the former President slammed him as a “RINO” and suggested Trump’s supporters wouldn’t vote for a “stupid” person like O’Dea.
In a statement to CNN, O’Dea, the CEO of a Colorado construction company, didn’t walk away from the criticism he’s been leveling at Trump, including on Sunday when he told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union” that he would “actively” campaign against Trump and for other GOP candidates if the former President runs again. O’Dea also told Bash that Trump should have done more to prevent the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.
“I’m a construction guy, not a politician,” O’Dea said in his statement to CNN. “President Trump is entitled to his opinion but I’m my own man and I’ll call it like I see it. Another Biden, Trump election will tear this country apart. DeSantis, Scott, Pompeo or Haley would be better choices. These elections should be focused on Joe Biden’s failures – supercharged inflation, a broken border, rampant crime, a war on American energy – not a rehash of 2020. America needs to move forward.”
“We need to reject the leader of the cult and replace him with one of his most cravenly loyal minions” doesn’t seem like a coherent message, not that intellectual coherence counts for a hill of beans in this crazy mixed up world of ours.
O’Dea’s strategy of rejecting Trump personally while embracing Trumpism makes about as much sense as rejecting Stalin while embracing Stalinism in the USSR (for you youngs that was a country back in the day) in 1950 or so, with the only difference being that Trump can’t (yet) order your immediate execution.
It also illustrates how remarkably degraded the concept of the maverick Republican has become, to the point where some gaggle of highly paid consultants advised this guy to “distance” himself from Trump by embracing a Republican party led by Ron DeSantis or Rick Scott or Mike Pompeo or that semi-hot if you’re into the kind of thing Indian (no not Tulsi, the other one).